The glitches we’re chasing, and how we’re fixing them
Games look finished long before they are. Most of what makes a scene feel right is small, and it’s easy to see only when it’s wrong. These are real glitches from our own testing builds. Every screenshot below is a bug report from a test phone, and you can see the little “Bug” button in the corner that test builds carry. Many of these are still open, and we’d rather show you than pretend.
Standing on the sea
Swimming has been one of our trickiest animations. In John 21 Peter jumps into the water and swims to the shore, but in our test build he swam upright, like he was standing on top of the waves. A tester wrote “I’m walking on water”. Another report called swimming “glitch of the year.”
The rule we’re working to is about water depth. A person in the shallows should stand on the lake floor with the water up their legs, and swim only where it’s deep. Our world sweep has already caught one spot where Peter, wading ashore in a later chapter, hovers a few inches above the lakebed. We’re re-testing the swim from start to finish on a phone.
The camera went under the sea
Another tester ended up looking at the seabed from underneath, with the verse still on screen. The camera is supposed to stay above the water and follow the action, and this one slipped below the surface. Keeping it above the waterline is on our list. Far-away conversations, such as someone talking to the disciples out on the water, now cut to a closer shot instead of gliding across the sea.
Walking versus running
You walk by pushing the joystick, and when you push past the ring it turns gold and you run. Sounds easy, but the details add up. Footsteps while running come about twice as often as walking steps, and in an early mix they were as loud as the music, so we balanced walking, running and riding to sit within one decibel of each other. And when a verse starts while you’re still moving, you keep walking and the character turns to face the speaker only when you stop, so it never feels like the game grabs the controls.
Hills have physics, too
One of the first reports from a tester was “walking up hill is too slow.” He was climbing the Mount of Olives, and he was right. Our rule slows you down smoothly as the slope gets steeper: on a 30 percent grade you kept less than half your speed, and on a 50 percent grade only about a quarter. That’s realistic, but it isn’t fun on a phone. We’re easing the penalty so a hill slows you only a little, while very steep ground still turns into a scramble.
Slopes cause other trouble. People in a crowd who step aside to let you pass now keep their feet on the slope instead of floating or sinking, and the herd of pigs in the story of the man in the tombs now tilts to match the hillside. Not everything is fixed yet. When we sweep the world for floating, one person was hovering over a road, and a soldier sank into the floor near a city gate. Others showed up as floating or “flying” on the temple mount in testers’ reports. The sweep walks the whole map and reports every spot where someone’s feet and the ground disagree, so we can fix them one at a time.
Hand-overs and hand-offs
Passing something from one person to another is surprisingly hard. In the chapter where Simeon holds the baby, testers told us, “Simeon threw the baby back to the lady,” and “I threw the child.” The baby follows a curve from one set of arms to the other, and if the curve is off by a bit, it looks like a throw. We reworked how things are handed over in the town quests (jars, cups, coins), and Simeon’s scene is next to be re-checked, so it reads as gently as Luke 2:28 does.
Sitting at the well
In John 4, Jesus sits by Jacob’s well while a woman of Samaria comes to draw water. Testers noticed he was sitting at an odd angle, partly into the stones, and wrote “Jesus is sitting wrong and glitchy.” The well scene’s framing is being reworked and re-shot, so it follows the verse: tired from the journey, seated by the well.
People missing from the scene
Two more kinds of reports keep coming. First, crowds that vanish: “Crowds just disappear,” one said, from the chapter where Jesus sends the crowds away and goes up the mountain to pray. People may only leave on a cut or while out of view, so that gets checked on every chapter. Second, boats: in one report, a passenger was sticking out of the boat, and in another nobody was aboard. The boat models were rebuilt, and we’re re-checking every chapter that uses a boat, starting with Jesus coming to the disciples on the sea.
How we work through them
Each report goes on one list. We reproduce it, find the cause, fix it, and then play the same spot again on a real phone before we call it done. We also run automatic walk-throughs of every chapter, so a fix in one place doesn’t break another. The game is built in Godot, and we test it with Xcode on iPhone and iPad. Props like jars and boats come out of Blender, and the crowd bodies out of MakeHuman.
If you spot something in our screenshots, or in the game, we’d love to hear about it. Testers get a bug button in the corner of test builds. Our anticipated public release is December 2026. To get an email about game updates, the release and beta testing invites, join the list on the home page, or follow @hosannaroad on Instagram.