vital code and fix the bug.

Hope you enjoyed this short novel about a programming shortcut coming back to bite me in the butt. This has been one of the more exhausting bugs to track down and fix that I've seen in my time working on Superspective!

important initialization code would have NEVER run on the object, which led to buggy behavior when a save file was loaded and the object had to reset its state. Whenever I started investigating this issue, one of the first steps I would do is open the script in the inspector, which would run the (9)

the inspector (side window). Most of the time, when you create an object and add a script to it, you will have opened this menu immediately after creating it. However, in some cases, I would be duplicating scripted objects without ever opening them in the inspector. In only this case, the very (8)

I looked up the initialization code that I had determined was somehow responsible for the bug, and found that for some reason, past me had thought it would be a good idea to have this run in a hook for OnInspectorGUI. If you don't know Unity, this means basically any time the object is open in (7)

to see the bug in action and observe it closely, it just doesn't happen? This was Schrödinger's bug. And that's when the realization hit me. It truly WAS Schrödinger's bug, this was a consistent pattern that EVERY time I tried to investigate this bug, it would stop happening. This was the clue! (6)

Until I opened up the trigger zone that was bugging out in the editor, turned on some debug flags to include some vital logging in the console, and tried again. No bug! The trigger zone was working correctly. What the fuck is going on? Am I just horribly unlucky that every time I am in position (5)

game, followed the steps in the video EXACTLY and sure enough, the bug happened: the gravity rotate zone trigger wasn't activating! I tried it again, and it happened again. Once more for good measure, and the bug happened a third time. Great, I finally have a consistent repro for this! (4)

trying to fix. Every time I spent hours looking into it and coming up unable to make the bug happen again. So frustrating! Well thanks to one particular playtester (@Dubious Duckling) getting me a video of minimal repro steps, I was able to once again try investigating the issue. I booted up the (3)

Every time I tried to investigate the issue, I could often reproduce it once or twice, but as soon as I tried to investigate further the bug would seemingly stop occurring. I figured maybe it was a race condition bug or something leading to transiently reproducible behavior, which I was dreading (2)

This is much, much easier to reason about and keep track of my streaming level layout than what I had before, which was just a list of levels in my LevelManager:

Here's a peak at the new level Locus Maximus, available to be explored now on Steam!

store.steampowered.com/app/2239490/...