This week’s code work focused on a subtle but important problem: sometimes the game appeared to freeze immediately after launching.
At first, it looked like the splash screen animation was failing. The company logo would sometimes never appear, or the animation would seem to crawl forward extremely slowly. After digging deeper, we found that the splash screen itself was not the problem. The animation was playing, the game was not paused, and the scene transition system was still alive.
The real issue turned out to be frame pacing. On some launches, VSync was causing the game loop to slow down dramatically, almost as if the game were rendering only once per second. That made the splash screen look frozen even though the underlying systems were technically still running.
We added temporary debugging tools to track frame gaps, boot order, scene transitions, timers, physics updates, and startup configuration. That let us rule out several possible causes, including the splash animation, scene loading, game timers, duplicate boot scenes, and autoload initialization. Eventually, repeated tests showed that the freeze came back when VSync was enabled and disappeared when VSync was disabled.
The fix was to make frame pacing explicit in the game configuration. Last Dream II now defaults to VSync disabled with a 60 FPS cap. This avoids the launch freeze while still preventing the game from running uncapped and wasting GPU power.
This was not a flashy feature, but it was an important stability fix. Players should be able to start the game reliably every time, and launch bugs are especially important to eliminate because they affect the very first impression of the game.
We also cleaned up part of the scene transition system during the investigation, removing an unnecessary loading loop and making sure the temporary boot scene is cleaned up properly when the splash screen loads.
These kinds of debugging sessions can be slow and methodical, but they make the game stronger. A stable launch flow means players can get into the game smoothly instead of fighting technical issues before the adventure even begins.
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