I had a bunch of refunds. Being the game cheap, the trailer honest and the experience bugless, I couldn't understand why. Is people really hating The Chasm so much? Isn't it worth the cost of a cheap fast food meal?
I started to get desperate. I had some cool updates for Halloween, and great projects for the future. But at this rate, I would never be able to even repay Steam's application fee.
I also had, recently, a YouTuber (Neco the Sergal) doing a gameplay on The Chasm and contacting me. Apparently, he got stuck at level 3. He couldn't pick up the Chief's Key.
I started banging my head on the desk. Why? How? I damn checked every room of every floor and played the game one hundred times! And never, ever encountered a bug! Not a game-breaking one, at least!
That's when my "Cursed Key" update came out. I was quite happy with it, actually. Now the key was more visible, and you could interact with stuff from a better distance - before, people had to smash their faces in generators to activate them (because I thought it was more realistic, dumb f*** me), so hey, I thought that the game got a nice improvement.
Refunds didn't stop. I started to consider taking the game off the shop, especially because you don't get to change the game's price soon after you released it. I couldn't even discount it.
Then, few hours ago, it happened again. Neco the Sergal contacted me, in frustration - he just lost AGAIN the time to record a video and play The Chasm - just to get stuck at level 3, because yep, the Key still wasn't possible to pick up.
I really wanted to throw myself from the third floor of a building. I was like, "That's it.". I would take the damn game off the Steam market. I questioned my life choices. What the hell was I doing? A stupid guy, in his small bedroom, programming and developing 15 hours a day to realize his dreams of game development - and I couldn't fix the stupidest bug on Earth. What was I thinking? I'm no real programmer after all, I thought. I'll never be able to do crap, I thought.
I started asking for hardware specifics. What Windows OS are you using? Which graphic card? 64 or 32bit?
At this point I wasn't taking it off the Steam Store only because some people bought it and didn't refund it - I wasn't taking people money and then telling them "Hey, thanks for your cash, and oh, btw, you can't play the game anymore. Bye!".
I was trying to replicate the bug desperately, wanting to fix it at all costs. I built the game with every possible combination of options known to man and beyond.
Then, some kind of divine wisdom struck me. I checked immediately if it was the case that I got right what the problem was.
I did.
That made me want to throw myself off a building again.
I couldn't understand what was going wrong because obviously, having to test the game on my own, I did it on the editor. You don't play the compiled game from scratch waiting to find the right random room on level 3 to find out a bug that may have unknown dependecies. That would be beyond insane. I always quickly check if the game is running smoothly and isn't getting any crashes once built, but that's about it.
The problem, turns out, was that I recently started building the game with an optimization technique that made the game faster. The Chasm is a procedural game, so I thought it would be good. Turns out, it breaks stuff. For example, you can't pick the Chief's Key up - a bug that I never encountered, not even when the game was still Alpha, and that was frustrating people to death, pushing them to refund.
I don't know what the morale of this story is, so don't ask for one - the only thing I know, is that I won't stop banging my head against the desk any sooner.
The game now works flawlessly.
With a tragic smile,
- Luca