THE WORD THAT BROKE THE GAME
The tester types into the terminal:
"Raise VAT by 3% on non-essential goods"
The game shows:
"Raise VAT by 3% on non-essential gAdriatic Energyods"
WHAT WAS HAPPENING
The companies in EQUILIBRIUM are fictional, inspired by real ones. There's a function that, if it finds the name of a real company in a piece of text, swaps it for the matching in-game company.
The problem wasn't what it was looking for. It was how: letter sequences, not whole words.
One of the sequences on the list was three letters long. Three. And those three letters sit inside a pile of perfectly ordinary words. Including "goods".
Also "parents". Also "denigrate".
WHY IT WAS A REAL PROBLEM
If the text had only broken on screen it would have been ugly and nothing more.
But it didn't stop there. It reached the engine that interprets commands, and that engine got handed a sentence with a company name jammed into the middle of a split word. It no longer understood what it was being asked.
"Tax on luxury goods". A command anyone would type in an economic simulator. Broken.
THE OBVIOUS FIX WASN'T ENOUGH
The first thing that comes to mind is matching whole words instead of sequences. That fixes "goods". It fixes "parents", it fixes "denigrate".
It doesn't fix everything.
Two entries on the list were already common words in their own right, in Italian and in Spanish. Matching them as whole words does nothing: they are whole words. A command about a government's aim, or about the value of a choice, got rewritten anyway.
Those two I removed.
And there was a second flaw, better hidden. The substitutions ran one after another over the same text, so a name that had just been inserted could be caught by the next substitution and swapped again. You ended up with sentences containing doubled fragments.
THEN I ASKED THE RIGHT QUESTION
At some point I stopped asking how to substitute better. And started asking why I was substituting the player's text at all.
The engine that interprets commands never receives the real names. They aren't in the context I pass it. They simply aren't there.
So masking them on the way in protected nothing. All it did was break the sentences players were writing.
I took it out of that path. The substitution stays where it makes sense, matches whole words, and no longer contains the ambiguous entries. Seventeen tests, all passing.
TWO THINGS BEFORE I CLOSE
This bug was found by a tester, not by me. That's what having someone else play your game is for: the person who wrote it types commands they already know will work. A tester types whatever comes to mind, and in an economic simulator "non-essential goods" comes to mind straight away.
The other thing: the first solution you reach for covers the case in front of you, not the ones you haven't seen yet. Matching whole words looked like the answer. It would have been half an answer dressed up as a complete one. Before repairing a piece of code it's worth stopping to ask why it exists. Sometimes you find out it shouldn't have.
EQUILIBRIUM launches in Early Access on September 10, 2026. If the project interests you, adding it to your wishlist is the most concrete way to help: it lets me show it to more people.
The next devlog arrives next week.
— Andrea, Obliquon Corporation