Thursday Turn Out - 03/26/2026
FIRST: Do you want to be a playtester for the Beatdown in the Holler (BDitH) prototype? You can either subscribe to the newsletter (subscribers get itch.io download keys and a link to a Google Form for feedback) or visit hollergames.com, which admittedly just has you sign up for the same newsletter. Having one place to check for playtesters is easier for me, even if I have two URLs to send everyone to that one place.
I said I’d start bug hunting and fixing this week and goodness, I’ve bagged some real trophies of catastrophic bugs. Nothing that soft-locked the prototype, thankfully, but there were two bugs that made the game essentially unplayable after a few seconds. But I found those, determined the issue, and fixed them. Now, BDitH works more or less as it should.
I mean, it appears to. I have no doubt that the playtesters will find approximately 3,472 bugs before I even send the download keys.
So, what were these bugs, and how did I fix them?
The Case of the Disappearing Enemies
This was the bug that appeared about thirty seconds into the gameplay video I posted on Sunday (I just realized my laptop was recording ambient sound, and I going to get my first every copyright strike for playing Bob-Omb Battlefield in the background?). To recap: enemies seemed to disappear from the world map when Zel teleported across a boundary and to the opposite side of the map. I couldn’t for the life of me figure out what was going on, so I turned to my old friend, the humble print statement. Good ol’ Printy showed that the enemies were being shifted off the map every time Zel teleported, so of course they wouldn’t show.
Now, who would have written code to shift enemies when Zel teleported, and added enemies to a WorldShiftable group, ensuring they’d never be on the map after the first teleport? Who could have been such a doofus that they didn’t consider that enemies which weren’t on-screen didn’t need to teleport at all?
I don’t know, but he felt reeeally dumb when he figured it out and fixed it. He also wrote a script which took all on-screen enemies and teleported them with Zel. So, that bug was fixed after some meta-analysis.
The Case of The Sticking Reelshot
This one was similarly tricky, but a lot more straight-forward. Zel’s reelshot would occasionally get “stuck” in one position and the player would be unable to attack or grapple until Zel took damage again. I had to sit with the problem for a bit, but I realized that something was preventing Zel from returning to the idle state in the finite state machine. The behavior was reproducible only if I spammed the kick/stab attacks while the reelshot was in use, so I analyzed all the functions associated with attacks.
The problem was revealed to be one of timing: both the kick and stab attacks operated on timers: a timer enabled, then disabled, the hitbox which dealt damage to enemies. If an attack ended after the reelshot finished, Zel never entered the idle state again. I added code to force Zel into the idle state when the attack timer ended, and that bug was fixed.
Mostly Complete
The BDitH prototype is complete enough to release. However, I’m sticking to the May 4th release date because a) I want to playtest some more and tune enemy behaviors, b) there are a few “lagniappe” features I want to add, and c) I have absolutely no idea how to handle the non-game-development part of releasing a prototype and need this time. It feels pretty great to be at this stage, but I still have work to do. Come back Sunday for a more detailed review of my bug fixes and to see what progress I’ve made between now and then.
As always, thanks for joining me on this journey!
