Those darn bugs

13th - 19th November 2011

Well, WJ didn't seem to be quite finished yet, as Shaun spotted a few bugs in the game, in which had to be resolved. After I moved the status panel at the bottom of the screen to somewhere else I ended with the player getting an extra life, instead of the level counter going up. This kept on happening during the level complete phase. So after updating this problem, another problem came, regarding the same status panel. The score didn't work properly. A simple mistake was made, and that was corrected.

The next bug was a major bug, Music. After the end of the level (The rocket) there was a droaning noise, which Shaun could hear, but I couldn't. So I found a way to resolve this problem, simply by creating a new instrument which silences the note and imported the music back into the compiled source. It worked a treat :)

The next bug was a minor one. On level 6, the sheep was walking on top of the snow on the barrel. This looked very odd indeed. I loaded up Arkitec and browsed through the utility to take a look at the value of the characters of the snow on top of the barrel. Then I removed those collision values, so

Shaun came across a major bug, in which the sheep died for no apparent reason, while it was jumping in thin air. The problem occured when the enemy sprites were all offset and still moving when not visible. So I had to program a little routine which compared to the position in which the player was. If the player's Y position was lower than the upper border, no sprite to sprite collision occurs. Otherwise, the poor sheep gets hit by the bad enemies. :)

The next issue was a graphic bug, in which level 2 kept looking quite odd. Well, the start screen. Some parts of the background was missing. Lawks. Not good :(. So I loaded up Arkitek to try and solve this silly problem, thus yesterday (Friday 18th November) I had an email back that the background still needed sorting out. So that I dealt with this small glitch today. I just hope that it is correct.

The final things were a couple of things which Shaun suggested to me to improve the game a bit. First of all, the falling power up / add. score objects could be seen leaving the screen below the status. This was originally intentional to me. Instead to make things better for the project I added a splash animation, for every time the collectable reaches the water. This makes a much better effect in the game. The other thing missing was the Game Over message, which has now been added. :)

I sent the new version on .D64 to Shaun to try out. If he's happy, then the 16KB build is finally finished :)