Testing, testing, testing, testing,

When I released a new version of my game (shameless plug) a couple of days ago, I fell into the trap of insufficient testing. I had made some quite big changes and never tried actually playing one of the new levels. After I had uploaded it, and changed all the necessary pages with details of it - my entire release process, I tried playing it. Within 10 s of starting a new level, the game freezes. Shoddy testing.

It turned out that I was using way too much memory (to get good performance with that version you'd need to allocate the JVM something like half a gigabyte of RAM). This was due to some oversights in earlier code causing failures with the new maps (and caching way too many images). It took me a couple of days to fix - in which the game was effectively broken (though the older levels would still have worked fine). I just uploaded a newer version which I hope fixes the problem, and seems to, but I didn't test that release enough either.

I don't think I'll ever get to the point of thoroughly testing each release of this myself, as it's way too much effort, but this experience highlights the need to do at least some testing of how it would actually be used before releasing a new version.