flibitijibibo

Oh, boy, where to begin...

• The opening title image to one game was so distorted that it looked like the opening to Metroid. http://www.flibitijibibo.com/images/NotMetroid.png

Turns out that it was the only image in the whole game that was 24bpp rather than 32, so my assumption that all textures were RGBA caused that fun mess.

• In another game, water turned into magical multicolor kool aid based on what direction it was moving. (Red was down, green was left, something like that). The problem was that we were trying to use EXT_framebuffer_object when we should have been using ARB_framebuffer_object.

• In the same game, water colors/vertices weren't being properly read, so instead of looking like water drops, they were giant red triangles of death. Terrifying when it was raining.

• In Capsized, using the grappling hook used to latch onto the ends of shapes, rather than where you actually pointed. It sort of looked like it was deliberately targeting "blocks"... turns out MonoGame's Vector math was writing into the result before it was finished reading it (read: vecThing.x = vecThing.x + vecThing.y; vecThing.y = vecThing.x - vecThing.y;).

• In Proteus, stones were invisible. Turns out I needed to rename the file to fit with case-sensitive file systems and load the one material... but this one took a while to actually notice. I mean, how do you debug a game like Proteus? o_o

• For FEZ, when I was porting Renaud's MonoGame branch to my SDL2 backend, I was getting this:

http://www.flibitijibibo.com/images/fez-sdl2-ig2.png

Turns out I was a big dummy and forgot to add a depth-stencil texture to my faux-backbuffers, so that data was getting lost in the drawing process.

Bugs like this are pretty much what I live with every day. :)

but haven't completely finished any

Found your problem, bro.

Finishing games that you make is a great way to make games. Highly recommended.

For Proteus it was super easy, as the engine used Mono and SdlDotNet. I had it running on Linux in a couple hours, and all I really had to change was a few settings/file locations here and there.

Capsized was relatively straightforward, but it wasn't really "easy". On top of adding several new features to MonoGame, I had to create 4+ new libraries to fully support the game (one of which was the MonoGame-SDL2 branch). It took a few months to get there, but now that the tech is done I can make XNA ports super fast now, rather than making an ass of myself trying to get OpenTK/MonoMac to "work".

Overall, pretty much what Ryan said. Some can be simple, and some only look simple. And some you can just eyeball and go "ha ha haaaayeahthiswillcostyou~"

Certainly is for porting contractors!

Support can be pretty tough, but that's about it. Maybe deadlines can be tough sometimes?

For Linux, drivers aren't an issue. I think I have more trouble with Apple in that regard...