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Bonbon

A short horror story, about your childhood. · By Aetheric

Technical problems [SOLVED]

A topic by PL_kolek created Aug 06, 2017 Views: 526 Replies: 4
Viewing posts 1 to 4
(1 edit)

Hi,

I bought Bonbon yesterday after seeing a positive review on RockPaperShotgun. To be honest I just read a few sentences of it as after reading that it's a short story I didn't want to spoil any of it. But unfortunately I was not able to finish it... yet

If you haven't played the game, you probably shouldn't read further as it might contain some (mild?) spoilers. TLDR is that it has no continue option and bugs forcing you to restart the game. Not to sound like I didn't like the game - except the bugs it looked very promising so far. And scary.



On the first try, the game thought that I put a ring in the box whereas I missed it. As looking for the last ring involved looking in dark areas, we (me and my wife) decided to come back to the game later - we are extremely sensitive to horror, after playing through Penumbra, we turn off Amnesia 5 minutes into the tutorial ;). One of the reasons we decided to give Bonbon a spin was that we might sustain the dread if it's short enough. Well, Bonbon is scary, so we turned it off to find out later that there is no continue option.

OK, so we started once again a bit later, but after putting all rings in the box, the game did not trigger the search for those small cubes, so we were stuck in the room playing with the toys.

Bad luck. On the next try we reached the dinner, but after feeding Bonbon with half of the cake, he got stuck waiting for more and didn't want to get angry as on one of the youtube videos we sas to check if we missed something. Getting stuck with Bonbon at the table is not fun at all, I prefer the previous option, endless play with the toys ;).

Last restart - and I accidentally pushed the last ball under the Bonbon with no way of retrieving it. Grrr!


Is there any chance of fixing it? I understand that the author is a single, independent developer and that it's so short I can restart it again (which I will probably do, tomorrow) but I would really appreciate if I could face the horrors of the game, not the bugs.

Greetings

Mateusz

Developer (5 edits) (+1)

Hi Mateusz, 


Thanks for this feedback. I'm sorry to hear that you've been unlucky enough to have a bunch of different problems that nobody else has reported - I can see why that would be frustrating for you!

Because the game was so short, the decision was made to not include a save/load system. I'll think about putting in unlockable chapters instead.

I am considering releasing an update in the next few days, which may address some of your issues. For example, there is supposed to be a fix in place that stops the ball from being pushed behind Bonbon - I'll need to check if this is working. The rubber rings can also sometimes bounce away from the box after they have been counted - I'll look into that too.

As for the other things you mentioned (the game not advancing after the rings or cake), I can't imagine what is causing those. Please can you tell me a few things: which version of Bonbon do you have? It should be v1.0.2, but do you have the 32bit or 64bit version? Can you also tell me your system specs, including your graphics card, RAM, CPU and Windows version. Please can you also let me know how the game runs generally - is it smooth/jerky, does it take long to load, is there texture pop-in? Thanks!


Cheers,
MrBehemoth

Hi MrBehemoth,

Unlockable chapters would be great - I understand the reasoning for not implementing it - probably the game also makes bigger impact if played in one shot, but it'd be a great emergency mechanism for technical difficulties.

Regarding rings - I think we managed to pick up the ring to the fireplace without triggering those loud sounds and Bonbon's occurrence - I'm not sure, but I think that playing with the toy that lies there is necessary to make this happen. And then we threw that ring into the box, it didn't start the search for cubes, as Bonbon was not present yet. Then we were able to trigger the weird sounds, by playing with the toy, but it was too late. At least that's what I think has happened.

As for the cake, I don't know why it happened that way - again my felling is that the game gave us the option to say "No, Bonbon" too early, when we still had the cake, and then when we fed him with every part we had, his anger didn't trigger for some reason. No idea.

I am not at home at the moment, so I will give you only the details I remember - we downloaded the game yesterday, I guess it was 1.0.2, but for sure it was 64bit. Graphics card is Radeon RX460. Windows 7 64bit. CPU - I don't remember now, some really cheap Intel bought few years ago. The game loads quickly, in general runs fine. In general, as at one point, when we were installing The Witcher 2 in the background, the FPS dropped heavily - still playable, but not smooth at all, I'd say around 15FPS? No texture pop-in observed.

Thank you for your attention!

Mateusz

Woohoo, we finished the game! The last oart was frightening - such a short story is the only way we can consume horror I think - you don't have to decide to go back to it. We never go back ;).


However, we had another issue during this playthrough, I'm leaving it here in case you wanted to fix it. This time those strange sounds didn't stop when closing eyes for birthday cake - we had to endure them for the whole "party". Fortunately they were gone for the recorded tale and further.

And regarding lagginess, this time it happened again, when Bonbon show ed up near the TV and more or less stayed with us for the rest of the game.

Keep up the good work, we hope to see more such things from you, hopefully this time we won't be the ones on who the technical problems focused ;)

Developer (1 edit)

Thanks for letting me know - and I'm glad you got there in the end.

Just to let you know, and anyone else reading this, I've been working on an update. The sounds you mention are actually the robots glitching out if they get trapped in corners, as well as causing noises, that could slow the game down too. The update will fix this. It will also fix the problem of balls getting stuck behind Bonbon, and rings bouncing out of the box.

I've decided not to implement chapters. After looking into it, I've realised that I would need to remake various things, and it's more time than I've got to spare. Also, I've not been able to replicate the other problems you mentioned, with events not seeming to trigger, so I'm going to have to leave those.

Thanks for playing, though, and for highlighting these issues. I'm glad you enjoyed it despite them.