‘The Lake’ Fixed

Apr 16
2007

There has been a long-standing bug in my game The Lake that allowed people to get scores in the millions. I was pretty sure that it was a problem with the game itself and not just people hacking my high-score system. One reason is that this is the only game that was getting bogus scores. Also the scores were never round numbers (like 1,000,000) which is what I would suspect if people were simply sending bogus scores to my database.

I finally found out that it was possible to play the game using the spacebar instead of the mouse. This was an old control scheme that I had forgotten to remove when I changed it to mouse control. The problem was that the spacebar control code was incomplete, so it would not reset the fly count after each jump. So if on your first jump you caught 2 flies, you would get a 2-fly bonus. If you caught 3 flies on your next jump you would get a 5-fly bonus. This would accumulate until you were getting 100+ fly bonuses on every jump, and millions of points. With the score-based time bonuses you could essentially play the game forever.

It took me so long to find the bug because I was always playing the game using the mouse. I finally posted the game on the Flashkit boards asking people if they could break it. With their help I was able to figure it out.

So today I fixed the game. You can now play the game properly using either the mouse or the spacebar.

Play ‘The Lake’