Day 3, final tweaks.

Last day of development: time to finish everything and hope it compiles (spoiler: it didn’t).

Final Game Loop

Arthur finished the last sprites and music, and I finished the game loop and UI.

The game was there, just some things were missing. After some work, we finished the last details like animations and balanced the game so it ended in about 5 minutes. And that’s it, we had the game:

Didn’t we?

Ok, Let’s Compile

It was like 4 hours before closing time, so we had time. Let’s do it! We compiled the game, and it built after some silly mistakes. But when we ran it… NULL POINTER EXCEPTION. The game crashed just after it started, with no stacktrace, and no way to know what was going on.

Then we were like 2 hours debugging and testing things. What can be wrong? It was tricky: the game ran perfectly in the Unity editor, but didn’t work when compiling. The biggest problem was that each change we tested meant building to know if it worked.

After building with stacktraces, we had a clue: It was about a ScriptableObject for resources that was not being loaded. PANIC. Now what? We didn’t have that much defined in resources (2 products, 1 appliance, and 2 customers), so we decided to ditch that and initialize them manually in code. This was 5 AM, 1 hour before closing time, but IT WORKED!. We had a running version on itch.io: