GENBA no Kizuna has been out for five days now! In case you’ve missed it, you can find the release announcement post here.
We unfortunately had a rather bumpy and stressful start, with players immediately running into a very unfortunate issue: the game crashing upon clicking on “Begin” “orz And it wasn’t just a player here and there… it was all of them, including myself!
Thankfully, the issue could be fixed relatively quick and easy. It literally required just one word of code being changed. But of course, the whole thing still got me pretty panicky at first and it’s really embarrassing to have this sort of thing happen. You may wonder now how we did not catch that before and well…
It all started with me finding a DPA display issue a couple days before release. One of the evidence entries would switch back and forth between its initial and updated version whenever you hit the “Hint” or “Show” buttons during an evidence presentation prompt. Natsu quickly fixed that, but it sadly resulted in a new issue. Upon game start, it would crash, stating that “add” was not defined.
Weird enough, the “add” command had always worked before, but for some inexplicable reason not here and, instead, Natsu had to switch it out with “show”. But I guess that’s coding for you! Never makes any logical sense!
Anyway, the reason we didn’t encounter this problem ourselves with further test runs was because, somewhere on our PCs, old game data had still been retained. With a complete fresh install, however… well, that’s when the issue popped up.
Again, it’s kinda embarrassing that something so simple yet severe slipped by, but thankfully, we could fix it quick and the players bringing it up seemed to have been pretty chill about it. That said, I’d like to once again offer our sincerest apologies for this, as well as an enormous thank you! I feel really blessed to know that there actually are people who showed up right for the launch to immediately dive into GENBA. Which is precisely why it stings all the more that we had this happen…
I mean, I know myself all too well how it is when you look forward to a game and can’t wait to get it started and then… it just doesn’t.
Now, that aside, there are two other things that were brought to our attention: the absence of Auto Mode, despite an options setting existing for it, and another bug where evidence entries disappear from the DPA in chapter three.
Auto Mode being gone kinda happened by accident. Early on in development, we chose to remove Ren’Py‘s default quick menu for design reasons… and didn’t realize that that was the only default way to activate Auto Mode. Because, for whatever reason, Ren’Py doesn’t actually have a hotkey assigned to it. Which is why we will simply add one ourselves with a future patch.
(And why didn’t we notice Auto Mode being gone much earlier, either? Well… all I can say is that neither Natsu nor I ever use Auto Mode in VNs, so it never even entered our minds, ahahah…)
As for the disappearing DPA entries, well… as of right now, we have no idea what causes this issue. With this one, not all players are experiencing it, which is already odd enough in itself. And making it much harder to investigate. So, if you did encounter it, we’d really like you to contact us to talk about it in detail. Because, without any further info, it will be very difficult to pin down how it is triggered.
As you can see, even though the game is out now… we’re still pretty busy with it! I would have preferred to talk about other things today and already get into the post-mortem posts, but for now, it’s more important to ensure that players can enjoy a truly smooth experience, so that’s what we’re gonna focus on!
Now, as always, please enjoy the rest of your weekend and, until next Saturday, take care :3
(And if you yourself have played/are playing GENBA, please let us know what you think of it!!)
