We've continued to make excellent progress, slashing our way through the combat-related bugs and issues, since bringing our new programmer on board! We've completely eradicated the combat spell-specific bugs from our list now. To give you an idea about the magnitude of this accomplishment, there are 4 playable character classes in the game and each has 6 combat spells, which makes 24 combat spells in total. Each combat spell had approximately 20 bugs associated with it (initially). So, that's 480 issues, just for the combat spells! We fixed all of those, but new bugs kept creeping in with nearly every fix, due to the intertwined nature of the battle system. Whenever we fixed one bug, it would cause another (sometimes 2 or 3) to take its place. For a while there, it was a case of taking one step forward and two steps back, but we eventually got on top of the bugs, got them under control, and ultimately, checked everything off. I don't even want to hazard a guess at how many spell-related bugs we've addressed over the past couple of months, but it's easily over 1,000!
Seriously, our combat bugs list is so large, that we even have it sorted into sections where different types of combat bugs are categorized. For example, there's a spells section, and each spell has a sub-section, listing its bugs. There's a monster section, where each monster has its own sub-section. A boss section, a GUI section, a loot section, and a general issues section, and so on and so forth. Having resolved all of the entries in the spell-related section, we have most recently turned our attention to the monsters and boss battle sections. 85% of the monster-related issues have been resolved and approximately 80% of the boss battle bugs have been cleaned up. Things are definitely getting closer to completing the combat system now. Though new bugs still manage to creep in here and there, so we need to be vigilant...
