Where Making This Hapen

Hey! I’ve been doing a few long articles lately, so I’m going to keep it short this week and just give a quick update on what I’ve been doing. (Sorry, no images)! As far as new content goes, I’ve been meandering through enemy work in the final dungeon. It’s an especially heavy one because the enemies you see vary based on what areas of the game you played through up to then, so there’s a lot of assets to put together to fill a fairly small window of gameplay.

I’ve been relying on Rocky to help me with the enemy animations in addition to the larger portraits, which is a little unusual, but when I came up against this wall of content to get done it seemed impossible without a little help here and there. :) Not to mention some of the enemies are naturally very complicated and difficult to animate, with lots of moving parts. Just as this area is the final level of the game, it kinda feels like a final challenge to me as an animator and artist. I’ll be doing my darndest to live up to that!

Of course, I’ve also spent a great deal of time on bugfixes and tweaks, even though I know I should probably focus on content for now. Close friends of mine have actually been asking to playtest lately, so I got to watch a couple people play through what is almost the entire game. I learned a lot from watching those! Working on the game, you only see it bit by bit, so seeing it all as one cohesive part played cover to cover gave me a nice, full perspective on it and where it’s working and where there’s work that needs to be done. And of COURSE there were bugs. Oh so many bugs to be fixed, and I’ve been powering through them like a machine. And the most time-consuming ones to find and fix are: memory leaks!

“Huh?!” you ask, “I’m not a programmer! What are those?” Put simply, it’s when you save something that you need temporarily–say, a song that needs to be just be played in a particular area, or a list of numbers that’s significant to just one process–but then you forget to delete that information when you’re done with it. In the example of the song, if you loaded in an entire song but then got rid of the thing that loaded the song without getting rid of the song first, suddenly there’s nothing that knows where the song you loaded “is.” It’s still there, taking up space, but you’re not using it and there’s nothing that remembers where exactly it is and how to get rid of it, so it’s stuck until you restart the game.

That’s bad! That slows down the game, a lot! And unfortunately they’re not as easy to fix as they are to explain. You can know one when you see one; the game will start running slow, and when you double-check some system info on it you can see that’s taking up way too much memory. But locating what bloats it like that is a lot trickier. So I feel pretty proud of myself that I actually went and squelched out dozens upon dozens of the buggers this week, finding the exact source and plugging it so it won’t ever be an issue again. The game’s performance is much, much better for it. Go me! (Okay, I know nobody cares, but whatever, I wanted to parade about it for a little bit).