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I haven't payed attention to the speed-running scene for this game, so I was caught utterly by surprise by the section on glitches in the game. How does somethi

I haven't payed attention to the speed-running scene for this game, so I was caught utterly by surprise by the section on glitches in the game. How does something whose out-of-combat state should be easily modeled with a trivial state machine end up with so many bugs in that portion of the game?

jmcgough 5y ago
If you haven't seen the AGDQ 2022 run mentioned in the article, it's extremely entertaining, short, and very worth watching just to see how broken the game is.
plorkyeran 5y ago
It is the developers' first game, and probably their first software program of its size of any kind. It would be surprising if they _didn't_ make any design decisions which in retrospect were mistakes. The fact that it's a single-player game also means there's no real need to redesign things once they discovered that what they were doing didn't really work. They successfully fixed the bugs you can hit when you aren't intentionally trying to break the game, and bugs which let you do absurd things when you are trying to arguably aren't even a bad thing.
orlp 5y ago
The answer is that it's a single-player game, and that user interfaces suck to write and model. In a multiplayer game you are generally forced to separate game logic from the UI frontend, which is a good practice regardless. But in a single-player game there is nothing forcing you to do so, and it can be (at least in the short term) very convenient to tie in game logic with the user interface code, as seemingly they follow the same state machine. But then new requirements pop up, such as being able to go back to review your choice, or weird slowness/strangeness that allows you to quickly press a button twice, etc.
deleted 5y ago
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ufo 5y ago
Hindsight is 20/20. My impression is that they didn't use a state machine, just callback events that get confused if you click before the animation finishes.

jmcgough 5y ago

If you haven't seen the AGDQ 2022 run mentioned in the article, it's extremely entertaining, short, and very worth watching just to see how broken the game is.

plorkyeran 5y ago

It is the developers' first game, and probably their first software program of its size of any kind. It would be surprising if they _didn't_ make any design decisions which in retrospect were mistakes. The fact that it's a single-player game also means there's no real need to redesign things once they discovered that what they were doing didn't really work. They successfully fixed the bugs you can hit when you aren't intentionally trying to break the game, and bugs which let you do absurd things when you are trying to arguably aren't even a bad thing.

orlp 5y ago

The answer is that it's a single-player game, and that user interfaces suck to write and model. In a multiplayer game you are generally forced to separate game logic from the UI frontend, which is a good practice regardless. But in a single-player game there is nothing forcing you to do so, and it can be (at least in the short term) very convenient to tie in game logic with the user interface code, as seemingly they follow the same state machine. But then new requirements pop up, such as being able to go back to review your choice, or weird slowness/strangeness that allows you to quickly press a button twice, etc.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

ufo 5y ago

Hindsight is 20/20. My impression is that they didn't use a state machine, just callback events that get confused if you click before the animation finishes.