Videogame Debugging - the Basics

Debugging is a critical skill for videogame development
All disciplines create bugs, so everyone should know how to do it.
It is one of the basics of success in your job.

Let me walk through the process I used when I was a programmer.
Debugging was the thing that I was best at.

I find the videos that show senior programmers as perfect engines of code to be extremely frustrating. And inaccurate. It isn't about not making mistakes. Its about being able to fix mistakes.

Social Media

Chapters

[julilla]

All of this was pretty much over my head, but sometimes I like to hear shop talk because it definitely gives better insight into what other people do. This is to say, bless all programmers! Without them, we'd be lost and I'm grateful to them for doing the things that make our lives better!

[hm]

Lots of this in the broad-strokes is applicable as an approach to problem-solving in other fields and even in life, I feel!

[ControllerLyfe]

As a tech guy this was something I actually understood and also enjoyed :P

[LumianGames]

Ah, I've a small story when I tried to debug an arduino project.
A 3x4 Keypad (think of the keypad layout old mobile phones had) and an 16x2 character LCD were connected to it.
I programmed (and for the keypad itself used a library to read out the pressed key) the arduino to send chars depending on which key gets pressed how many times (advancing the cursor was a button didn't wanna to read out a timer thingie ^^' )

First issue I had: I saw no text.
Checked my code, realized that switch case needs breaks to not fall to the last case of the whole thing (which was the space)

Issue 2: Garbabe symbols appeared after a while.
Checked the serial output of my code (Arduinos IDE is really barebones, they're working on a better one atm but for now Serial.print("Test"); is a big helper ^^' ) and realized that when I transformed an int into a char, I didn't take care to stay in the 8 bit space.

Last issue was related to making sure that the right value gets converted when I pressed a button multiple times (A->B->C->A for example on pressing the button [2])

When that was finally done the thing worked as intended and I promptly abandonded the project since the code was working and some kind of enclosure could be done at any time XD

[DarthKrytie]

A great vid. Sometimes, it's just a missing bracket somewhere. lol. But, this is great. There's no level of expertise that allows you to bypass the having a sold foundation in the basics.

[Kradle]

Why does this guy sound like kermit the frog?? 😂