I feel like I’m Job.
This isn’t programming. This isn’t about logic or computer science or game design. This is metaphysics. This is fucking magic.
I cannot get the audio to work properly. At one point it’s all tinny, then I spend two hours changing everything around, and nothing works at all. The same code that works in a new project doesn’t work here. Or it works selectively. I’ve looked through the whole game’s code twenty times now. There’s nothing there that can explain any of this. Frankly, I’m starting to think it’s not even a bug in Construct. Software cannot behave this absurdly. Software can be broken, but it can’t be illogical, and it can’t be mean.
This is just crazy. I have worked on this game for more than nine months. I’ve worked on it for hundreds of hours. There’s so much else that I should have been working on, but I worked on this, day after day after day. It’s the first game of mine to attract some attention. It’s got tons of cool features. It’s got voice acting. It’s got exploration. It’s got all sorts of fun stuff. I enjoyed playing it myself.
And I’ve been sitting here for days, inches away from getting it out, and every time something comes up and hits me over the head. And these audio problems are the ultimate game-stopper, because they are impossible. They follow no patterns, they make no sense. The dll is not broken. Construct is not broken. The commands are all there, and there is no code accidentally stopping them. The same code worked this morning. Now it does nothing.
I don’t know what to do. Every time there seems to be a solution something else stops working, even though I’ve done nothing that would affect it. It’s like there is a force actively trying to stop me. It’s like the computer keeps saying 1 + 1 = 3. How do you deal with that?
I don’t want to give up on this game. Not only because there are so many people waiting for it, but because I don’t know how to deal with the idea that I’ve done all of this for nothing, that it’s all fallen apart when it should be complete. This game was supposed to be the first part of a great wave of creative projects that would finally get us to where we want to be. Instead it seems to be cursed to just fall apart for no reason. No reason at all.
That’s what really drives me so mad about it. Personal failure I can understand. Physical distaster I can understand. But this is purely, utterly irrational.
I will give it another go, of course. There’s nothing I can really do that I haven’t done before, but the results are completely unpredictable.
