Ghostlight Blog

Omega Quintet, an adventure in bug squashing!

Thu, 24th Aug 2017 | Posted by Ross

Hi everyone.

Since our last update we've been hard at work on the PC version of Omega Quintet and I'm pleased to say that the game has been coming along very nicely indeed.  The latest few builds have been really stable and we have also been able to squash a whole lot of bugs.

While the team keep testing here, I thought it might be interesting to give you all a brief overview of some of the bugs and weird problems we’ve been tackling during the transition from console to PC.  Hopefully this will give you a little insight in to the kind of things we have to check and fix as we progress from a first playable build through to a full Beta.

As you may expect, we have to carefully check all aspects of each build from start to finish, and just one of the areas that has seen the most work recently has been the rather important save system.  In the first build that we received from the programming team, the save/load looked like this:

Although fully functional, I think the kindest way of describing it was: "lacking details" ;-)

By the 4th build, however, after some detective work from our programming lead, the save/load screen was quickly featuring a lot more information and was looking like this:

I think you'll agree that this is quite a lot more useful!  Although, it still feels like there is a little something missing...

Now that's better! The 5th build saw the addition of a highlight over the currently selected save.

The 5th build also saw us begin to fix one of the other recurring issues with the save system.  Up until this build, any attempt to load one save from within another would cause the game to crash.

While the 5th build may have fixed that issue, there were still some very weird things happening when I actually tried to do this.
For example, should you have the sudden urge to play Omega Quintet in 1st person view, there was a simple way of doing this.  You just had to head over to the ‘office’ and then load a save you had made while within a dungeon and…
 

…‘voila’ first person view!:

In another example, the office doesn't typically contain a minimap, but if you wanted to make one appear then all you had to do was make your way to a dungeon and - from within the dungeon - load a save you’d made from within the office, at which point…

…a minimap would be displayed in the top right corner of the screen.  Very strange :)
 

Perhaps the most confusing of these occurrences, was when I loaded a save that I’d made on the world map while I was within a dungeon.  Doing that would take me to the world map as expected, but with a couple of differences.  First of all, a minimap would appear in the top right corner again; secondly in addition to the standard world map menu, the list of options that were usually displayed when selecting a save point in a dungeon, would also be displayed! :)

Both of these menus would have an active cursor, and when I tried to select an option, the game would try to select the highlighted option on both menus:

I wondered what would happen if I tried this the other way around by loading a save made in a dungeon from the world map, and I quickly discovered that it made the game crash!  ;_;

Thankfully, this was all quickly fixed in the 6th build.  I was really pleased about that because having to quit the game every time I wanted to change a save was quickly becoming quite annoying! ;)

One bug which turned out to be rather less helpful than I had hoped, appeared back in the 4th build.  In this build every time an enemy was encountered, rather than go to the trouble of making you defeat it, the game would just award you a victory and go straight to the battle results screen.  Sadly, while I was able to get a nice bit of grinding done with this bug (he, he), I was unable to use it to really progress in the game.  The reason was that I quickly got to a quest requiring me to perform a combo skill in battle - something that this bug made somewhat difficult!  So, I was relieved when this pesky bug was fixed in the following build and I could again move forward with testing the game.  Ah, the trials and tribulations of porting quality JRPGs to Steam for all you lovely people... ^_^

That’s all for now. I’ll be back soon with more news from Ghostlight, but until then why not follow us on our Twitter and Facebook pages, our Youtube Channel and our  Google + account, where we’ll be posting all the latest news from Ghostlight. You can also follow me on Twitter for a more personal take on all things Ghostlight.

© 2017 IDEA FACTORY/COMPILE HEART. All rights reserved. Omega Quintet™ is a trademark of Idea Factory.  Licensed to and published by Ghostlight Ltd.

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