No Game Engine Game Dev: Word Sleuth 049: Bugs, tech debt and loose ends

Streamed on 2024-09-16 (https://www.twitch.tv/thediscouragerofhesitancy)

Game Engines are for sissies!

Today we started the end of the project. We will address tech debt, bugs and loose ends for a while. If we get through those tasks quick enough, we might add a few more features before we tackle art and polish.

I started off with a simple loose end: When I added a visual ping to the Playback, I removed the center offset from the letters on the blackboard. They were rotating around their upper left corner instead of their center. I put the center offset back in, then updated the visual ping to account for any centering offsets.

The other loose ends are from Playback as well. Time for Sprint mode was not being tracked consistently between the Replay and the Game play, and neither were the Total Guesses for Golf mode. The real trick is from when we have to jump forward/backward a word in the Replay. Keeping everything synced up when we make that jump is a bit of bookkeeping.

While working through this I ran across a compiler bug that exactly matched what I found on 2024-07-11. After beating my head against the wall for way longer than I should have, the issue was resolved with some log statements around certain lines. Doing clean and rebuild to remove old artifacts didn't help. Attaching the debugger didn't help. Normal debugging log statements didn't help. Only putting log statements next to specific lines fixed it. Once it was out of its funk, the compiler then compiled the lines of interest correctly, even after removing the curative logging. No reasons for it that I can see or even guess at. But we worked through it and got the tasks above complete.