Stay Frosty

So work continues, as I find that it does. Somehow, I was expecting the Team to, well, dissolve honestly. Some hidden thing kept thinking, "We missed our deadline, we're boned. We've lost all credibility..." and so on in some kind of self perpetuating doubt spiral.
Instead the replies that I got back regarding the news were universally, "Hmm, that's okay. That means we can do this and this and this like we would if we had more time." That's not just cool, that's downright frosty. So, I busted ass and got to work. There's still programming to be done and levels to be carved from the raw binary. I needs me a place to put all the incoming awesomeness.

- I'm onto a bug I think. It's core is in the engine itself and how I call it up and some of the latent buggies are showing their hideous little heads via the front end menu. The Tutorial bug is one of them, and I discovered that this bug is far larger than that. It's one of those systemic bugs that I have condensed Campbell's Hate for.
So, the Tutorial was having a bug where after you did it, and did it again (unlikely but not impossible) the game would load and drop you into a hole and continue to do so until the game got tired of abusing you. So, I hunted down the screen it was loading back into, and I set up a portal rectangle to reset the player if the player was outside where death could happen.
This did in fact correct the bug. No problem there. But, the game ran slower the second time and the third and the fourth was unplayable. I think, that a new game loop just got started each time. That or concurrent versions of the same functions.
It's like I'm running the FrontMenu() Function, which opened the Game(), which opened Scripting, which opened the FrontMenu(). It's not cyclical, it's a rabbit hole and it'll go as far as it wants to. Oh, and they share variables, so leftovers from the last whatever are still floating around and causing bugs that aren't actually in the software.
I think I can fix it though. I just need to actually put the whole Game Loop into a function of its own and give it the option to tag out. In other words, have a single loop that runs the software as a whole, and a different nested loop that runs the game engine proper. Then if I want out of the engine, I change a variable and it should just go back to the Front Menu. And it should keep single instances of each. Or it'll crash the thing.

- On other stuff, I got my PageFlip to work and it's sweet. I build several images on the fly using Image Buffers, and one of them is dynamic for size. As it travels across the screen it's width increases proportionally to its position and it looks like a page is turning and the art for the next page and current page are all showed in real time. It's some pretty fancy graphical work if I do say so myself.

- Finally, I'm keeping the Last Stage cut. I did like the idea, and wrote about it extensively, but words are cheap (I mean, look at all these words, and for only $1.89 worth of Google revenue - what a bargain!). Instead, I'm make a couple script changes and just reference the area as being wicked hard, then skip it entirely via plot resolution and permutation. The trick is going to be making it look like it's on purpose (which is is now), and not just a cut (which it was).