Restoring a Village, Week 1

tl;dr

Everything is still on schedule for an October release for v1.1, aka the reboot, the restoration, the redo. Still gotta nail that name.

This past week has been mostly a technical slog as I get back in the saddle. It’s necessary but slow going work.

Previous Restoring a Village: Week 0

The Good

Flyswatting, aka fixing the small (but annoying) things
First thing I did was update GameMaker and look at all the errors, warnings and “suggestions” it made to me. There were… a lot.

Most of these are false positives or can be ignored, but going through them and fixing them was a really useful way to get back in the swing of things. The code base is now much more robust and should be less prone to breaking as I continue to bring it up to release condition.

Music and sound compression
One of the “small” bugs ended up turning into a bigger but worthwhile fix: many sound files (including music) were being incorrectly converted into a different format and then back again. This resulted in both crunchier sounds and audio bugs. It’s fixed now!

The Bad

Slow Going
I had hoped this part would go faster. I know that it’s all so necessary and important to dig my way out of my self-inflicted hole. But I had hoped to be able to show off more things, while 80% of the screenshots I took this week are all of code or bugs. Blech.

Missing Kickstarter Rewards
While auditing something unrelated, I noticed that one of the Kickstarter backer messages wasn’t where I knew it should be. I went and checked and found that many of them are in fact missing.

I added almost all the KS backer rewards during a two week stretch in early 2022. Most were just text appends and I hadn’t noticed their absence among all the other missing or corrupted files.

This is a huge oversight and was not intentional. I’ll need to re-add these items by hand and it is a priority to fix in this next week.

The Weird

The Curse… is real?
My wife and I have joked (well, “joked”) that Village Monsters is cursed somehow, as every time I go to work on it again something bad happens to pull me away from it. That hadn’t happened yet… until yesterday.

I had planned on posting this yesterday, Sunday, but had to delay it because one of my kids is sick. Turns out he has COVID and an ear infection. The Curse strikes again.

Thankfully he should be fine, as he’s vaccinated and loves the pink antibacterial meds – it’s probably a net positive for him. But I mention it so that we can plot another datapoint for proving the Curse is real.

When bad weather crashes the title screen.
Depending on the (in-game) season the weather on the title screen changes. However, some update or other changed how particle systems work when destroyed, and the punchline is this: bad weather could crash the game before it even started. That’s fixed now.