So 2 weeks ago I had the Playup Perth event which I was using to test the waters on showing Little Bit Lost to the public. It was all looking great I had a good planned features list and despite having a few late nights prior to the day I was on track the night before the showing.

I got stuck into the work as I would on any normal night. Things were going very well and by 2:30am I had completed my list of features, squashed some known bugs and was feeling really good about things. So I decided to make a build for my closed testing group just in case there was anything I had missed…

The build fired up and I was at the normal menu screen so I started a game. It began to load then crashed.
That was odd, so I tried again in the engine.
All OK.
Hmmm.
Let’s try again.
Still nope.
Maybe I should try an old build so I know I can fall back on that.
Nope.
OK PANIC!!
Has Windows had an update that caused an incompatibility??
Try a different machine..
NOPE!
Is it my lazy networking code? Maybe..
Re-write it??
OK lets do this I have a few hours before dawn.
OK its now 5am and I have work at 9am I think I need to concede and sleep.

Best decision I made was to go to bet at that point and though the sleep was not good and I was stressed about it the break from situation was what I needed/

I went to work as per normal and started recanting my story to a friend and colleague and at that very moment things started to make sense. I realised there was some code I had implemented as a “time bomb” to limit the build life so that my testers would only be on the latest build. At the time I thought that I would not need a user message as I would remember that it was in there. I guess when it came down to it 2:30am brain remembers a lot less than I would have thought.

Well, I was able to laugh about it about 20mins after I realised the problem and that weight started to lift. The lesson had been learnt and I was very glad I had chosen to do Playup as now I have a better plan for Perth Games Festival. I am aware of what can go wrong and not leaving things too late that I hit a panic like I did.

All in all as post previously the Playup went really well. So looking ahead I am very excited for Perth Games Festival.

Cheers

Grae