Last year, I set up some error reporting to alert me when a user was redirected to a 404 page – it’s something I’ve set up if you’re trying to do an action but the game doesn’t have all of the information to do it, like you’re trying to talk but the code doesn’t know which character you’re trying to talk to.

It’s mostly for my benefit to make sure I’m not accidentally missing out information somewhere as I program in scenes and characters. (Erm, and because I’m the only user.)

Tonight, testing some of the oh-so-many talk options I wrote for NaNoWriMo that I now have to painstakingly add into the game, something went wrong. An error message came up. That’s fine, I thought, naively. I’ve just missed something out somewhere, in this massive, incomprehensively massive, so-so massive project. But I added all of that really useful error reporting last year. I can go to my error report and see exactly where the error came from and exactly what went wrong and fix it.

And I did. It was terrifically useful.

I only had to fix this one teensy problem first:

This one itsy bitsy issue where the function that handles the error message, that gets called in about a dozen places, writes the name of the file it is in and the line number of the code it is on to the error report. Rather than, say, information about the error.

Call it outside-the-box-thinking (or: not-enough-sleep-thinking), but so far it’s not quire proving itself as quick and helpful a feature as I’d hoped…