Why the bug I wrote became a core gameplay mechanic?!
Chapter 386 - 395: Randomly Sticking Game Tags

Chapter 386: Chapter 395: Randomly Sticking Game Tags

Instructor Ding’s computer had automatically reverted back to the game’s details page by now. The original green "Start Game" button had turned gray and read "In Game", requiring a wait of about ten seconds before it would become clickable again.

These are standard indications of a game crash.

And the series of changes within the game that occurred just before the crash were naturally classified as bugs.

The screen mysteriously turned red? It seemed to be some kind of art resource texture error in the game, where the background texture of the setting sun or the red hue of the twilight had mistakenly covered the entire sky, creating this effect?

As for the garbled text and the sound bursting, those are very common bugs, although they obviously stem from different causes than the texture errors. But all of this seemed to suggest one thing: the new game from Nitiandang hadn’t gone through any stability testing, had it?

So many bugs all popping up together!

You know, when "Ascension" was first released, players also felt it was full of bugs, but there was a fundamental difference compared to now—at least "Ascension" mainly had texture and clipping errors, but the game never crashed.

Of course, it might only be these issues with the official release; after all, the demo seemed pretty stable, with no serious bugs occurring.

After waiting a few minutes for the backend programs to shut down, the Start Game button would become clickable once again.

Instructor Ding was somewhat speechless, right at the final push, and then suddenly deflated—that work?

But there wasn’t much he could do except wait, while his gaze naturally swept across the game details page again.

"Huh, this game doesn’t have official tags from Nitiandang?"

Every game has tags, which primarily let players quickly understand the game’s genre. Like "Action", "Adventure", "Role-playing", and so on.

There are two kinds of tags for a game. One is the official tag, which is applied by the game developers themselves. These tags are displayed at the front by default, and their background and font colors are slightly different to emphasize them.

The other is the player tag. All players are free to tag games and can also vote for the tags applied by other players. Only those tags with a higher number of upvotes are displayed at the front by default.

And it seems "Heartbeat Dream" has no official tags, only player-applied ones.

When Instructor Ding took a look at the player tags, he couldn’t help but chuckle resignedly.

"What is all this? Sure enough, players who are here for fun are numerous, why are they tagging randomly?"

The tags Instructor Ding saw were: Visual Novel, Romance Simulation, Cute, Dark, Rich Story, Single Player, Sci-Fi, Love, Horror, Action Adventure, Psychological Thriller...

The first few tags seemed quite normal, but why were there tags like Horror, Psychological Thriller, and Action Adventure?

It must be the work of some little pranksters, again.

It’s just a gamer’s kind of humor, like in certain action-adventure games with dark settings, full of dangers, zombies, and wild beasts, where because there are one or two relatively gentle and beautiful female NPCs, even if they only have standard dialogues, they would mercilessly get tagged as "Romance Simulation".

As for this situation, Reversed Celestial Firmament, right?

What was originally a proper romance simulation game now started getting tagged with all sorts of bizarre, unrelated tags.

This "Sci-Fi Game" is tolerable since the plot of the girls chasing the player is indeed quite sci-fi; this "Action Game" is also barely acceptable since you can’t guarantee that the player really does have some action to perform.

But this Horror Game is too much, isn’t it? The female NPCs in the game can’t all be expected to throw punches, right?

If it were in real life, it might barely relate to a horror game, but in the game, Instructor Ding was willing to believe that Nitiandang hasn’t gone that crazy yet.

After all, illogical things are bound to happen in reality, but Nitiandang has much more to consider when making games.

Reopening the game, Instructor Ding directly clicked on "Continue Game" and found his previous auto-save.

Up until now, the auto-save feature in single-player games had been perfected quite well. There would be autosaves at key moments, and the game would also autosave every few minutes.

Indeed, the latest save was when Instructor Ding went to the beach for the confession. Loading this save file would allow a direct view of the confession, without losing too much time.

Instructor Ding decisively clicked on it.

However, the next second, a prompt appeared on the screen.

"File Error: ’characters/Alvet.chr’, file may be missing or corrupted."

Instructor Ding was shocked: "Hey, what the hell! Why is the file corrupted! Don’t tell me after all this hard work, the save is busted!

"Let’s see if the earlier saves still work..."

In single-player games, a "corrupted save" means a save file has encountered a serious problem and become corrupted. Although the chances of this happening are not high, they’re certainly not zero. Considering the game previously encountered a major bug and error message, it made sense that a corrupted save could have happened. But for Instructor Ding, it was quite annoying.

He picked an earlier save to load, just before Yarvette notified him to go to the beach to confess.

This time, the game loaded normally, and Instructor Ding couldn’t help but breathe a sigh of relief!

Blue sky, white clouds, the beach, beautiful girls.

Well, everything seemed normal at last!

Although compared to the last save, a few extra minutes were lost, Instructor Ding found it acceptable and quickly clicked through the scenes, trying to shorten the time of the cutscenes as much as possible.

For plot that players have already seen, the game allows them to fast-forward, which is quite considerate.

Soon, Instructor Ding found himself on the beach again.

Just like last time, Yarvette was in a swimsuit, her alabaster face seemed to blush with the sunset light, and the wine-red strands of her long hair seemed to blend with the sunset, waving in the wind, oozing charm.

Her gentle voice began to speak. She started delivering her lines!

At this moment, Yarvette was facing the sea with her back towards Instructor Ding. The only thing on her snowy-white back was a narrow swimsuit strap, and the setting sun shone on her back, clearly revealing her rounded figure and the seductive dip of her waist.

It was just as breathtaking as before.

Instructor Ding knew that after the first part of the confession dialogue ended, Yarvette would turn around and walk towards him to continue her confession.

So, he eagerly anticipated it, while praying that the bizarre bug wouldn’t appear again, and that the game wouldn’t crash anymore.

Finally, Yarvette turned around!

The sunset in the sky didn’t seem to have changed too much, there were no new texture failures, and the text hadn’t turned into gibberish...

However, Instructor Ding still ended up shouting in surprise, almost jumping three feet high from his gaming chair.

Because when Yarvette turned around, the game unfortunately gave a close-up of her face.

Normally, a screen filled with her beautiful and enchanting face would appear, with shades of sunset making Instructor Ding think her beauty was a feast for the eyes.

But unexpectedly, the face of Yarvette who had turned around was faceless!

How to describe it?

Instructor Ding saw two round eyeballs, in perfect spherical shape, while the mouth area consisted of a red gum line and neatly aligned white teeth. The contours of various facial muscles were clearly visible, but on closer inspection, it appeared that certain key parts, such as the nose, were missing.

For some reason, the skin on Yarvette’s face had mysteriously disappeared, leaving only the inner skeletal structure, eyes, and mouth parts, like a face that had been flayed in a horror movie!

If the camera had been further away, there might have been some buffer space.

But the problem was, during this scene, the camera happened to give a close-up, and so this terrifying flayed face suddenly confronted Instructor Ding in his unguarded state, striking a heavy blow!

"Damn it!"

Instructor Ding instantly activated some kind of muscle memory, and with his left hand he naturally pressed alt+F4.

Returning to the desktop, Instructor Ding was still a bit shaken and took a moment to calm down.

"Damn, it scared the crap out of me."

Instructor Ding mocked himself a bit, feeling that he might have overreacted slightly.

This muscle memory was developed while playing FPS and horror games.

When he played FPS games in the past, he often encountered situations where he had to quit the game instantly; some using the console, some where he’d leave a battle royale game immediately. Setting aside whether his gameplay was good or not, when it came to quitting a game speedily, Instructor Ding was among the top-ranked FPS streamers.

Later, often encouraged by his viewers, Instructor Ding would also play horror games, continuing this habit.

Other streamers, when scared, would instinctively jump up, or kick out, sending their gaming chairs flying back to create distance from the screen.

But Instructor Ding would directly press alt+F4, addressing the problem at its root.

For this reason, he had even set his desktop wallpaper to a calm and peaceful pastoral scene, so he could soothe himself as quickly as possible after quitting a game.

But he never thought this muscle memory would be triggered by a bug in a romance game.

"Guys, did you see what just happened?

"Looks like a model bug?

"Come on, can Nitiandang still hold up or not? Why are there so many damn bugs? Don’t tell me all the bugs that didn’t show up in the previous games are all appearing in this one!

"It’s over, I was just saying this game was safe and definitely not going to crash, now it seems, I was too hasty..."

Instructor Ding took a moment to calm down, and in the end, he booted up the game again.

Is this bug common?

Not common, but it had indeed appeared before.

In some games known for their plethora of bugs, there have been similar issues where characters’ facial textures disappeared, leaving only eyeballs, teeth, and muscle patterns, turning a perfectly good assassin game into a horror game, and it became the subject of jokes.

But the impact wasn’t so big in those games.

Because in other games that weren’t paired as well, encountering this bug in a casual conversation scene would only seem humorous.

However, "Heartbeat Dream" was a bit outrageous, precisely during the female character’s turn of her head and with a close-up of her face, the effect was no different from a jumpscare in a horror game.

Instructor Ding was speechless. If it were any other game, after two bugs like these he would have been deflated on the spot, refusing to play any longer.

But this was a game by Nitiandang after all, and besides, he hadn’t finished hearing Yarvette’s confession!

Even if he was considering abandoning the game, he had to at least wait to hear Yarvette’s confession, right?

Although he was indeed scared, bugs like this shouldn’t occur every single time.

With that bit of hope, Instructor Ding loaded the save again.

As expected, it was the same as before; the save prompt before the beach confession indicated the file was corrupted and unreadable, so he could only load the previous save. Fortunately, although it was a bit time-consuming, the game was able to continue.

"Please, please, let there be no more inexplicable bugs..."