All testing here was done under "Game Jam Official" conditions:
- Stock Minetest 5.6.1 with minimal custom config (just keymaps)
- Piranesi release number
15441, the official "Jam Version" of the game
- There is a general pattern of accessing "player" in callbacks that are not player-specific, such as node on_construct, causing reference of a nil global player and a crash. To fix this, either a different callback needs to be used (e.g. give the player the item when they use the correct item and then change the node) or a player must be found (e.g. search all players, identify the nearest one at the time, and give the item to them). This happens:
- Pouring the black potion onto the black bowl to get the coin totem.
- Placing the 3rd crown to get the chess totem.
- Completing the candle-lighting puzzle to get the neck totem.
- Completing the clock puzzle to get the time totem.
- Falling through the ending portal to the ruined mansion ending after completing the altar puzzle.
- There were a number of key things I never found, which I assume were supposed to be part of the game, but I never actually saw. I can't be absolutely sure about some of them (they could be hiding in a schematic somewhere) but I've been over the game with a fine comb and it seems unlikely I missed anything.
- The entire clock puzzle room; I had to cheat the buttons.
- Any clue that I was supposed to set the 3 crowns on the throne at all.
- The inventory screen is blank (not disabled, and not filled with any other useful info) and players only have a hotbar, and this causes serious problems with items.
- The Minetest hotbar tries to "wrap" and is textured really awkwardly on screens too narrow for it, which is exacerbated by making it extremely wide.
- The actual player inventory was not shrunk to match the size of the hotbar, so there remain "hidden" inventory slots.
- If your hotbar is full and you pick up a new type of item, that item will be inaccessible forever, lost to inventory slots beyond your hotbar. Picking up more of the same will just add to that stack instead of creating a new one where you can access it.
- The plethora of apparent red herring items make inventory management more of a problem. Not enough slots are provided for all the collectibles.
- When the game runs out of rooms, instead of correctly refilling the room queue, it just crashes.
- rooms_to_visit is an alias of rooms_to_visit_constant, not actually a copy, so it's not actually constant. This needs to be fixed.
- The easiest way to make a constant here might be to just make rooms_to_visit_constant into a constructor function that returns the literal array.
- Instead of using rooms_to_visit_length, it should just use #rooms_to_visit, which will also prevent the bug where it's setting the incorrect length on resetting.
- This is actually another bug that's ironically hidden by the crash. By setting rooms_to_visit_length to 12 instead of 13, it would only be possible to visit the library once per play session.
- rooms_to_visit is an alias of rooms_to_visit_constant, not actually a copy, so it's not actually constant. This needs to be fixed.
- Game reinitializes mod_storage on every start, defeating the purpose of using mod storage.
- Lots of internal state is reset if the player leaves the game and restarts it, including things that should not be specific to a single session. This includes resetting if/when the game crashes.
- This also makes the crowns quest nearly impossible because you have to go through enough rooms to get all 3 crowns to trigger the "out of rooms_to_visit" crash, which causes the crown count to reset when restarting. Players would need to know to carry all 3 crowns and place them all together.
- A lot of rooms feature fire, and this fire will spread and consume things.
- In rooms with wooden or woolen floors, the fire can eat through the floor, opening a hole to the "void" where the player could simply fall forever, being forced to either cheat and fly/teleport back, or start a new world entirely.
- In rooms with flammable floors, fire can exist below the floor when it spreads. When players overwrite the room later, if the new room has a flammable floor, the fire can suddenly eat through the floor from below.
- Some rooms that feature floors that burn but seem like they were not supposed to:
- The fireplace with the "starting clue" next to it about the different movement patterns to reach key rooms.
- The throne room, which seems to feature lava over wool carpet.
- If fire spreading was meant to be disabled, this did not make it into the Jam Release of the game.
- Crash on right-clicking any chair causes a crash, apparently because of a missing "chairs" mod that must provide an API for sitting.
- Punching the gear mold removes the gears from the mold ... but apparently destroys them, because they are never given to the player. There doesn't seem to be any way to actually get the gears, despite having completed the puzzle.
- The black potion looks exactly like the purple potion, and without an inventory screen, there is no way to tell them apart.
- A lot of nodes that do not use drawtype="normal" need to use paramtype="light" but are not. With smooth lighting enabled this causes some shadows when they are placed near each other or in corners, but with smooth lighting turned off, they go completely black. These nodes need to use paramtype="light"
- The crowns.
- The clock buttons.
- Compass simply doesn't work; frozen pointing "up". Players end up needing to use F5 debug info to tell direction.
- Multiple players can join the game if started in host/server mode. Weird things happen.
- As one player moves around, they can overwrite terrain that another player is inside at the time, causing chaos.
- Multiple players should probably be disallowed for now (unless significant design changes are made to allow this to work). If a second player tries to join and there is already one player, kick/reject the second player.
- In the "ruined mansion" ending, there is one sapling in the northwest corner that never grew, allowing the player to "escape" the map and fall back into the mansion below.
- This game is packaged in a very weird way which seems to make releases error-prone, which likely caused a lot of the issues.
- It seems like it was intended to ship with customized versions of some of the 3rd-party mods, not matching the ones actually shipped.
- It seems like there were specific config options or defaults that were relied upon in testing, and supposed to be set but were not defaulted or forced in the ship version.
- Based on the package description, it sounds like the version shipped is not the version actually tested.
- If you drop an item on the ground in a room, before it times out, if you re-enter the room, the item will still be there, but in a different room now.
- Things that seemed a bit too hard to me, and maybe need more notes or hints (especially if the player has been stuck and not making progress for a long time)
- How to get to the candle room. Apparently the clue is in the gravesite, which I was able to follow, but it only shows the direction hints very briefly.
- The clue about the candle lighting order was a bit obscure.
- F5 debug info also totally breaks this (need to set hud_flags basic_debug = false)
- It was not immediately obvious to me that the forest machine was telling me a sequential recipe for a potion. "Where have I seen these colors before?" Pretty much everywhere.
- Any clue about the the and axe to get into the ice room to quench the molten gears in the molds. These were "out in the open" but very hard to spot, and there wasn't much to indicate to me that that particular mound of grass was something I'd want to dig up (if it were plain dirt instead, though, that might tell me something was freshly buried there)
- I never figured out what the star chart was supposed to be telling me.
- Items have names, but those names aren't displayed anywhere. This makes some of the "flavor text" like Vanilla Extract and Soy Sauce far less interesting, and also makes identifying the key items a lot hard (too hard? I can't tell for sure).