Frayed Knights - Bug of the Week

Jay Barnson posts about tracking down bugs in Frayed Knights, using a specific problem as an illustration. It's not an essential read but if you're following the game, it's a fun little insight into the process:

Internally, the game saw the new incoming Blessing spell, compared it to the old one, and decided to supersede the old Blessing effect with the new one. Fine. So it removed the old Blessing effect. But in that split-second between deleting the old Blessing and adding the new one,  the monster fell to zero health – death! That triggered some death code. But it was then immediately “healed” by the incoming spell, which caused the follow-up code – which checks to see if the monster is dead – not to fire.

So the monster was only mostly dead. Which is still partly alive.

Well, okay, it’s a skeleton, so it’s undead, but you see what I mean.

And you see what I mean about how coding up an RPG can be a bit more challenging than many other genres?  I wouldn’t think twice about something like that in a pen-and-paper RPG. But it can get a little trickier when all that exception-based gameplay makes its way into code.