Steel Penny Games

Yes, it's always a $25 cable that holds up a $20 million game. Okay, a little exaggeration in our particular case, but it's no joke that the tiniest thing can stop a freight train dead in its tracks. Today was a disaster of epic proportions, in that sense.

A dear friend, Brad Clark, dropped by to say hello and check out the game. In about every 30 runs, I'd seen a pretty serious graphical glitch maybe once, but it has been utterly unreproducible. The whole time Brad played, objects were dropping out of the draw list. Whoops! And naturally, as soon as he left, I was unable to reproduce it. Damn Murphy and the chagrin he rode in on.

Add to that, the machine I used to have a firewire card in for video capture has long since been put to pasture, so I brought in my laptop. Wrong connector on the cable. Two stores didn't have such a cable, so I'm running all over town looking for one.

But today wasn't a total loss. I wrote the online manual for the WiiWare servers and managed to find time to crunch down the texture sizes.

Current memory footprint: 39.0mb. Yep! Just under the wire. I won't crack out the champagne just yet, because there's a few small things that still need to be added to the package, and the size isn't definitive until the package checking tool tells me so. But I'm extremely optimistic.

ps. I just found out that we're over by exactly 1 block. Yeah, that just about bookends my day. :-)