I was wrapping up development the other day when I noticed that I had never skinned the Log menu, given how short this demo game was. Surely I could move the textbox and change the color so it was readable and that was it?

Of course it wouldn’t be that simple.

Horrors of horrors. I didn’t understand anything the debugger threw at me, and the errors kept changing, until it settled into something I honestly didn’t get at all. Basically, it would work if I used the default settings, but even changing the box size and position seemed to send it on a tailspin. The first time the textbox was called, the whole game (and the editor in dev mode) would freeze. I had to kill everything from the Task Manager. Even if I used the default settings, it would only work in the beginning and just flat out refusing to work after a scene change.

Then I noticed something really really strange. Everything I changed in the editor didn’t seem to matter, but if I exported the game it looked like whatever I intended it to be. The editor was having a phantom file issue, it seemed to cache and load my old files before I made the changes, so even if I commented the problematic lines out, it would still showing as errors.

After some experimenting, I remembered how finicky the editor was about text overflow, and something sunk in. See, I had changed the default font size for the backlog to be 30 instead of 20, because my poor eyesight liked it bigger. Surprise, surprise, with size 20 the log showed up without throwing a fit.

BerserkD, the engine developer, was very quick in sending me a hotfix. The new version of the engine should not have this bug.

But it was still crashing after one scene change.

Then I read my script again and realized I might have made a very big mistake. I had thought the command fadeout All to mean hide all assets. It actually tossed out every single thing including your external scripts, which meant I had to reload the backlog module whenever I did this.

That one was right on the money.

The real command I should have used was Clear. Yeah, read the manual, folks.

On the bright side, I have a fully working entry now, with two days to spare from my projected deadline. I’ll have to refrain myself from tinkering and wait from my playtesters, but the joy of having grokked just how Light.VN handles animation is making me very giddy to experiment.