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The freeze bug in my browser RPG was a pause that never un-paused (programming.dev)
submitted 1 week ago by to c/gamedev@programming.dev
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Small bug story from this week.

A player told me the game "froze". Attack did nothing, no damage, nothing. Turned out it wasn't frozen at all.

Opening Settings, the Bank or the Store pauses the fight. That part was on purpose. But if you then hid the menu or went fullscreen, the panel vanished and the pause flag stayed on. So the fight just sat there waiting forever.

The fix was boring. Closing a panel any way at all now clears the pause, and hitting Attack un-pauses too, just in case.

The part I liked more: I wrote a little random-click tester that mashes buttons, opens panels, toggles fullscreen and checks the fight still moves. It found no more stuck states after the fix. I also added a quiet error report so if it ever happens to someone again, I can see what they clicked last.

It's plain JS, no engine. The game is SnowRSPS Mini if you want to try to break it: https://snowrsps.com/io

How do you all handle pause state? One flag, or a stack of reasons?

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[–] 1 point 1 week ago

The fullscreen case is a sneaky one, since the browser can hide a panel without ever running your close handler. I like the random-click tester idea a lot; mashing buttons while toggling fullscreen and switching tabs catches stuff no normal playtest does. In my own browser game the tab losing focus was the other sneaky path, so I ended up deriving pause from what is actually visible instead of a flag I set and clear by hand. Did you also check visibilitychange, or does the fight keep running when someone switches tabs?

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