Devlog #2 - Squirrel Adventure Postmortem

Similar to all of my other projects so far, I kept my scope small. I don’t really need to do much troubleshooting throughout the game-making process thanks to my process of finding tutorials and documentation first and then proceeding with my idea based around that. The game-making process wasn’t too hard, but I did have a really big challenge when I tried to upload the game on itch and that’s where I had to do a lot of troubleshooting, and I had to go through the process of taking things away in my game (to see if it’s what was affecting the issue), and if it wasn’t, then having to add it back, etc. 

After finishing my game, polished UI, having cute background music to fit the visuals, all that jazz. I was ready to upload it onto itch. But then lo and behold, “table index is out of bounds”. I was freaking out. I tried to refresh the page, try it out in different browsers, and still nothing. The same error kept popping up. I frantically searched the internet to see if anybody else had gone through the same issue. I was searching up things like “table index out of bounds when trying to upload on itch Godot”, “table index out of bounds itch”, everything you could think of. I found a few threads that were helpful in trying to figure out what the issue was, but since my game is obviously not the exact same as the people who were posting, I couldn’t figure out for sure what the issue was. From looking through those threads though, I learned that the issue meant the platform was trying to look for something, but it couldn’t find it. I also learned that if you export the game from Godot with Debug checked, you can see the issues on browser if you press F12. So I did that, and I was dumbfounded, I could see errors but I didn’t understand any of it. I just saw a bunch of numbers and words that I couldn’t make any sense of. 

I narrowed it down to a few things that could make sense. One, the Autoload script that would make it so I had background music that started as soon as the game opened. Two, retrieving the user’s microphone input. I had used Global scripts before in a previous game in 2nd year that successfully uploaded on Itch.io so that set me on the thought that it must’ve been because of the microphone input, especially since I had never dealt with microphone input before (spoilers: I was wrong). I tried commenting out the code that was retrieving the microphone input, it was in the process function of my script so I also tried to move it to the _ready. None of it worked, the error was still showing up. I was honestly ready to give up and email the teacher if it could just be a downloadable file retrieved from itch, but I remembered a few teachers saying they really don’t like .exe files since they don’t like having to download things onto the computer, and so I kept fighting through (it would make for a good thing to write about in the devlogs anyways). I decided to copy the errors from pressing F12 and pasted it into ChatGPT to ask what it meant because I was honestly tired from trying to figure it out myself. It mentioned that it could be because of my autoload. I had an inkling it was that because the issue would happen as soon as the game started (or didn’t start honestly) but it really didn’t make sense to me since I had autoloads in a previous game that successfully uploaded. But anyways, I got rid of the Autoload and instead moved the background music into the main scene, and lo and behold, the issue was no longer there. 

Apart from this issue though, I’m really proud with how it came out. I was a little bit doubtful about handling the microphone input, but I’m really glad that I was able to make it work. I think the visuals also came out super cute, I’ve always wanted to make a game with a pink/purple colour palette and I think I did a good job! I also learned how to import fonts into Godot so that was fun too. I’m a bit unfamiliar with the pixel art style so I did have a little bit of trouble with that, along with making the colours cohesive, but I like to think everything turned out really cute still!