EchoQuest v0.19.2–0.19.3: The Bug Squash Sprint
Over the past two days we ran a focused QA sprint across the entire game, using automated Playwright tests alongside manual playthroughs. The result: two patches that fix over 40 bugs and make EchoQuest noticeably more stable and polished.
Dungeons Are Fully Playable
The biggest cluster of bugs lived in the dungeon system. Floors were rendering as gray voids because tileset assets weren’t being preloaded. Enemies were spawned server-side but invisible client-side. Levers, chests, and candelabras showed garbled sprites because the dungeon objects tileset was loaded as a spritesheet instead of an image with manual frame registration.
All of this is fixed. Shadowfang Crypt now loads all walls, floors, pillars, and decorations correctly. Enemies appear and fight back. Interactable objects display with their intended sprites. The floor header shows the actual floor number instead of “Floor undefined.” The dungeon-complete overlay no longer haunts you across screens.
Combat Goes Manual
Auto-attack has been removed. Previously, your character would swing at the nearest enemy automatically, which felt disconnected and made positioning meaningless. Now every attack is player-initiated — click on desktop, tap the attack button on mobile. This makes combat more tactical and puts you in control of every swing.
Shops, Hotbar & Respawn Fixed
Vendor NPCs like Greta and Marcus had a broken dialogue path that prevented their shops from opening. The “Browse wares” option now works as intended and opens the full buy/sell interface.
The hotbar was fragile in several ways: it lost all assignments when you used “I’m Stuck,” it became unclickable after respawning from death, and pressing number keys to switch slots spammed save requests to the server. All three issues are resolved. Hotbar state is now backed up to localStorage and restored on scene restart, the UI properly re-enables after respawn, and slot selection no longer triggers unnecessary saves.
Respawning itself was broken — HP wasn’t accounting for equipment bonuses, so characters with +HP gear would respawn at base health instead of their effective max. Fixed across all respawn paths (overworld, dungeon, and “I’m Stuck”).
Overworld & UI Cleanup
- Enemies in Whispering Woods and Thornwood Forest spawn correctly again
- The tavern south exit is walkable (was blocked by missing collision data)
- Duplicate dungeon entrances in Thornwood Forest removed (there were 9 overlapping portals)
- Chat UI restored and collapses to a compact button that doesn’t overlap the bottom bar
- Healing potions now have a USE button in inventory
- The Spells tab shows only item spells, not class abilities from other classes
- NPC name labels are less likely to stack on top of each other
- “Echo Quest” branding cleaned up to “EchoQuest” everywhere
Server Stability
Extended play sessions were causing the server to run out of memory. We identified and capped eight separate leak vectors: pathfinding caches, combat instance tracking, WebSocket event listeners, enemy double-death processing, cooldown maps, dungeon floor data, database connection pools, and corpse recovery timers. Rate limiting was also improved — failed requests no longer count toward the limit, and tracking is per-user instead of global.
Connection Recovery
Switching back to an idle browser tab used to show a stale “Connection Error” overlay. The game now listens for tab visibility changes and automatically reconnects, so you can tab away and come back without reloading.
By the Numbers
- v0.19.2: 26 bugs fixed, server stability improvements
- v0.19.3: 15 bugs fixed, combat rework, branding cleanup
- Total: 41 bugs squashed across 2 patches
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