Dear Reader:
Game devs come together to share their 'most embarrassing dev crimes' to squash glitches and bugs
Steve Gaynor, one of the devs on Gone Home, took to Twitter to share one of his dirty coding secrets for the game. Sometimes you have to do weird things to make your game work! The players will never know, but the developer lives in shame for the rest of their lives!
please share your most embarrassing game dev crimes. Mine: all the scripting in Gone Home is contained in 2 gigantic uScript graphs, bc I didn't know about interlinking many smaller graphs at the time. It's only 2 bc the first one started running too slow to navigate. Your turn.
— Steve Gaynor (@fullbright) December 14, 2018
Multiple devs took Gaynor's call, and have been sharing their dev crimes on Twitter in response. We've pulled a few to share below, but make sure you hit up the full thread to see many more!
My first game (Earthworm Jim 3D) had no scripting language. So I made conditional logic using invisible washing machine objects in the sky that travelled animated paths on timers and could set triggers as they arrived at nodes. Debug was a nightmare. Shipped that way, I think?
— Eric Holmes (@ericholmeslive) December 15, 2018
Beta, we didn't have a proper “Game Over” @CrashBandicoot NsaneTrilogy. I made a prefab, at runtime, spawns 5000ft Z @ each 100 lvls Genuis!! 3wks later, 8hr soak bug, UkaUka drifts offscreen. RC days, im freaking out, so I threw a reset XYZ every few minutes, bam it worked! pic.twitter.com/yZ3cs9tJWn
— leo zuniga (@momoMonkeys) December 15, 2018
Thumper's code...
— THUMPER (@ThumperGame) December 16, 2018
Searching 3309 files for "TODO"
261 matches across 96 files
In Scooby Doo for gba we had a bug where the game crashed if you picked up a specific Scooby Snack before another specific Scooby Snack. We were in the last few hours for shipping the game for the movie release. If you were about to get them out of sequence, I swapped positions.
— Jeff Dixon (@mrbodisafa) December 16, 2018
In Trivia Murder Party we had an extra column to fill in the leaderboard. Couldn’t think of another stat worth tracking so I said to add “Charisma” and have it always set to zero, as a joke. I still regularly get questions about how to raise your charisma in the game.
— Arnie Niekamp (@misterarnie) December 16, 2018
In Firewatch free roam mode I wanted the time of day to change constantly, but we didn’t write our system like that. It was only written to respond to Henry’s position in triggers. So in free roam there’s a water wheel of triggers attached to Henry that slowly rotate through him.
— Jake Rodkin (@ja2ke) December 15, 2018
A little bit of Scribblenauts was translated by me and a programmer to five? seven? languages with google translate only like two days before cert.
— Liz England (@lizardengland) December 15, 2018
night in the woods recompiles its dialogue every time you change scene, because I never got cached bytecode working in time before it shipped
— Jon, from December (@desplesda) December 16, 2018
I'd never coded 3d sounds before so in Celeste all the objects update their sound position every frame relative to the camera instead of moving the listener. I have no idea why it didn't occur to me that obviously the listener shouldn't be stationary
— Noel Berry (@NoelFB) December 16, 2018