Ominous title for a funny situation:

Almost 5 years ago we released update 1.2 for Planet G, and it ended up breaking the game entirely. I must have made some fixes related to how save games worked, but didn't test the changes properly. I'm sure the changes worked great for me, because I already had a save game file locally on my development pc compatible with these changes, but for everyone else... not so much. Essentially, if you didn't have MY save game file that was stored on MY pc and nowhere else, there was no way you could get past the intro sequence of the game without encountering a terminal error and the game closing. Whoops, sorry about that.

I think I noticed there was some issue with the game now and then, but it never felt urgent enough to do something about it. There was even a time when I needed to get some video footage of Planet G, and had to resort to grabbing it from some Youtube video of an older version of the game because I couldn't capture it myself due to the bug. Still there wasn't really time or motivation to fix the issue.  Also Planet G unfortunately never did numbers that would have been appropriate for the great work Hannah and June put into the art and music.  

Since that time five years ago many things have changed. Planet-G (alongside a few other games of mine) got purged from the Google Play store for not no longer meeting their ever evolving technical requirements, despite still working great in 2022. I also finished my university studies and started working as a mobile game developer. At that job I started using Unity as a development environment on a daily basis, as well as utilizing it for the occasional private project here and there. But what it also meant that I was no longer using GameMaker Studio (which Planet G was developed with) regularly, and therefore started to forget all the GameMaker-specific knowledge I had accumulated over the years using nothing but GameMaker to develop anything. So chances for a fix to rectify the save game issue with Planet G were looking slim. 

Recently though I had a week or so off my day job. I had an urge to do a little bit of work on a game and by chance remembered the save game issue with Planet G. I originally anticipated I could pull the update off in 30 minutes or so, maybe an hour. But it turned out I had underestimated both the evil genius that was 2017's coding-in-GameMaker-Jonas (apparently I had discovered a loop hole in the Geneva Convention) as well as the mind melting hassle that is setting up the Android export + YYC in GameMaker Studio 1.4. It was really an eye opening deep dive back into the world of GameMaker programming. Back when I worked with GameMaker, I merrily defined global variables all around, combined different datatypes into single arrays, used magic numbers left and right, all that jazz that makes code absolutely incomprehensible for anyone ever. I ended up taking the entire day and a bit for the update, but did plenty of play testing and fixed a couple other bugs I came across. Some very rare and tolerable bugs are still in there, because fixing them would have involved working with layers upon layers of arcane code I can no longer understand in 2022, but all in all playing Planet G should be a very smooth experience now! Maybe it's even good?

Planet G will probably never be mentioned in the same breath as Tetris, Super Mario, or Hal's Hole in One Golf for the Nintendo Entertainment System, but I think it's very palatable, and -now- playable for the first time in almost 5 years :)

Downloads available for Windows and Android.