An Update on the Beta Testing

Thankfully, the first week of beta testing for The Anarchic Kingdom didn't reveal any major work to do. A simple bug allowed me to enter negative numbers when spending, which then caused the game to crash. I don't know how I managed it, and didn't manage to reproduce it, but I fixed that problem by ensuring only unsigned (positive) numbers are stored behind the scenes.

Another bug, one shared with my other game Ossuary, allows people to break out of the game with Ctrl-C. Because the game is in graphics mode, breaking out like this leaves the screen in a mess, so it's best disabled. I've done that with a function call provided by the OpenWatcom compiler. However, that didn't seem to work when I tried it in Ossuary, so I'll have to see if I have better luck here. If not, I think that bug will have to stay.

Finally, I worked on the manual for the game. I had wanted to provide a 4-page PDF leaflet. Having written the manual and added the screen shots, it turned out to be a whopping 16 pages! However, both programs I tried to use to prepare the document (LibreOffice and LaTeX) had trouble with the formatting. So I decided instead to provide the manual as a plain text document, like Ossuary does, following the example of those 80s and 90s shareware DOS games that The Anarchic Kingdom most resembles.

New beta testers are still welcome! If you want to help out, send me a message or join my Discord server. While beta testing lasts, I use the Discord server to circulate the weekly beta test files, and the game's discussion channel serves for feedback and sharing experiences with other players.