Post by jdelible in Little Bug (full version) comments

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I am right near the end of the game (what I assume would be considered the final "boss" equivalent) and this section appears to be beyond buggy. Sometimes on the initial set of "bouncy" jumps I land short for no apparent reason (you literally just hold right for the first bit) and fall, except nothing in the fall is killing me and I fall forever until I go to the pause menu and return to the start screen.

Worse than that a bit further in when the little girl has to fall through a blue block and then "activate" the tall black enemies literally 50% of the time she falls through the floor to her death when dropping in when said blue block disappears (one time after literally standing on the floor for a few seconds while I maneuvered the blue orb she randomly fell through). This too on occasion does not result in her death, falling forever until I pause and return to the start screen.

This last section is already very long and rather difficult with no save points, having to repeatedly redo that rather braindead opening 25 seconds (I timed it) over and over as often due to bugs as my own failings has really soured the experience. The last five minutes I played I believe every single death was due to the game acting weird rather than me screwing up (which I have done plenty of times getting to this point). I turned it off after that and at this point I am 50-50 on ever going back to try and finish it up, I'm so close yet in this state I struggle to see the point.

I know this is made by a small team of individuals and you can clearly see the passion behind the game, and hence if this ends up read it'll likely be by someone who put a lot into this and will be bummed out to read this. I apologize for that and you have my sympathy, but for whatever reason this last bit isn't even in a passable state and it is a darn shame.

jdelible4 years ago (1 edit)

Okay, I tried this again today and had 10 straight minutes of every single attempt bugging out in various ways, so I'm simply done with this. On the off chance it is helpful I took a few screenshots of what is going wrong.

Here is me falling short of this jump one of several times despite just holding down D or right on the stick the whole time (I alternated to see if it made a difference). As you can see I am currently midway through the pinkish purple hand that in theory should kill me, I will continue to fall off the bottom of the screen as the background scrolls downwards until it no longer can scroll any further. The only way out is to go back to the start menu via pause.

Here is a slightly different version of the second bug I mentioned before. I fell down here and got stuck in the floor unable to move rather than fall all the way through and then falling forever. I figured I would wait for the pursuing hands to kill me but as you can see they just passed right on by the little girl and her blue orb. I eventually tried to kill myself by maneuvering the blue orb directly into one of those shadow people which A) did not kill me, and B) somehow caused the girl to finally fall through the floor and drop endlessly.

I reset again, fell on those opening jumps a couple more times (each time resulting in an endless fall) and gave up. FWIW the game up until this point wasn't really buggy at all, there was one time (the part with the pipes you can walk through if you want) where I sorta fell/clipped a bit into the top of a pipe and got stuck but that's about it.

EDIT: Had an idea today, redownloaded the game and checked if that would maybe fix things.

It did not, but I learned that the collision detection on the hands just ain't working at all as this was from me not moving from the start of this section. At this point I am out of ideas, either a recent-ish update to the game borked this section or my game save is causing this somehow as, again, I moved its entire game install folder to the desktop as a "just in case" backup, redownloaded from itch, extracted to a new install folder and it is still like this.

Bela4 years ago

Hey there, very sorry to hear you are having issues with the ending. Its been two years since I've updated the game, so I don't remember exactly what is causing that bug but I certainly remember a few people experiencing it and thought we had patched it. You are probably right that it has to do with save data, but deleting your downloaded folder won't actually delete that information because the saved info lives in another location. On windows you can use the Registry Editor to locate it: \HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\bubbles\Little Bug. Deleting that folder will get rid of the save data, which means all data will be lost but the bug will probably be solved. Also this folder contains saved information and may need to be deleted: C:\Users\user\AppData\LocalLow\bubbles\Little Bug
I know its not ideal to delete all saved data, but its the only solution I can think of at the moment.

As for the ending, I thought I'd share why it is how it is: Hard agree that it needs a checkpoint after the first 25 seconds. The simple reason is that Little Bug was my first game and I didn't have the skill/time to make the animation of the momster start at wherever it was when you hit that checkpoint. The simple solution was to make it start from the beginning of that animation everytime. It was one of the last decisions I made before publishing the game and if were to ever patch it I would add a pause feature and a checkpoint to that last part. Let me know how it goes and thanks for your feedback!

jdelible4 years ago(+1)

I thank you for taking the time to respond and offering the best solution you could come up with, even if it isn't an ideal one. By pointing out the save game location you unintentionally lead me towards something resembling an actual solution, that I will briefly write here in case anyone else ends up in a similar predicament.

Rather than delete the save game listed under C:\Users\user\AppData\LocalLow\bubbles\Little Bug I moved it to the desktop and started the game back up, at which point it created a new save game (I made sure to get as far as the first checkpoint and then make sure that the hands were killing me; they did). It turns out you can open up the save file in wordpad and have it be almost entirely legible, so I started copying bits from the old endgame save into the new one to see if anything worked.

Eventually I figured out that changing the location to the final checkpoint (I believe it is named TheDesert) and copying over the X and Y coordinates successfully caused the new save to start at the last checkpoint, but it was still buggy. That said, I messed around and by increasing the X coordinate a bit (I think I upped it by 7) you spawned a few feet in front of the checkpoint and the hands once again killed you as intended.

The issue is that I still often come up short on those initial spring jumps and while I haven't fallen all the way through the floor at places I have gotten stuck in them for a bit so it is still not functioning ideally, but in this state it is likely completable. Personally speaking... this whole hullabaloo kinda burnt me out on the game if I am being honest (plus I was admittedly awful at it and would have struggled on that final run even without a week off), so I instead messed around with the X and Y coordinates in the save file until it spawned me right before the final jump, did that and declared the game beaten (ending doesn't run if you do this BTW which isn't entirely surprising).

Still I consider that closure and I walk away more satisfied than I would have otherwise, so thanks again for that last bit of info!

Bela4 years ago

That's really interesting to know! I'm glad that you took the time to mess with the save data, that always yields interesting results. Something that crossed my mind: since your issue is based on colliders seemingly not responding to eachother, I wonder if turning down the graphics quality and screen resolution would help boost your frame rate and allow for better physics calculations. If your computers specs are not great, that might help. I'm sorry you didn't make it to the end, but I appreciate your foot work. Maybe one day I'll patch it when I have more time, but right now I'm deep in the next project. In any case your feedback has been really helpful, so thanks again and glad you played!

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