So I'm done doing bug fixes for Transcending Fear. Yeah there's a few things I'd like to change but it's dawned on me that I coded the game with so much "duct tape" that it would be less of a hassle to remake the game from scratch at this point. I'd ahve random bugs come up that I had to just patch and move on without a real fix and now those patches are biting me in the ass. Rather than remake the game, I'm going to be putting my efforts into Transcending Fear 2, taking what I've learned and applying it there.

One thing I'm doing is having as many "closed systems" as possible, as in things don't interact with objects besides themselves as little as possible and having as many scripts on one object as I can. One issue I ran into is my ghost could be heard all the way down the highway, despite her sound effects being limited to fifty feet. No matter what I did/rebuilt, it would constantly be playing. So I went "Okay screw it, she's disabled until you go to the gym." I then had an ojbect called my Game Manager, which was responsible for analyzing checkpoints and other variables and turning things off/on as needed. It also made testing easier because if I disabled the Game Manager, I could disable whaever I waned for testing without worrying about remembering to turn it back on for the actual building of the game since I could just re-enable my Game Manager which makes sure everything is turned back on/off as needed. This ended up backfiring. I had this colossal bug where when you pressed P to pause the game, the main menu turns off the game manager so it can enable the mouse and when you closed the menu, it renabled the game manager which turned off the ghost. Turning off the ghost triggers the ending of the game since there's a different thing that waits for the ghost to be dead/deactivated then triggers the ending cutscene, so pausing the game at the gym would skip to the end of the game as soon as you closed it. There were so many random, tiny glitches that I just quickly made a little patch for so I could move on that changing one tiny thing, triggers an avalanche of other issues that will cause even more issues if I fix them.

At this point, finding the cause of a bug is less work than actually fixing a bug because of the giant heap of duct tape and pins that is my code. Since working on a billion tinier projects, I've learned the "Ugh, screw it I'll just patch it and fix it later" approach backfires and is my weakness. I've started instituting more discipline and leaving myself developer notes as I go along if I have to patch something. Let me tell you, having to completley hold off on game testing because of one tiny, stupid bug is one of the most frustrating things ever, so the urge to just move on is hard to resist.

So all this being said, I've learned my lesson about making games and will continue forward with what I've learned. In the future when I know what I'm doing, I may remake Transcending Fear for the hell of it with better graphics, more stable behavor and extra content but for now, I honestly think it's fine.