User blog:RottenBlock/Games with Debug Features

This is just a quick blog post to remind myself and to inform others about games with Debug features that someone (probably me) should put on the wiki someday, but aren't already.

Finding cut content is hard and exhaustive, but doing a search for the word "Debug" in the game's source is easy paydirt.

Rance II
While the game hasn't been translated yet, it has at least four hidden menus that read "デバッグ " (Debug).

Rance IV
Has a dummied Key Item that claims to let you see over walls. But you can already see over walls? I have a feeling this one might just be a dev gag.

Rance 5D
Considerable debugging options, possibly player-accessible? Unfortunately, Rance 5D's code is just as goofy as the game itself. There are stars jazzing up the variable names. This might take a while to uncover.

Toushin Toshi 2
Also very extensive, including expanded developer commentary delivered by a "spy." There's even a faux Debug Menu where all the options are "Don't activate." I have a sneaking suspicion that some of these were supposed to be player-accessible but they cut the feature at some stage (it's definitely inaccessible, I was able to confirm that much). There are also additional combat options, including a Debug Sword and a Mercy Attack 3. This one will be fun to data-mine.

Kaeru nyo Panyon
Dummied text mentions a debug mode, but I'll have to dig further to actually find anything.

Alice Nyo
It has a debug mode, though with everything still in Japanese I have no idea what it does. Expect a closer look at this once I'm done with Mamanyonyo.

System 4 Games
Very early in the lifecycle of System 4, Alicesoft developed a lot of standardized debug tools that do boring things like show on-screen timers and frame counters, communicate with DLLs, that sort of thing. Since these tools are all named "Debug" in some form or another, they make it harder to find any "fun" debug stuff via a random text search. Furthermore, I suspect they discourage Alicesoft's coders from even making unique debugging stuff, so it may be that System 4 largely marks the end of "fun" debug stuff.

We've basically got four sets of debug tools. The most common are the ones used by the Asra Framework (a codeset used by most Alicesoft games after a certain date), and its successor, the Asra3 Framework (Alicesoft's 3D engine). Before Asra showed up, there were two sets of debug tools in use at the same time, depending on which programmer was doing the debugging. Shade had his own self-titled debug tools (BBA, Sengoku Rance), while the other set strongly resembles the Asra tools, so I'm going to call it "Pre-Asra" (Rance VI, Slash Thrust Burn).

I could and should probably work out how each of these debug tools work, but they're going to be pretty boring programmer things, not fun stuff like "Debug Sword." If there are "fun" debug options hidden in the Sys4 games (like in Mamanyonyo), they'll take a much more thorough investigation to uncover.

No Obvious Debug Features

 * Rance 3
 * DALK
 * Kikichuou Rance, a game so big that the lack of debug features is simply shocking. May want to go over this in more detail looking for less obviously labelled debug features, but it's huge, so it's hard to say if I'd find anything.
 * Persiom: Refuses to decompile, possibly another future project in the making.