Is four days enough to develop a roguelike? Yes, there is proof. Is it enough time to test it thoroughly and ensure that it is bug free? Unlikely! In any case, Chronophase was released at the 4-day mark with 3 known bugs, all of which I’ve just now corrected.

These were, in order of priority:

1. Enemies were being prematurely removed from the TurnManager (the priority queue handler that handles turns and energy use). This caused enemies to stay stuck in place without shootin’ or movin’.
2. Some values of the TurnManager priority queue were mysteriously set to null, crashing the game with Flash’s equivalent of a null pointer error.
3. In certain cases, if an enemy shot twice in a row, it was possible for it to destroy its first projectile, due to the order of turn updates inherent in the system.

I list #2 as lower priority than #1, even though #1 didn’t cause a fatal error, because I had a feeling that fixing #1 would fix #2 (and it did). In an ironic turn of events, it was bug #3 that was causing both #1 and #2:

Projectiles were being removed from the TurnManager prematurely, which registered at an index of -1 in the priority queue (not found). I would imagine that AS3’s Array.splice() function, used to delete and insert items at random positions in an array, would ignore an index of -1 and be on its way (it did not). The moment I started checking that the requested splice index be > 0, the first two bugs disappeared.

Bug #3 needed some special case handling to ensure that existing projectiles are allowed to update their position before a new one, shot by the same enemy, can destroy it.

And that did it!