Month: July 2017

Find Once, Fix Everywhere

Just got a bug report from QA that a scene threw up an error. It was pretty easy to see that it couldn’t find a friendly clan to visit you.

That turned out to have happened because of using the debug tools to have everyone feuding (to make it easy to test resolving feuds). This is an unlikely situation, but it’s certainly possible to get a lot of clans to hate you, if you play the right (wrong?) way. So it’s a valid bug, and I fixed it.

Given how many scenes are in the game, I figure any bug is probably somewhere else as well. So figured I should go back to our automated tests and run them in their nonstandard configurations. I don’t usually do this, partly because they’re mutually exclusive, but also because some of them can take a long time (in fact, as I type this I’m running one … that just finished in just under 26 minutes).

But sure enough, enabling TEST_ALL_FEUDING found several scenes that would have trouble. It also gave a lot of false positives, since the brute force testing ignores scene conditions. (Scenes almost always have conditions that prevent them from being randomly chosen when they’re not appropriate.)

So today I’ve been dealing with that, and also TEST_NO_CHIEF, TEST_NO_GOODS, TEST_NO_RING, TEST_NO_WARRIORS, TEST_ALL_HATE, and TEST_Q_BRANCHES.

July Status Update

Six Age has a lot of art, and it’s almost all complete. I just sent out the final assignment today. We may still do a little reworking of illustrations and UI assets, but technically what’s there now could ship.

The music is in similar shape. We’ve been trying to track down some bugs (are they in the underlying engine? my code? the music itself? the operating system?).

QA is still pushing to get all scenes and events exhaustively tested. Bugs range from typos, to logic flaws, to “after a failed, interrupted cattle raid, the news after a heroic combat doesn’t show up at the right time.” (That’s not quite how it was reported, it took much of a day to figure out the first part.)

We’re also playing the game. It’s quite possible to win and to lose. Unlike when we did KoDP, I’m capturing data so I can see what went wrong (or right) — a recent loss was an event that turned out to be much harsher than we expected. There’s a lot of randomness in the game, but I’m trying to tune it so one unlucky break (or one bad decision) won’t sink you.

Not yet. Sorry to interrupt, but I know you were going to ask if you could beta test. There are still a few last features I want to get finished. (In theory I could drop difficulty level, but it’s on the list to go in.) And there is no point sending it out with known bugs. At some point we will be looking for outside testers, but it will still be a while.