Happy October people. This is a time for joyful celebration, right?

But no.

Gather around the campfire, kids.

Today, we will NOT be talking about the joy of development. No, today, I will tell you all a horrifying ghost story.

A story about betrayal and hauntings. A tale of unluck and misfortune. A tragedy involving our hubristic protagonist Yoyoyollie and his friend, Arcy.

It all started on a dark and stormy night, weeks before the demo at Tokyo Game Show…

*Note that while this is based on a true story, a few elements have been altered very very slightly for dramatic effect. Very slightly. An incredibly small amount.*

Chapter 1: The first incident; Foreshadowing

I was working on final improvements to the hangar of the game before night fell.

I had gotten to the point of adding in the plane itself, having already finished the environment around it, but I noticed something strange.

Was the plane... far bigger than it was supposed to be?

“Wait a second”, I thought to myself.

“I made the game work on a 1 to 20 scale. And the hanger should be at a 1 to 1 scale. So why is it that the aircraft is 40 meters long when it should be 20…?”

I double checked, no, TRIPLE checked the numbers. But each time, the results were the same. My planes were too large!

Did this mean I had made this error throughout the entire development period?

Could my game be… half the speed than it was supposed to be?

I had to report this to my friend immediately. We could maybe work on a plan to remedy this in the future!

And I had believed this to be the case for the longest time.

I even had a playtester confirm that indeed, I had messed up the scaling of the game. I thought I had to fix it!

But… When I actually got around to fixing it, it turns out there WAS no scaling error after all.

Everything was exactly the size I intended for them to be. How peculiar?

At the time, I had attributed this mistake to a fault in my memory or judgement.

Maybe I just misunderstood something.

I don’t know.

But I should've taken the hint then. I should've known... that this game was haunted.

Chapter 2: The second incident; Betrayal

It was the night of the Tokyo Game Show. We had already sent over the build, so we were planning our next steps.

Joyfully, Arcy suggested we upgrade our unity version to something higher due to the newer version being more stable and having better performance.

Little did we know though, that our thirst for progress would be a fatal mistake...

But the next day, when I went to perform this upgrade, I realised that something was wrong.

Deeply wrong.

I had completely forgotten that Unity was not something to be trusted.

Yes, indeed. In the recent unity versions, they had changed a critical API call which a lot of packages and assets relied on.

And unfortunately, not all of the package creators had gotten around to fixing it yet.

I had to manually comb through each one and fix it myself.

It wasn’t too difficult, just tedious, but I had forgotten about one asset. A tool so integral, yet would not be updated for months to come…

Yes. Fmod. The audio alternative we were reliant on.

Being a very very large asset, it doesn’t get updated frequently and the supported versions are few as a result.

Fmod would not work with unity 6.6 or 6.7 at all.

Despite our troubles created by Unity, we had prevailed! Or so I thought. But as it turns out, we had celebrated too early… far too early…

Chapter 3: The third incident; Haunting

Thunder roared through the halls our our grim mansion.

Sounds of vultures and ravens could be heard, swarming the rainy courtyard, scouting for an easy meal; a corpse to pick at. Yes, they could sense that someone was about to die.

It was midnight, where the full moon was placed far up in the night sky, and I sensed that something… was off.

So I turned to Arcy:

“It must be a ghost”, I thought. I had heard of such things but I never thought it would occur to me!

However, I thought that maybe... just maybe, I was just jumping at shadows.

Maybe there was nothing wrong! Maybe I was just going crazy!

So I continued working and ignored my intuition…

But I had had enough of the slowdowns and the lag.

I started searching, scouring the codebase and profiling everything, seeking a reason for my frustration.

I had to prove to Arcy and myself that there WAS a ghost in the system causing these, and... I found it... Proof!

But it was already too late. The only fix was to go back to our previous version, and downgrading directly now would be impossible.

We could rollback to before we upgraded, but by the time we found it, I had already made dozens of commits since and it would be a massive timesink to redo everything.

We were doomed... doomed to be stuck in this hellish house with the ghost of a fatal editor memory leak!

And thus, both Yollie and Arcy died (from fear) and the game was delayed until 2126.

THE END

Epilogue

Ok, some things might be hyperbole.

But really, all these things did happen!

And yes, we’re currently stuck with an editor version which makes it very annoying (and ram-intensive) to work on this game.

We’re working on a fix! Hopefully soon!

Regardless, hey, looks like TGS went well, huh? Thank god.

What I did not include in this was the horrifying experience of the endless build game -> debugging loop me and Arcy had to endure to make sure the game was airtight.

Well, it was our fault for being slow, but it was a lot of very boring work.

Or maybe… it was the fault of the ghost…?

Anyways, Happy October people!