Dev Blog #4

Wednesday June 5, 2013

This past week Matt and I submitted our QA build for testing. We spent a lot of hours the day and night before fixing bugs and implementing features that needed to be tested. When we were done, we submitted the build to our professor. Monday rolled around and our game was there, up and running for people to test out. It really is an amazing feeling seeing something you worked so hard on being tested and critiqued by others. All of the people that I watched test the game seemed to like it a lot, although there were a few bugs that were unintended. First off, the area boss was unbeatable. No matter what you did, you couldn't beat him. That was my bad. I overestimated the amount of stats the player would get by killing all of the other enemies in the area when I set up that feature. Although, the battle system worked beautifully. There was a funny bug that was discovered through testing.

The bug stems from me not range checking the damage done during battle. In this build, it is possible to do negative damage, which would add health to your enemy. The lower level enemies were also able to do negative damage to you, which would heal you. Another bug came from almost the same thing. When trying to select the Use option on an empty inventory slot, the game would crash. This came from the game trying to check an element in an array that simply wasn't there. I fixed that bug earlier, and it was a simple fix.

Matt and I have a lot of work to do over the next few weeks. We have a lot of features to fine tweak, balance to do on monsters and levels to create. It is going to be a hectic next few weeks trying to get everything done in time for our presentation in Week 8.