Fuzzy Bugs
Hey all, Tyler here! I'm the programmer and other designer of Mewgenics. And I'm here to talk about... BUGS!
not those kinds of bugs
One common question we get asked when talking about just how much stuff is in mewgenics, how do you make sure it all works? I mean, there's *thousands* of things in the game, and that means *millions* of ways those things can interact (and even more when counting 3 piece or 4 piece combos). It's pretty much impossible to test all possible interactions. Well, for humans to test them at least...
Enter the Fuzz Tester
The fuzz tester automatically plays the game, as fast as the computer can possibly run it. As you can see, its doing a couple of full fights per second. A human will normally take a couple of minutes to play through a combat encounter, so this means the computer can play about 500x faster than a human. It also doesn't need to sleep, so I can just run it overnight and come back the next morning to 100000 combat encounters played, each with a completely new set of cats with different abilities, afflictions, items, and mutations. That's a lot of interactions tested, for just one day!
In fact, I am running the fuzz tester while writing this post right now! And... oh no! It crashed!
After a bit of digging around in the debugger and log files, I found the culprit!
You see this little bird? Well its a rare spawn that can randomly show up in levels. They run away quickly, but if you kill it before it flies away you get some good rewards! Now this little bird here in particular... it was killed by a lightning strike from a rare weather effect, not a cat or an enemy! When it tried to grant its rewards to its killer... it didn't actually have a killer so the game crashed.
An easy enough thing to fix, and a quick double check that that same issue was not happening on a handful of other similar effects, and now... roast bird for everyone!
Lets take a moment to appreciate just how rare this particular interaction was. Birds are a rare spawn, lightning is a rare weather effect, and a lightning strike hitting and killing a bird before it runs away is... well... rare. You could play this game for 1000 hours and never see that happen. And yet the fuzz tester found it in a few minutes. It's an extremely powerful tool, and will be a large part of ensuring a stable launch. It can't find *everything*, but it covers a lot of space, and we're still doing traditional testing as well to cover the rest.
Until next time
- Tyler
not those kinds of bugs
One common question we get asked when talking about just how much stuff is in mewgenics, how do you make sure it all works? I mean, there's *thousands* of things in the game, and that means *millions* of ways those things can interact (and even more when counting 3 piece or 4 piece combos). It's pretty much impossible to test all possible interactions. Well, for humans to test them at least...
Enter the Fuzz Tester
The fuzz tester automatically plays the game, as fast as the computer can possibly run it. As you can see, its doing a couple of full fights per second. A human will normally take a couple of minutes to play through a combat encounter, so this means the computer can play about 500x faster than a human. It also doesn't need to sleep, so I can just run it overnight and come back the next morning to 100000 combat encounters played, each with a completely new set of cats with different abilities, afflictions, items, and mutations. That's a lot of interactions tested, for just one day!
In fact, I am running the fuzz tester while writing this post right now! And... oh no! It crashed!
After a bit of digging around in the debugger and log files, I found the culprit!
You see this little bird? Well its a rare spawn that can randomly show up in levels. They run away quickly, but if you kill it before it flies away you get some good rewards! Now this little bird here in particular... it was killed by a lightning strike from a rare weather effect, not a cat or an enemy! When it tried to grant its rewards to its killer... it didn't actually have a killer so the game crashed.
An easy enough thing to fix, and a quick double check that that same issue was not happening on a handful of other similar effects, and now... roast bird for everyone!
Lets take a moment to appreciate just how rare this particular interaction was. Birds are a rare spawn, lightning is a rare weather effect, and a lightning strike hitting and killing a bird before it runs away is... well... rare. You could play this game for 1000 hours and never see that happen. And yet the fuzz tester found it in a few minutes. It's an extremely powerful tool, and will be a large part of ensuring a stable launch. It can't find *everything*, but it covers a lot of space, and we're still doing traditional testing as well to cover the rest.
Until next time
- Tyler