Reflection

Well I have quite a story to tell the approximately 2 people reading this devlog...

The process of making this game was a journey. Here's how it went:

When I started to make an endless runner, I just thought of obstacles I should add and decided to add them before thinking about the theme. However, I stumbled across a Quora post that recommended deciding on the theme first and building the mechanics and dynamics around that. I took that to heart and started brainstorming.

After a while, I came up with an idea that I really, really liked: the player runs on sheet music, with certain notes having different effects--staccato markings boost the player up, eighth notes and lower have a platform you can land on where the flags are, accents give a point bonus, etc. To accomplish this, I would have to evenly space the notes to truly recreate the vision of the game I had in mind. After all, in real sheet music, the notes are spaced according to how many beats they represent. It would also have measure bars to represent a music score.

Everything was going well in the development process...until it wasn't.

Around 5 days before the deadline, I encountered an elusive bug that seemed to manifest out of thin air.

The notes weren't evenly spaced, even though the events said they should. They also drifted to the right overall, and this got to the point that after around 10 measures, the notes would start to drift into the next measure over.

I looked around the events for hours trying to find what might be causing the issue, and eventually, when I had almost given up hope, I found that there was one event that moved them all along the x axis a small amount, creating the bug. To this day I do not know why I put that in, although I suspect I must have put in the event before replacing it with another one somewhere else without remembering to remove the first one. Nonetheless, I was relieved to have fixed the bug and continued working, thinking that that would be the last I see of it.

That, in retrospect, was my mistake. If there's one tip I could give my past self, it would be that when programming bugs disappear, they really don't. They are waiting like landmines all over your code. Be on your guard even if you think you have disarmed all of them.

The next morning, I woke up to some terrible news. The bug was back. With a vengeance. It arose after editing some events that I didn't think would change anything. By the time I decided I should just go back to the old working version, I had added too much to remember what to remove. I was frustrated that my vision of perfectly spaced notes had just been shattered.

That was until I realized something: instead of trying to fix the bug, I could not only turn it into a feature but completely rework my vision of the game into one that embraced the glitches. I doubled down on the idea of notes that were unevenly spaced and made them spawn with random spacing. This was the turning point in my development. Now I could finally relax without worrying about perfection because the game was now designed around the idea of imperfection. I actually began to enjoy making the game because I could integrate all bugs I found into the game's premise. For example, I found a bug where the head of a note would sometimes spawn separately from the stem. No problem; just leave it in as a feature.

Don't get me wrong; I still really like my original vision for the perfect game, and I have not abandoned it yet. However, on a tight schedule, I improvised.

However, you're mistaken if you think I will give up this easily on a project like this. Expect a game looking like my ideal vision by the end of this summer.

To all the programming bugs I encountered: I'm coming for you. This is not the last you will see of slvrfsh.

-slvrfshston