Ecological Disaster Pt. 1

The good stuff: 

As the Sap: School Days' conclusion looms large, I have been working to fix the last few flaws and make sure the resultant demo is solid. One of the more silly issues to crop up recently is some frustrating difficulties with mushrooms.  More on that later though.  For now here's the juicy new stuff:

• Sfx finally tied in to buttons
• Mushrooms work (as do any other location specific growth traits)
• Power cards work as intended, mostly
• A bouncy new title screen

Problems this week? 

I had this very strange problem wherein Spores would sometimes fail to grow into Mushrooms.  To make matters worse, it seemed random.  I had some idea of what might've been causing the issue.  Whenever I would only place a Spore, and only next to static terrain (for instance, next to a Puddle)  it would grow just fine.  However, when placed after a consumer (such as a Bombling) had consumed something, it would fail to grow... sometimes.  The sometimes was a real problem for me, as I assumed I had a good place to start debugging but if it wasn't consistent it could mean any number of things.

"GASP," how did you fix it?

After thinking about it for a bit I realized I had copied the code from a trait which functioned similarly, Grow_On_Death.  The problem is, cards which die in sap (or are otherwise removed) are placed within a temporary pool of cards before being returned to the master deck.  This happens so that any final traits which happen after death can resolve.  As it turns out it was this which was messing with the order of operations I have constructed and occasionally preventing Mushrooms from growing.  I only assumed it was consumers, because they cause other cards to be forced onto the discard pile and marked for this operation.  I solved it by simply writing a new Trait from the ground up, and now they work just fine!

Of late, my priority has shifted to ensuring that the game is as polished as possible. I'll be fine-tuning the mechanics, adding more new cards, and tweaking existing ones to demo the best playtest. Of course, I'll keep you up-to-date on progress along the way. With less than a month to go, the pressure is on, but I'm 92% confident that I'll be able to pull it off and deliver a demo of some sort! 

Hopefully, you've realized by now that I value feedback, and I hope to share the finished demo with you soon!

Eli