A little bit late on this post but that's mostly due to the fact that I was on Easter break the past weekend. However, I do have some exciting news to share: We finally fixed the gameplay loop! 

For a few weeks now, our build has been having issues with minigames working on a second playthrough. The player would select another mission to play and as soon as they would reach the packing minigame, a plethora of glitches and issues would arise. Firstly, the player wasn't able to drop any packages onto the grid, making the first game unplayable. Secondly, the timer for both the charting and asteroids game was frozen, meaning it wasn't running at all. Thirdly, once the player got to the asteroids game, the game would just freeze completely, since the entire asteroids game relies on the timer to work properly. This massive bug created a huge roadblock for us since we knew we had to fix it before moving on to adding any new features since being able to replay multiple missions was a key component for Space Mail. 

We realized this moments before our demo presentation and instantly went into emergency bug fix mode. While we did come up with a few possible solutions having to do with static variables, we were unable to test them properly since we had to present the demo to our stakeholders. So, it wasn't until last week that we had time to sit down and figure this issue out. The way we went about it is that one of our programmers, Chris, created multiple builds, each with a certain combination of minigames in order to determine where the root of the problem was coming from. We all knew it had to arise from one of our minigames, but none of us knew which one. Nevertheless, after hours of testing multiple builds, we discovered where all of this was stemming from and we honestly were all surprised at the result. We found out that it was the delivery minigame that was causing all of this trouble, since one of the lines in Chris's script didn't properly reset the timescale after his game finished. As a result, all of the other minigames never started or were broken, due to the timescale being off. The reason it was this way before was to make sure the game worked properly if no scenes came after it. However, now that we do have other scenes within the build, that line of code was no longer necessary and was now causing issues with all the other games. 

We promptly fixed this, and our build worked flawlessly on multiple playthroughs. This was a huge win for us, as now our core gameplay loop was successful and now the biggest hurdle was behind us. Now, our next big steps were to start incorporating other necessary additions to our game, that being minigame connectors and an upgrade system. With this success serving as a huge morale boost for my programmers and I, we all knew that we could handle what's to come and get everything accomplished to make Space Mail the best it can be.