Thanks for the quick response. Sorry about being vague.

A big part of of the problem is that I don't don't know how to isolate my problem, I also didn't want to be accused of asking the community to build my thing with the very first post, so I erred on the side of vague.

My game has 2 buttons, one makes a new creature by randomly generating genes, the other makes a new creature by looking at 2 parent creatures, or at least that's the plan, right now button one works as intended and button two creates a child without it's instance variables and seems to alter the appearance of every creature already in existence.

Creatures are containers with 2 sprites, and their genes are stored as a sheet in an array, so whenever a new creature is added to the scene, the creatures array becomes a layer deeper and the correct frame and animation(as well as instance variables) are set according to the genes.

The two button's functions were identical until adding the solving the parental genetics, but it's the part that's the same, setting the frames and animations to correlate that seems to be breaking things.

I have 2 suspicions about what it may be:

in the splice function, the extra events to determine the genes are causing the system to forget which instance(new one, just been created) is picked, so it switches to all creatures when assigning animations and frames.

or

the data in the array is being changed instead of referenced.

I've tried watching the array in the debugger, but the comma'd list format is impenetrable to my feeble art brain. I'd need to copy it out and compare cell by cell to know if that second one is true. Seriously considering building an array visualizer right now.

I'm going to prettify it a bit to make it easier to read and undo junk I added to try and peer at it before posting images.

Hi,

I'm new to construct and programming as a whole, having been an exclusively art person previously.

To attempt to move away from game design informed primarily by basic behaviours, this week, I tried to make something small and slightly complex. I opted to make a small click and drag gene splicer.

it's not as complex as it sounds, I actually managed to get one step away from the core being functionally complete in less than 24hrs (I love how enabling construct 2 is!!!) but then one last step, one final function to create, and it's breaking all the things.( I suspect its a selecting instance vs selecting all of type issue)

I've now spent as long trying to figure out why as the rest of the development, and I just don't know what to look up in the manual, google and try.

Could someone help me or link me to content to help me get my head around processes of debugging, especially debugging in construct 2?

I don't want to necessarily post the project, other than maybe as a working example. I'd actually rather learn more about the process than just solve this individual case( teach a woman to fish and all that)