Post by Maithonis in INTERBLOCKED [Game Boy] comments

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Hi thanks for the review. I can't believe you beat every level. I didn't expect that to happen but it makes me really glad someone was able to accomplish that.

I spent a fair bit of time with trying to scale the difficulty and you're exactly right towards the last two sets of difficulty they do feel very similar and once you get good with the longer move puzzles it gets quite easy.

Thanks for pointing out the issue in level 600. I accidentally deleted a char (when commenting my code?) and so the bottom rightmost block didn't appear.

There actually is a reset button but I guess I didn't make it obvious enough. Pressing Select resets the level.

The random mode is a nice idea. I'll think about adding that.

The cursor bug is weird I'm not sure how that happened. During development there was some cursor issues exactly like you described and I can't exactly remember what caused them but it had to do with the level loading out of order. It could very well be an emulation but I think you're right that it's a memory issue. You might not of noticed this but I break up the levels into banks and try to mitigate the loading time by using constants within the banks. So for instance, level ~1452 should take a bit longer to load then the level immediately after it. (Or something like that it's been a while since I comprehended the code).

Do you have any examples of how that bug first gets triggered? It could have to do with bank switching so it could be a specific level completion that triggers it that I never caught. How many levels do you beat before it happens? Did returning to menu fix it? By resetting the game I assume you mean cycling the power.

Thanks for enjoying the game so much it really warms my heart!

eishiya2 years ago

Oh, I didn't try select to reset. Thanks!

About the cursor bug: I *think* the number of levels before it happens varies, but it's possible that just depends on what level I was playing last time I reset or how far I was from a "problem" level when I resumed play on any given day. It usually took a good while to happen but happened regularly enough that I got used to it, but I wouldn't be able to tell you how many levels it took. Somewhere on the order of 100-200 maybe?

I did mean power cycling fixes the problem when I said resetting. Unfortunately I don't remember whether returning to the level select fixes it, and I never tried returning to the menu. I ended up always resetting for a reason, but it's possible that reason was simply speed. Naturally, playing through over 200 levels just now (1-133, 4521-4661) to see if I could trigger the bug didn't achieve anything xP

It's weird that the glitch is preceded by laggy behavior in the cursor during normal gameplay. The cursor becomes laggy in the middle of playing a level, rather than right after it's first loaded. This symptom makes me doubt it's related to the way the levels are stored. I also don't remember the glitch happening even once during the early levels, so I wonder if perhaps it's connected to time spent playing a given level, or time spent playing in a given session.

I'm sorry that I don't have more specific information! I'll reply again when I have something to share.

Maithonis2 years ago (2 edits) (+1)

Thanks that's a ton already. Maybe if I decide to try to fix it I'll open it up in a debugging emulator and try to figure out if something is leaking. The things you describe are weird because I don't think there's too much if any stuff that persists through the levels. I might remember once having something akin to lag but I don't think it was related at all and it was such a glaringly easy fix I have very little recollection of it. I also don't remember ever having the cursor bug out during a level it usually happened on loading. I will think about it it lol.

eishiya2 years ago (1 edit)

Played a few levels today from where I left off yesterday, and hello glitch :D I didn't notice any cursor slow-down before this one, but navigating the menu to get back to the level select did feel laggy and eventually got unresponsive. Level 4686.

Getting back to level select, that was also glitched. Going to other levels, even on other pages, did not get rid of the glitch.

Going back to the main menu did not fix the glitch. I guess this is why I got in the habit of power-cycling.

When loading a level in this state, some of the background is corrupted too:

Definitely some kind of overflow, but good luck finding where xP

Maithonis2 years ago

Thanks for all of this. Yeah I have no idea about this one. I've seen the cursor glitch before but usually it happened when there was some issue on loading where an input got buffered or something. It never corrupted the menus though. There's definitely something persisting which is unfortunate. How many levels did you play before 4686 before it bugged out. I tried beating the level immediately before it and couldn't reproduce it. I wonder if there's a way to export the state of the bug and I can look for anything odd because yeah IDK. Something else is it could have something to do with the game mishandling the sram file and getting confused but I doubt that. I'll look into it.

eishiya2 years ago (1 edit)

I played through 1-133 and then 4521-4685 in a single session (with emulation pausing when I wasn't playing) before this occurred on 4686.

Next time I get around to playing, I could play in BGB instead of VBA and send you a savestate of the glitch having happened, would that help? I might also be able to savestate every level and get you a savestate just before the glitch. ~~Just watch, in BGB the glitch won't happen.~~

Maithonis2 years ago(+1)

If you'd like to send me a BGB savestate that would be useful for when I do try to hunt it down. Emulicious is also a useful emulator for seeing performance graphs. I would like to try to fix this bug and maybe add the random level option like you suggested, but time is a lot more limited for me lately. honestly I don't think I'll have much luck tracking down the bug even with a savestate of it. I'm not a pro when it comes to the Gameboy architecture/assembly so I don't have a super good understanding of how it's moving around the data. I do think using another emulator would be good though just to potentially rule out that. I only ever would play 100 or so levels in a session but it was typically on original hardware. It sounds like the issue happens after around 300 levels or so, so maybe I can build a test environment to just skip through 300 levels and see if anything is growing.

Also please redownload the game from itch.io just in case you're not using the most up to date one. I did one update around the time I submitted the game to fix a header issue with some flashcarts.