My wife stayed up late last night and tried to beat “Crossroads”. But she uncovered a nefarious bug, so this is just a warning to everyone. It doesn’t show up until level 9, aka “zigzag”, but it prevents you from passing the level and if you’ve got that far that means you’ve been playing for at least an hour or so.

The bug is with non-square levels, so it only happens on levels 9 and 10 (the last two levels..). It doesn’t allow you to place words on the right half of the level so “DECIDE” (or “DEVICE”) in the screenshot above never gets added. It’s not surprising, since it’s in code I added in the last half-hour of the contest… heheh. I’ve already fixed it but I’m not going to release a post-compo version until after judging is complete to avoid confusion.

If this happens to you, and you are stuck on level 9, there is a workaround. Without closing your game, edit the file gamedata/level_09.txt and make the level square (17×17). Add ‘#’ marks (walls) to fill up the extra rows. Then
hit ‘r’ to reload. If you’ve made a typo, it will crash. Otherwise, it will reload your level and you can continue. yay. Same goes for level 10. An easier fix is to copy level_11.txt over level_09.txt and achieve victory two levels sooner.

ps. The level format is pretty simple. If you make any good levels, send them to me and i’ll include them in the post-contest version.

This entry was posted on Monday, December 8th, 2008 at 1:21 pm and is filed under LD #13 - Roads - 2008. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.