ROAD TO XP SUMMIT / INTEGRATING TRAIL

https://xpgamesummit.com/game/dusk-and-dawn/

On April 4th / 5th, during this week, Jimmy and I worked together in preparation for XP Summit. He integrated Jason’s polished ice-level, I added in different SFX sounds and assets. Jimmy set up the trail support with our Unity file. 

There were a lot of issues trying to integrate Trail. There was this memory error and even after asking for help and trying to solve the issue (changing up our scripts), the error still occurred.  Jimmy tried increasing our memory size (didn’t work). He also tried removing the ability in our NPC script to save memory as one thing our NPC / yarn script was doing was it kept re-running the same files over again, leading to a ton of memory usage. When Jimmy wrote the new script, it did lead to our memory usage being a lot lower, the error was unfortunately still there.  He was trying to trouble-shoot the error, however on April 7th (due to the time-zone differences, timing & communication was hard) and at this point, we most likely couldn’t get the trail integration done in time for the summit and also realized that realistically, we couldn’t pin-point the error and if we did, it would amount to many changes to our script which would lead to a domino effect onto our entire game because changing one script, would lead to changing another, would lead to another bug appearing, and if the game functionality worked as an exe file on our itch.io page, it wasn’t worth risking. 

Along the way,  there was a hidden bug which appeared that broke our game which was very strange because we play-tested the version (with the trail changes) and it worked the first couple of times. However, after I opened it again (after a few hours), the bug appeared even though none of the files were changed between the Trail version and the few hours. Whenever I completed the flower quest and tried to give the sun energies to the tree, it wouldn’t work (and vice-versa). This made me realize that it had to do something with the changes we made when trying to integrate because before we started experimenting to integrate with trail, the entire functionality worked. 

What was occurring had to do with the entire NPC memory storage. The minute we removed it, the problem that happened before with the "world.interactions" and the entire "program already contains ___ node" was now happening with the quests. If I activated the cat quest, I couldn't finish the tree quest, because it would think that I already a) finished the quest and b) already accepted it, thus it was just permanently stuck on the quests. I had to re-insert how we initially wrote the NPC script with the entire re-reading memory system (even though it makes our memory really large). Then it fixed the issue with "program already contains x node".  If I did the opposite -- finish the tree quest first, and then give the flower to the cat, it would perma stuck you on her last line of dialogue ("I'm gonna think for a bit") and wouldn't let you click anywhere to progress. Thankfully Github has the history tab and I had to deduce when these bugs started to appear and which scripts did work in our game, and which ones were breaking it and reverting it to the older versions.

After debugging all that, I then added in the fade in/out transitions to our game when switching scenes for some nice polish. In the end, our entire game works now and there are no more game-breaking bugs and was ready for our final demo. :)