Posted July 10, 2025 by Diego Ramirez
##postmortem
TL;DR: Turns out that the so-called “nightly version” of the game has a fatal crash. So I removed the link until I figure out a fix. Keep reading for the long explanation.
Since the feature was enabled by Pyxel itself, among the installation guide there was a section called “In-browser, nightly version”. It had a link leading to a Pyxel-powered launcher, so you could run the main branch of the game without a single installation. It was a sort of “quick method” to try out the game without any commitment by the user.
However, I don’t know when or how, but such link started leading to a fatal crash, so you couldn’t actually play it at all. The issue was first pointed out by @HarshNarayanJha and I still can reproduce it. The game, instead of loading, leads to a SystemExit that’s not even in the game code, but in Pyxel’s codebase.
That makes me beieve it’s a Pyxel problem. I’ve seen other users complaining about this feature (though with other crash messages), and I hope the library launches a fix. It’s still not working with Pyxel 2.3.4 (latest version right now).
In order to avoid users from clicking a useless link, today I removed it. The section itself is still there, but instead of the previous link to the “nightly version”, now there’s a message redirecting to the local HTML version, that works perfectly fine AFAIK and is the closest stable version to the removed one.
There’s even a chance that the “nightly version” never comes back to the main page. From the beginning, it was quite unstable. Another possible option is to pin a future link to a stable tag, or even embed it to itch.io directly.
By now, we can only hope the crash gets fixed, since there’s nothing else I can do by now. I’m still trying to figure the exact reason to be 100% sure it’s not our problem. I’ll take care of this, don’t worry.
Keep shooting those bugs!