Dealing with un-squashable bugs

As most who have the grit to make it to The Deep should discover sooner or later, bouncy platforms aren't ALWAYS bouncy... If you dash at the perfect time, you'll find your ninja walking within that jelly layer that usually is so confounding!

This should be a simple fix, right? Well, actually, no... The way triggers work in GB studio, code is only executed On Enter or On Exit, not while within the trigger zone, and somehow the player is bypassing the On Enter trigger with that one or two frames of dash. I can't fix whatever is going wrong in the engine, so, why not use actors? Well, actors cause slowdown when there are too many on screen (even if transparent), and I'd have to use multiples to cover the varying surface sizes. Arcade mode loses a frame or two here and there from the 2 onigiri at a time plus a flarping ninja on screen, and you can see what it was like before the cloud effect was removed from every jump in older versions within the archive. It was BAD, so many frames were lost that inputs were also lost, and death was completely unfair at times as a result.

Alright, actors seem like a poor solution. The game runs smooth and it's supposed to, I'd hate to lose frames. But also... Transparent actors are already in use for a lot of the spikes (as seen in the cover image).  This is for the same reason a second trigger can't just be stacked on top of the first one that is being magically bypassed by our dash, we are ON the trigger limit for each level, and approaching the actor limit on some. Even if we were using 0 actors somehow, there STILL wouldn't be space in a level to use them instead.

Pesky bounce triggers and some invisible actor spikes

So... Give up? Sacrifice the bouncy platforms?

In my testing, it's actually really hard to trigger this glitch on purpose. It's 1-2 frames tops, there are only really a few places where it's even feasible to attempt, or where one would even benefit from executing it. So, why not re-frame how we look at this bug?

It's very hard to achieve. It provides a small benefit on a handful of levels, or in a few certain circumstances, to high skill players. Isn't that what a speedrunning trick is??? Sometimes, instead of banging your head against something, I think it's important to ask whether it CAN be a benefit to a player, and if so at what level of skill does it become useful? If it's high, maybe it can stay?

Now, I don't mean to say that every bug is a feature, but THIS bug is one I can live with. That's why you've got some collision beneath the trigger to fall back on! And boy, if you get good at doing it on purpose, you'll really begin to fly :P