Week 2 - Secrets

Hello!

Secrets secrets secrets

This post comes quite late in the british, GMT evening. I've been very busy as of the end of last week discussing and planning something incredibly secret but very exciting that also might just not happen at all.

So this isn't so much announcing an announcement, but announcing the possibility of a future announcement about Something.

So I'd say look forward to that, but maybe don't. I'm not sure what emotion I'm asking you to feel. But either way I'm excited. 

PokeyPoke and the weirdest bug that ever did crawl.

We did a livestream last Friday where I had planned a chill evening working on a bit of PokeyPoke followed by some viewer games. Instead we ended up trying to chase down the most unfathomable bug I've ever seen. Collision functions would cease to detect a particular button object (and only instances of this object in one specific area of the room!) under very odd circumstances. If I walked through the game normally, it would not work. If I teleported from collecting the spear, to the button, it would work. After closing a semi random amount of distance normally and then teleporting to it, it would not work.

But this bug had something of a Schrödinger twist. Once you had caused the button to either work, or not work, nothing you did afterwards would change it. And everything about it seemed normal either way. It had the correct bounding box, coordinates, variables, everything.

This seems to have turned out to be an as of yet, unidentified GameMaker bug with deactivating instances. Something I do to manage the nature of having a large, seamless gameworld. I'm only able to work around this bug by adding a pointless collision check with the cursor, or another object, to the button. This seems to do something to 'refresh' its place in how GameMaker handles collisions internally.

This madness consumed pretty much the whole stream, but I think made for some entertaining viewing for the more schadenfreude-inclined among you.

This Friday I'd love to stream some viewer games. I'll be setting something up to allow you to submit them live. More details on time as we get closer.

Isometryyyy

Also on Friday we'll be releasing the second part of the isometric tutorial. If it gets finished and uploaded before then I'll release it here for you guys immediately as per usual.

Hope to see some of y'all about on Friday! Be it on stream, here, or in the YT comments :)

-S