Hello Humans!

It's been a strange week!

I began the week by sprinting confidently toward release, but just as I was about to cross the finish line I ran face-first into a brick wall.

It sucked. A lot. But dwelling on it won't help, so I've dusted myself off and I'm ready to move forward.

Current Status

The manual workaround I spoke about last update has been completed successfully.

I am now re-testing the final version. I expect this to take the remainder of the weekend. Devs aren't able to do a weekend release anyway, so this actually works out.

Right now I am aiming for an early morning Tuesday release. This gives me the weekend to focus on testing, and then Monday I can wrap it up and go down my release checklist.

I have confirmed that I can build the final version of Village Monsters and can upload it on Steam and Itch, so there will be no further obstacles.

I will continue to post live updates on Twitter and Discord. I also did a developer live stream yesterday showcasing parts of the game while I tested things and answered questions.

What Happened?

I want to be as transparent as possible about what caused all this, but the details are pretty technical.

In short, building the release version of Village Monsters caused my development environment (GameMaker Studio 2) to crash. I could run it just fine on my own computer using the virtual runner, but could not package it for release. This was a problem.

After much testing, and pulling hair out, I discovered the root cause. An IDE bug was causing a large number of junk files to clog up my project directory. These files were (apparently) harmless, but would lead to a crash when I tried to build the final release.

I use source control (git), but it was frustratingly unhelpful in this instance. The junk files were being created nearly every time I created a new asset, meaning nearly every commit since the bug was introduced contained junk files.

In addition, I could not simply cherry pick the "good" files and leave behind the junk files. It was all too intertwined, and removing the files outside the IDE caused even more file system corruption.

My only recourse was to clone the last good build of the game from January and manually port over the changes commit-by-commit. It was tedious work of nearly 300 commits, which is why it has taken me so long.

In addition, testing has become an even more important priority, as manual work (especially performed by a tired, cranky developer) is far more prone to errors and mistakes.

Thankfully that did the trick. I've gone through the entire release process multiple times with success. There should be no further issues.