Gameplay Journal Entry #6: Glitches Again
Apart from glitches in video games, like I talked about last week, glitches can also occur outside the game, especially while developing them. These types of glitches often appear in the form of files being corrupted. They can be quite frustrating for the user when they occur, as they often mean if you haven’t created a backup or saved often, you may have lost some or sometimes a lot of work depending on what gets corrupted. This is why backups and file management systems such as GitHub are so important to developers and artists. Without backups, you can lose essential such as models, scripts, textures, and much more when these glitches occur. They most often occur during pushes to GitHub, during the saving process, or if a program crashes while you are using it. Sometimes glitches are caused by human error but most often they are “…an affective event generated by a media machine.”(
In my Workshop II class, we recently had a glitch like this that caused a file corruption. After working for a few hours on the pause menus for our game, I pushed my changes to our GitHub repository but inadvertently merged my branch with the main branch which cause one of the files both I and another member of my team were working on to create a merge conflict. This conflict caused the entire file to corrupt and essentially erased our pause menu from the game. The next day when we went to get to work, we noticed the pause menu wasn’t functioning and upon investigation realized that in the push the file size had gone from 294kb to just 1kb which was a very obvious clue that a corruption glitch had occurred. Luckily since we were using GitHub, we were able to revert the commit that caused the corruption and got our file back only losing a few hours of work instead of weeks of work.
Cloninger, Curt. “GLI.TC/HREADER[ROR].” The Machine in the Ghost / Static Trapped in Mouths, p. 23.