Hey Folks!

There’s been one ugly bug that’s been killing me for the the past 4 weeks. When I showed Narcissus at Game Dev North, I woke up at 7am to catch the bus to Manchester and started the day with no port to iOS for the game. I made my way to media city, found the fancy pub that the event was hosted in then worked like a nutcase from 9 till 4pm when the event started. At that point, I had just about ported the game to iOS, but in the process made some brutal cuts to the game (70% of the graphics in the game were cut, leaving the juicy 30% that mattered).

With this 30%, there also exhisted a shedload of bugs. Probably the first 60 minutes of the event consisted of fixing things as people broke them, excellent user testing but for the purposes of the event not the greatest showcase of Narcissus. When I got back home, I began addressing the bugs and show stoppers and managed to get rid of every last one with the exception of 1. Every time level 10 would load, it would crash upon either ending the level or restarting the level.

After 3 weeks of rebuilding the game, taking the code apart and putting it back together in every way I could think, debugging and tearing facial hair out, I showed it to a programmer at an event that I run in Huddersfield for Devs. After a week and a bit of communication and mind breaking problems, we tracked the crashes down to two main things:

1. When a character dies, a piece of code that they hold restarts the level - both of them doing so at the same time reloads the level twice, causing the iPad to throw a hissy fit.

2. There are too many tiles! The game is filled with tiles, and unfortunately certain levels are overpopulated with them - there’s not only the geometry to jump on, but also the decoration that covers every surface. To get the game back to a manageable framerate, I’ve introduced a new tileset to allow me to cut the stone columns down to floating stumps. Personally I’d prefer the columns but what I prefer more than that is a game without a choppy framerate.

Before

After*

(*Stars and moon and stuff are still included, just aren’t in the screenshot)

With the exception of a couple more levels, Narcissus is nearing completion for iPad. Following the fixing of the bug above, I will also be starting work on the iPhone version, along with testing how the game copes running on android devices.

For his help with the project, Dan will be getting one of my tickets for Rezzed for his fantastic contribution to helping me get the project finished. Couldn’t have done it without you mate!