TBowers Week 6 Report

This week was spent working on bug fixes, evaluating a great new Lua IDE Eric discovered, and implementing an level skip feature for internal testing.

Everyone has been on deck this week on the bug fix front following the discovery by James that the last beta we released exhibits strange runtime behavior on the target hardware only. Everything appears fine in the simulator but when running on an actual Android device, the boss doesn't appear to take damage. It is a very strange issue - this sort of inconsistency between simulator and target hardware hasn't been seen before. Based on yesterday's meeting, the current theory is the json library inside our code base (required for the twitter integration) may be conflicting with the json library built natively into  Corona. The why part isn't exactly known at this point but we are still working it.

As I mentioned, Eric discovered and subsequently suggested we all try the Lua Glider IDE. In just a few days with it, I think we all already wish we had started using something this high quality all along. It has built in support for the Corona SDK with realtime debugging that has already proved invaluable. Additionally, it automatically calls out and highlights potential errors and warnings. Running our project through this environment has exposed a lot of issues (mostly minor but numerous in nature) that we need to work through and try to correct to increase quality.

I also had time to implement a level skip feature for our internal testing. I added a global debug_build flag that can be checked anywhere. When the pause scene is created, it checks for this flag and adds an additional button to cycle through the available levels. Once you have the one you want picked, hit the "jump" button to set the selection and then unpause. When the originating scene resumes after the pause, it checks to see if it should perform a level skip and if so, it automatically transitions to that scene. The OO nature of the storyboard API makes this sort of jumping clean and consistent. Hopefully this feature will help us in testing issues within specific levels without having to constantly play through the game itself.