Scene Transitions

Today wasn’t exactly a thrill ride, but I did wrestle with one of the more underappreciated beasts of game development: scene transitions. The challenge wasn’t just making them look smooth; it was ensuring that saved game profiles and database entries persist correctly between scenes without dragging the entire game’s dataset and graphical assets into memory all at once. Nobody wants their game to hog resources like a dragon guarding its hoard; efficiency is everything!

To tackle this, I leaned on static classes, but I might need to bring in Singletons if things start getting unwieldy. The real headache, though, was ensuring that no collections were being queried before they actually existed. Turns out, when the game boots up, players might take a scenic route. Hopping from the splash screen to the title screen, maybe checking out settings, loading a save, or even scrolling through the credits before diving in. That means any null reference lurking in the shadows can cause a crash before the real adventure even begins.

It’s the kind of problem that’s invisible when everything works, but painfully obvious when it doesn’t.