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Game Development · Custom Engines & Others

Game Development · Custom Engines & Others. Browse Why Is My Retro Port Spending Its Frame Redrawing Pixels That Did Not Change?, Why Does Pressing Reset During a Dialog Softlock My Game?, Why Does My Game Run Fine in the Editor but Break in the Packaged Build?, with requirements, routes and walkthrough steps.

Game DevelopmentCustom Engines & Others

Why Is My Retro Port Spending Its Frame Redrawing Pixels That Did Not Change?

haroldo-ok's Wolfenstein 3D Mega Drive fan port v0.0.3 (itch.io devlog, October 28, 2026) gained about 27 to 29 percent in emulated Genesis Plus GX benchmarks: 8.17 to 10.51 FPS (Start Room), 6.86 to 8.71 FPS (Tour), 8.01 to 10.17 FPS (spinning). Gains came from skipping unchanged background rows, batching video transfers, cheaper ray math, skipping empty sprite columns, and removing controller reads. Still slow in absolute terms; emulated only, not real hardware.

By Vaagame Editorial Team5 min readPublished
Game DevelopmentCustom Engines & Others

Why Does Pressing Reset During a Dialog Softlock My Game?

In That's BU//S#!T, resetting during a dialog with QuickReset could softlock the game; the author reproduced it consistently in 1.1 by dying, accepting death, and dying again with minimal clicks, and reports that redoing the respawn flow so Quick Respawn shares the regular path should, in the author's words, (I think?) eliminate dialog softlocks. A spike pit in level 1 could also strand a player who deleted all spikes, fixed with a small ledge. No engine, code, or invented root cause is claimed.

By Vaagame Editorial Team5 min readPublished
Game DevelopmentCustom Engines & Others

Why Does My Game Run Fine in the Editor but Break in the Packaged Build?

Beyond Devlog #17: Dagger Industries found their game slow and broken in the packaged build, fine in the editor. Profiling showed parked cars checking contact every frame (6.5 ms for 60 cars) and systems searching every object. Packaging left out by-name files, editor-only preview materials broke placement, and a motel town of 490 objects never appeared. Fixes cut per-frame logic from 22.1 ms to 9.1 ms, but graphics work and picking dropped items back up are unfinished.

By Vaagame Editorial Team5 min readPublished
Game DevelopmentCustom Engines & Others

Average FPS Looks Fine, but the Game Still Hitches. Why?

Red Shelter players reported freezes on the loading screen and slowdowns in runs. Devlog #2 (update 0.9.34) traces the slowdowns to the sun's shadow drawing the whole street twice per frame, now a single shorter cascade, and on the developer's own test PC average frame time fell from about 21 ms to 13.5 ms while stutter frames over 25 ms fell from up to 19% to under 2%. Loading now waits for graphics preparation, and animations compressed to about 3x smaller files stop mid-run rescue hiccups.

By Vaagame Editorial Team5 min readPublished
Game DevelopmentCustom Engines & Others

Why Do My Web Players Lose Progress When I Push an Update?

In Second Tail's first demo week, saves disappeared after every update pushed to itch, and the developer's one-word outcome was Fixed. The devlog states no save mechanism, so this case does not invent one: it separates the save loss from the separate web fixes, a near-200 MB build that now loads chapters as you play, and saving that no longer freezes, and draws the reusable lesson from a tiny audience of about 140 page opens, almost 40 starts, and five comments.

By Vaagame Editorial Team5 min readPublished
Game DevelopmentCustom Engines & Others

Why Does My Game Speed Up Every Time I Restart It?

In Velocity Puck, restarting created a new setInterval(animate, 1000/60) loop while the old interval was not always cleared, so after a few restarts 3, 5, or even 10 loops could run at once and the game sped up. The fix stops any existing loop and nulls its handle before every start, disposes scene geometry, materials, textures, and renderer on restart, and removes the if (!gameStarted) return; guard that stopped logic but not the interval. No frame-rate number is claimed; the devlog gives none.

By Vaagame Editorial Team5 min readPublished
Game DevelopmentCustom Engines & Others

You Lost the Whole Project. Can an Emailed Build Save It?

Solo developer William S. Coolman lost the whole Shoot the Skeletons project when his partition tables corrupted, then recovered it by reverse engineering a build he had emailed himself. Per his own video description, an open source program rebuilt the project and recovered 343 files, verified, with no errors. The program is unnamed and the steps undisclosed, so this case is labelled as a recovery story, not a backup tutorial.

By Vaagame Editorial Team5 min readPublished
Game DevelopmentCustom Engines & Others

Why Does Your Game Feel Laggy When Its FPS Looks Fine?

HORDEFALL felt laggy, especially in menus, while average FPS looked fine. Per-frame logging exposed one-off freezes of 0.3 to 4 seconds from first-use shader compilation on Windows, and the developer's four fixes, pre-warming effects behind the loading screen, compiling bosses during the WARNING screen, freezing quality changes out of combat, and moving menu canvases to the CPU, cut reported freeze time from 55 seconds to 3 seconds in a 400-zombie test.

By Vaagame Editorial Team5 min readPublished
Game DevelopmentCustom Engines & Others

Why Did One Hard Drive Kill the Art but Not the Code?

Hypercane Studios lost data twice while making Rage Runner: Jacob's 3D Max crash wiped every model and texture, and only a trickle came back through undelete, forcing a third rebuild under 5,000 polys for the ship. Shortly after, Zach's RAID array failed, but redundant Git copies brought his code back without a line lost. This case turns that contrast into a backup test for your own project.

By Vaagame Editorial Team5 min readPublished
Game DevelopmentCustom Engines & Others

Why Did My Balatro Save Load With the Wrong Stats After Corruption?

An independent tester flipped every bit of his own three Balatro save files (version 1.0.1o-FULL). Because each .jkr file is a Lua table loaded with loadstring and raw DEFLATE carries no checksum, 12,694 of 61,672 corrupted files (20.6%) loaded with no error and different data. This article reports that third-party test only, not an official LocalThunk finding, and turns it into save practices for the reader's own project.

By Vaagame Editorial Team5 min readPublished
Game DevelopmentCustom Engines & Others

How Did No Man's Sky Recover After a Launch Players Called a Broken Promise?

Hello Games launched No Man's Sky in August 2016 without the multiplayer and base building many players expected, and trust collapsed. Free updates rebuilt it in stages: Foundation in November 2016, Pathfinder and Atlas Rises in 2017, NEXT in July 2018, Beyond in August 2019, and Frontiers in September 2021. Steam reviews moved from Overwhelmingly Negative to Mixed, then Mostly Positive in September 2021, then Very Positive in November 2024.

By Vaagame Editorial Team6 min readPublished