When Things Go Wrong: A Game Announcement Mishap

Last Tuesday, I started announcing my hangover-themed Sokoban puzzle game, Olaf the Boozer. I had several fixes to publish, like moving a menu to a separate layer to display it over dialogs. Everything seemed fine in the debug build, but when I exported it for Itch, the game hard-locked on the first dialog.

I was incredibly nervous and spent 4 hours debugging the issue. Finally, I found the problem: when the signal is connected with the UI inspector, the callback isn't triggered for some reason. It's likely an issue with the Dialogue Manager when it copies an example balloon.

I thought I had fixed all the bugs and was ready to go. But guess what? Today, I got a message that someone was stuck in the first dialog with answer options. Here we go again. Thankfully, I already knew where to look and fixed it in several minutes, but it meant that my game was unplayable all that time! All the announcement efforts were wasted!

So, don't be like me—test your builds thoroughly and have a great holiday!