Yeah, that’s the cringey thing about last day testing.
You find no bugs, you worry you were looking wrong.
You find a bug, you wonder what else there is, especially if you found it easily.
It’s tough just to say, okay, I did my due diligence, here, and whatever happens, happens. It shouldn’t be, but it is.
The rational way to look at it is, major regressions should pop up quickly if you just plow through the game as expected with good baseline tests. Most of the time you see you just switched a variable or something. But fear of the unknown is powerful.
I’m not sure I’d be willing to fix anything I found at 1 hour before deadline, unless it hit so many people it was impossible to ignore. I’d be too worried about breaking something else with my fix.
This may be the downside of a competition, especially an image building one like IFComp that has been pushing up the bar for,… well… decades now…
A lot of games from before IFComp became such a serious factor, or from the very first years of the Comp, were incredibly well praised despite some obvious bugs.
. Anchorhead has one in the drainpipes that doesn’t stop it from still being second in the IFDB ToP 100. And rightly so, (Yes even the commercial version. Look for it… And then get stuck…).
Sunset Over Savannah has a faulty drinking spout. Doesn’t keep it from being one of the best (…thinking…perhaps …thinking…) thé best game I have ever had the joy of experiencing.
Just to say, a little mosquito bite never hurt no one… unless it really breaks your game. As long as the rest (fill in priorities here: …) is top notch.
It was actually an easy fix, amazingly. And it was a very specific combination of actions that caused it, so it might have been OK. But man, did I freak out about it, not necessarily because of that bug, but because of the fact that my rickety, convoluted programming allows things like this and of course there may be more.
On the bright side, I was swearing so loudly and creatively that my husband was in stitches.
Ya. It IS hard. I have to remember that I’m barely out of Inform diapers, and will still have accidents, and that’s OK.
So when are these competition entries released? It’s 1pm here and I’ve just come off a lunch break. It’s very inconsiderate not to make them available for me to play on company time.
