shader animated sky dolphins
I was testing my multiplayer code late last night, alternating my attention between two Visual Studio windows, and my game instances.
It was by accident that I saw the erroneous black sun above my ship, hardly visible in my tiny game window.
Oh, great, another rendering bug. Depth clipping with the far plane?
I pressed F6 in my game to fast forward time, diagnosing my glitch. The huge black splotch began to spill away, revealing itself as the moon.
It wasn't a bug -- I had just witnessed a solar eclipse.
I didn't know my game had solar eclipses.
Sure, I knew there was a possibility it could happen, but I had gone months at this point without even believing it was possible.
If I wanted an eclipse, I assumed that I would need to add a dumb transform hack to make sure the moon and sun's paths aligned, which I would do for an update after the game had released (in hindsight, it's readily apparent how easy that would have been to implement).
Part of the beauty of making games are the systems we make for it, setting us apart from other mediums. The more these systems interact with each other and the player, the more unexpected things happen. It's what provides us with novel experiences and discovery, and it's also what makes it so hard to test our games in the first place.