The WAMF Update, and What It Is

Two days ago, I finished and uploaded new files for Fastidious Ally of Longevity and replaced the file in the playable web port panel with a new web port. The original files that actually HAPPENED in the true ten days of the real jam are still there so people get to know what that was like, but it's worth talking about this.

Exhausting as it was, once I found out that the original FAOL had terrible fundamental game speed/delta/timestep issues, I knew I'd have to work on it again. I wanted all those people to see what speed the game should actually be running at, especially as the speed was unintentionally fast in the showreel recorder's computer and especially as so many seemed to not notice the mistake somehow.

I set to work on making a Fastidious Ally of Longevity update that faithfully takes the original but makes it run on all computers - not just mine - roughly the same way I was seeing it run during development.

I planned at first on doing it within a single eleventh day, but I made it an eleventh and twelfth day together when I realized how badly tired in the "last stage" I was getting, so I had the additional security of more time. And I'm glad I did, because I nearly made some pretty bad mistakes in completion at that point. So, well off, August 15 and August 16 together came to make a post-jam bugfix.

Obviously fixing a broken timestep is necessary. I don't know why anybody would think it wouldn't be. I also realized, while trying to test something a couple of days after the jam - using my modding backdoor so I didn't have to edit the real code on the wrong day - that I hadn't even done the modding support right. So, necessary, but very exhausting.

The post-jam bugfix, or 1.0.1, is called WAMF.

WAMF stands for Walk and Modding Fix. That's basically what it did. I decided that this should be practically all it did, but unintuitively I guess "Walk" also meant adjustments to the rest of the tempo elements. It made movement speeds of almost everything from the scrolling text and walking left and right to gravity and the various counting up clocks that literally showed you incorrect minutes and seconds actually count the way they should. I should have noticed that the minutes and seconds were wrong on day 1. It's a mistake I made once, a mistake I wish I never made, and a mistake I never want to make again.

As I discovered using the modding backdoor two or so days after the jam, once the time step actually uses the correct delta, everything in the game on this computer will move wrong, at about twice the previously recorded speed - until you edit the number values that work inside it. It was hard to adjust all the values to make the correct step use the correct gameplay intentions - and it can never be fully precise, but I think I did. I hope I did. I still have a paranoid, lingering fear that something in the game speed is still really not done right. And there could be brand new bugs that were created by WAMF as either a necessary or an unnecessary evil. I don't know.

I decided that this WAMF update shouldn't do anything but make the game work as intended before on Day 10 if I had fixed the mods and timestep properly. Making a version that fixes the bugs I really cared about and didn't know about come out post-jam, but then also making it fix bugs that I could have made peace with on Day 10 felt too much like revisionist history for me.

So, any bugs that I knew about or didn't know about during the end of the jam, if they weren't about inconsistencies between processor hardware or allowing people to modify the game from outside implemented code like I planned, I left them were they were. I think I had to put some pretty bad kludge in there when something unexpected happened with acceleration of walking, too. I blame that problem squarely on the need to fix the timestep, though. Much like when I had to reduce physics body frictions in this very same WAMF. I still don't know if I fixed that walking-running bug or what's up with that. Things just feel weird to me about this game now. It's not my great, fun project of triumph anymore. I also think those other bugs are likely to not be fixed unless I'm fixing them in a sequel. And I don't want to update the game again.

I was devastated when I found out that the original FAOL wasn't coded properly. I knew I could "fix" it, but I also was fully aware that FAOL as a game jam entry was always going to be wrong. I really wanted this game to be amazing during the real contest period. In this sad reality it was always going to live up to less than it properly could have done, at a "makes you wonder" placement of overall 52nd.

I was also terrified during WAMF development the entire time.

So, here we are. WAMF is a faithful patch to the jam version of Fastidious Ally of Longevity, it doesn't fix the "proper" bugs, and you can play it instead of the jam version unless you just really want to get a sense of history on how broken things were or you just really want to see a game that's broken. I'm not taking them down because that would also be too much of a revisionist history for me, actually much more so for this one.

Like before, I uploaded accessible source code for this 1.0.1 WAMF update in the form of a basic .love file. This time the backdoor will properly work. If you want to make a mod, go nuts.