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From the Archives: Debugging Eiyuu Senki for PS3
🕑 Added 2025-09-12 18:05:04 +0000 UTCWhen looking into old backup photos recently, I came across a large swath of photos from debugging Eiyuu Senki on the PlayStation 3 devkit in the distant, distant past. So we thought they might make for a fun archive post!
As for some background... why are they photos? Glad you asked!
In fact... we never got the debugging environment to work! The entire PS3 environment was quite terrible, to be frank. So while most of the gameplay testing was done on a PC-compiled version, all of the PS3 debugging was done by simply compiling a complete new build, copying it on the devkit via USB stick, and playing the game normally to test changes! So instead of screenshots, we have photos of the TV running the devkit.
As you can imagine by the number of screenshots, this was a pretty crazy way to debug the game (we also just had 1 dev kit for it). It still amazes me every time I think back to it how bug-free we managed to release the game. Like really, it's something of a miracle!
In the screenshots, you can see how it took us dozens of revisions just finetuning the font used in the game - trying to make it 1) display without visual errors, 2) Look pleasant, 3) wrap into the text box correctly... truth be told, I left out probably half of the photos from this process! And remember, for every change we had to do a full rebuild and physically move the copy to the console...
Without any debugger, all we had to find issues was regular legwork. In fact, there was one super scary bug we noticed during the PS3 testing, that didn't give any errors, and could've easily made it to the release version... making it unplayable: at one point late in the game, the game would simply freeze the entire console when scrolling through the list of items. Not good! With no error messages to guide us, figuring out the cause was just trial and error. We confirmed the issue didn't happen with the Japanese version, but there was no obvious cause.
In the end, the reason was narrowed down to lack of memory, and the only reason for it that we could find was that some of the English-edited graphics were larger in size than in the Japanese version! While that's not much for one graphic, there were a lot of edited graphics! So we had to lower their file size, which removed the crash. The memory limits of the system were very restrictive (it has 0.25GB of RAM and 0.25GB of VRAM, compared to the Switch that had 4GB already 10 years ago), and the game was right on the edge of them. It's very easy to see a timeline where this bug made it to release version, and at best made the game unplayable for a few weeks until a patch could be submitted and approved.
It was not a very user friendly console to work on, but we're very proud of carrying the project to the goal successfully!
You might think it's ancient history, but actually Eiyuu Senki can still be bought on PlayStation 3! Although the process is difficult. We're getting a few sales trickling in even now, so some people are doing it!
Hope you enjoyed the little story hour and footage!
-Jakke
Comments
Michelle Campbell
Looking at those screenshots, it must've been so tedious to constantly fine-tune it all to look right. Good thing you found that game-breaking problem before it was too late, I couldn't imagine how bad that could've gone if it would've taken weeks to be able to patch it! At least it all worked out in the end though.
