Ethan

This morning, when I was testing Carl's new death animation for a certain enemy, I thought, "It's too much work to set up a level to test this easily; I'll just play through the level where the enemy appears, and kill him the normal way." But then for some reason I didn't. I wrote a level called test-bossdeath and it took me about two and a half minutes. And then I used it four or five times to test the animation. And I'll end up using it more, now that Carl asked me to implement sprite deformation. Each test would have taken a four or five minutes or longer to do the quick and dirty way, versus ten or twenty seconds with the custom level. It was tempting, but it was a false economy.

It's easy to think "I'll do things the quick and dirty way right now; I just don't have the time to do it the right way." And it's easy to say "I'll do things the right way here; it'll save time in the long run." And I guess it's easy to get wrong either way. Still, I'd like to document that at least sometimes I make the right decision.

FYI, Project Alexandria doesn't have a "test suite" as such; it's very difficult to write a test suite for an interactive program. But we do play through levels every now and again to see if they still work (sometimes they actually do).

Ethan