Fixing problems
Learning paths through this topic
Which of my save changes will break the saves players already have
Adding one tracked detail to your story feels harmless, but a few kinds of change lock out everyone with an older save. This entry compares the old and new layout of a save and sorts the changes into harmless and harmful ones.
On the second playthrough the story remembers things from the first one
A door that is already open, a friend who is already dead, a score that does not start at zero: something was not put back when the new game began. This entry gives your AI a way to list exactly which pieces of memory were left behind.
A player reported a crash in one scene and I cannot find how to get there
In a story with many branches, the scene that fails may be buried deep, and clicking around to find it wastes an evening. This entry lets your AI work out the shortest list of choices to the broken scene, worded as the buttons a person would press.
I need forty clicks to reach the bug and my AI cannot repeat them
A bug that hides behind a long path through your story is hard to describe and slow to test. This entry gives your AI a way to cut the recorded choices down to the few that still cause the problem, so everyone can reproduce it in seconds.
Some scenes take ages to load, but is it the scene or just one bad moment
One slow measurement can point you at the wrong scene and waste a day of fixing. This entry splits the scenes that are always slow from those that stumbled once, using a typical value rather than an average, and tells your AI where to look.
My character's name is spelled two ways in the script and the voice lines do not match
A single wrong letter in a speaker name creates a second character with no portrait, no voice and no colour. This entry finds look-alike names, tells which spelling is probably the right one, and leaves genuine pairs of similar names alone.
My AI keeps trying the same fixes again and again without getting anywhere
After a few rounds some AIs undo their own change and then make it again, and each round burns your time and budget. This entry gives a small watcher that notices a return to an earlier state or a long stretch without progress, and says when to stop.
Which of the files my AI just changed should I look at first
After a round of edits your AI lists twenty files and all of them look equally important. Here is a ranking helper that puts the files that can wreck saves and scenes ahead of dialogue and pictures, so you know where a mistake would hurt most.
My story game printed a wall of errors and I do not know which one matters
When a scene fails, dozens of red lines follow and the loudest one is usually the least useful. This entry gives your AI a small reader that picks the line that started it all, counts the echoes and shows the warning that came just before.
I asked my AI to tweak one unit and it changed many numbers in the balance table
A balance table is easy to damage with a helpful edit. This entry gives your AI a table comparer that sets what you asked for apart from everything else that moved, shows by how many percent, and also catches units and stats that appeared or vanished.
The autosave overwrote my good save with a broken one
One autosave slot means one bad write destroys everything. This entry gives your AI a small rotating set of slots with a check on each, which loads the newest one that is still whole and always keeps a good one when it saves.
The same battle ends differently depending on who is listed first
If whoever happens to be first in a list gets a free hit, the result is unfair and hard to reproduce. This entry gives your AI a combat round that can run in two orders and in a fair simultaneous mode, plus a test that exposes the unfair one.