Debugging

Today split itself between cleanup and storytelling: one branch did a broad safe-strings pass to make old text-handling code less fragile, while another added site generation files and the beginnings of a public project diary. That felt fitting, because from day two onward this repo had become both a WizBall rescue mission and a hands-on lesson in managing coding agents, with Codex and Claude via GitHub Copilot doing most of the typing while I learned how to brief them, review them, and stop them from confidently wandering off into nonsense.

This was a day of small, oddly specific wins that make a game feel real again: better debug handling, path utilities, blend mode fixes, sprite drawing updates, F1 to F12 key mappings, waypoint table work, and even a nudge to the main menu logo script, which had apparently chosen drama. It was also exactly the kind of fiddly glue work that coding agents are great at, so Codex and Claude via GitHub Copilot handled most of the busy work while I did the supervision, because an AI will absolutely fix one thing and quietly invent two new problems nearby if you let it roam unsupervised.

Today added two extremely useful things to the revival effort: SDL2 audio support and better diagnostics, which is a polite way of saying the game got better at making noise and better at explaining itself before doing something strange. Codex and Claude via GitHub Copilot were doing most of the implementation by this point, especially the repetitive conversion work, while I learned the part that matters more in the long run: how to guide, review, and correct coding agents before they turn “helpful first pass” into “fresh exciting bug.”

This was the “can this ancient thing even run on modern Linux?” day, and the answer turned out to be “yes, but only after a lot of persuasion.” The first rescue pass got the recovered WizBall remake compiling, added sanitizer builds, cleaned out generated junk, hardened data and tilemap loading, added scripting diagnostics, updated the Linux audio side to newer FMOD APIs, and generally stopped the game from falling over at startup; a wonderfully specific frame-0 portal bug also died here, which is exactly the sort of sentence that makes old game code sound haunted.