Behind the Curtain: A Last-Minute Near Disaster

At the start of October, I was nearing the point where I was comfortable going live. But there was something small that annoyed me.

In the item inventory, items would be ordered differently than what I was wanting. Some items weren't grouped with each other where they should be. And I was trying to figure out how to fix it.

I finally came upon the problem: it was sorting by the internal ID number corresponding to the item, not to the position in my database  Simple enough a fix, right? Reassign the ID numbers, profit.

Unfortunately, this was...more impactful than I was expecting. And it resulted in a last-minute scramble.

Numbers are Everything, Apparently
So, what I hadn't realized until that point was that the ID numbers of everything were how things were handled. Characters, skills, weapons, and items are all based off of a particular ID flag that it refers to. So when I'm assigning, say, a Heal staff to a priest, I'm not assigning the item as much as I'm assigning that particular ID flag to the inventory of...the character flagged by its ID number.

In reassigning ID numbers to clean up mi inventory sorting, I also re-assigned every single item that was in that bucket of items. And so I needed to do some clean-up. A lot of it, it turned out.

A seemingly innocent decision meant that I needed to go back through 25 levels worth of enemies, shops, and character inventories to make sure things looked right. And it was a pretty frantic scramble that I didn't completely catch things from until just recently. I got 85% of the changed items in that night before I pulled the trigger to go live, but it was definitely a decision I hadn't realized the ramifications of until the last minute.

Change Earlier, Not Later
The lesson I learned here is simple: big changes need to happen soon. A good example is in implementing a particular system in game no.2; I had a sort of soft threshold for how long I had before it would be too much to add a specific system to my new project. I believe I got in there, but it was still definitely a call I had to make now instead of later.

Work flow tends to be an interesting sort of beast in that it inflates exponentially, and a small change you make at the end is a lot larger than it would be when you make it at the outset. The call to implement specific systems in my next project had to happen now, and while I may be able to add things to Chronicles of Dramarith 1 without creating complete chaos, I'd rather keep things simple and not too far from what I initially published on itch.io last month.

As always, thanks for readding. I do have a planned patch coming tomorrow, to address typos, the last bits of my inventory scramble fallout, and add in new animations for various spells. Thanks for playing, and stay tuned for more!