There was an ongoing issue in Assassin's Creed 2 that I couldn't solve with missing animations in combat. I could never figure out what led to the exact combination of circumstances which triggered the bug. It haunted me for well over a year but I could detect it in code, and... just make it work. Not properly, mind you. When I detected the error case, I just played another animation. I'm assuming there's a rare issue in the game where you'll see an animation that doesn't sync up, but no one ever complained, so I guess at the end of the day it was a valid fix. Sometimes making a bug disappear is the next best thing to actually fixing it.

I remember showing Hyper Light Drifter at a convention in 2013. I'd been having a dream time, getting to show our game off and watch people enjoy it. I also hadn't slept the night before so we could get the build ready. Late in the day, this cocky kid rolls up to the booth and says, "I'm gonna break your collision," and starts dashing into walls over and over. I told him he couldn't. He insisted he could. We argued back and forth for about 10 minutes. I argued. With a young child. But he didn't find a bug. Two years later, my fellow designer-coder Beau Blyth and I watched Awesome Games Done Quick together. We watched speedrunners abuse glitches in Ocarina of Time to jump through walls and skip entire levels. And for the first time I wondered: if someone *did* break our collision... would it be kinda cool?

Six months after that, we released Hyper Light Drifter and it took about two days for a speedrunner to figure out how to get through our impenetrable walls. He used a glitch we'd never tried, purposefully getting trapped in crystal and having it force him inside of a wall, at which point he could roam freely. We thought about fixing this. Alx Preston edited some of our level designs to keep crystals away from important walls as a start. But ultimately we chose not to completely fix it. OK, we weren't totally sure how, without a major overhaul. So instead of blocking players from this exploit, I decided to just let them do it... but kill them after a few seconds. It felt quick enough to keep speedrunners from doing anything *too* crazy, but slow enough so an unlucky casual player would have time to realise they were somewhere they shouldn't have been. Sometimes you just kill the player, and hope they forgive you. Please forgive me.