The
Coffee Quest 3
Problem

An Article that examines a rather interesting bug that was discovered when the updated version of Coffee Quest 3 was released.

The Discovery

On May 25, 2003 the first episode of an enhanced Coffee Quest 3 was released. Well, to be technically accurate, the game was released on the afternoon of May 24th, but officially new games are released on my Blazing Games web site every sunday. The Coffee Quest games were originally released in 1998, but I have spend time increasing the size of the game window and adding other enhancements to the games. Coffee Quest, for those of you who are not familiar with the series, is a role-playing series. The first game was essentially a maze game. The second instatement added stationary monsters. The third game put those monsters in motion while adding an inventory system and player statistics that improve as the player gains levels.

Now, updating my site generally takes a couple of hours - not counting the large number of hours that goes into creating the content that is being posted. This time is spent putting together the pages that make up the weeks new content and making changes to the index pages that are affected. I then post my updated pages and game related files to the site. Finally I go over the pages to make sure that everything is working. This is when I noticed a problem with Coffee Quest 3.

Don't get me wrong. The game loaded and played just fine. The problem was with how long the game took to load! Now, because a third party hosts my site, it is always possible that net lag is the problem. To be sure, I brought up my firewall software. It shows you how much you are uploading and downloading. The download bar was very active. As my internet browser was the only thing accessing the internet, I knew it was my game.

To be sure what was happening was actually happening, I reloaded the game page. Indeed, the game downloaded five megabytes of information before the game ran. This was bad. Very bad!