Hunting for Bugs!

45 days ago by Zenua

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You might call our game a damp corner of the woods because of many bugs it has! Bug hunting is an important duty in games, usually found and done after play-testing.

Bugs are things in the game that the developers did not intend for it to happen. Sometimes they are subtle, and sometimes they are quite obvious. Bug bashing is often a term used by developers for describing the process of finding and fixing these errors.

Stay Hidden is a game made by first time developers, and the amount of bugs is absolutely flabbergasting! It is also infinitely generating with everything we do. take a look at this conversation below:

All these bugs were found within 3 hours.

There are priorities for game bugs.

Game breaking bugs such as glitching into walls and infinite jumping are often Top Priority for heavily affecting the playing experience, while minor player skill issues and low concern enemy issues are Medium Priority because they may make the game look and feel weird, but still playable. last but not least are the Low Priority bugs, where it is often visual or audio bugs such as player being stuck in a particular animation.

Sometimes the bugs are game breaking, such as the infinite jump bug when you spam hide and jump, or in the light for some reason. Those are called Top Priorities because it affects the entire game experience and is a core mechanic.

Medium Priority bug are the most common ones because they are easier to find and not as rare as high priority ones. This bug below was a bug that can happen if the player presses the hiding skill on the moving platforms:

We fixed it by disallowing the player to be able to hide on these platforms, but another cool thing happened. It could also be triggered by when the player touches a light while on the platform. However, the stretch of the sprite is only temporary, still pretty jarring.

Low Priority bugs are small mostly harmless bugs such as butterflies, millipedes... OOPS! I mean mainly visual bugs that can look weird but still allow the game to progress normally, for example this door visual bug where the animation for closed and opened are mixed up or when player get's stuck in falling animation:

Bug bashing can be quite tough sometimes, for example, the jump animation bug took us weeks to eventually find a way to fix it, but it also created some other bugs such as being buggy around tight corners, which then made us change the layout of some parts of the stage. Sometimes we get skilful and lucky to not have any bugs for some mechanics.