Marcel

Eventually we figured out that "undamageable" does not mean "invulnerable" -- they can't take damage from attacks but can still get hurt from other things One of those things: falling a great distance (9/18)

The problem with *that* is that there are no spots in the player's ship that are high enough to result in a lethal fall So now we had to figure out how companions were mysteriously ending up way above the level (10/18)

I looked into tons of theories, including "maybe their height data is preserved when fast travelling from other maps" and "maybe a physics interaction between two companions causes one to rapidly accelerate upwards" (11/18)

My personal fav was "what if a companion is standing *right* where a cow spawns in during a random event and they're launched into space" Was genuinely bummed when that theory didn't pan out (12/18)

By this time, the game had come out, and all hopes of this being a weird fluke only a couple devs would ever see were dashed, as players all over the place started reporting their companion quests failing (13/18)

Eventually, an offhand comment in one user's review mentioned seeing a weird bug where a companion was "climbing nothing", and this comment led me to figuring the whole thing out (14/18)

On the dev side of things, the system for NPCs interacting with the environment is called "furniture" Sometimes this is literal furniture, like sitting in a chair, but it covers everything from using a terminal to leaning on a wall (15/18)

Somewhere deep in the complex beast that is the furniture system, we had code that disabled all NPCs from starting new furniture interactions if the player was in a conversation (16/18)