[Phylum]

Well let me throw 2 things back at that -

One is that iteration is a powerful tool, and just fiddling with a bunch of values until it works can be a good way to get movement right. Rapid iteration can lead to oversights though.

That kind of leads into the idea that it probably wasn't all done at once. Things change. Someone who possibly wasn't the original author had to change something at some point because it wasn't working properly. They might have had to change it to work differently, but didn't have time to completely rewrite it. Even something simple like this is never as straightforward as "sit down, plan it, do it perfectly, move on".

Also people fucking make mistakes. That doesn't make it bad programming. If mistakes can slip through into the finished product then you can't just pin that on the programmer(s).

Anyway let me explain why your solution doesn't work. But first let me explain how the glider actually works because you don't seem to understand. I could say lots of passive aggressive things about you not understanding the game here, but I decided a self-aware one would be best.

So a fall flower's durability is determined by how many petals it has. This is shown on your backpack all the time, but also is a visual indicator when you hold the flower. The game properly remembers how many petals you have, so your idea about it just getting reset as a single integer is off the mark. It's more complicated than that, but you're close. As you glide, petals fall off the flower at a certain interval. When there are no more petals you stop gliding and start falling.

The problem is that when you start gliding, your time is rounded up to a whole petal. This is because it would feel like ass if you think you have 5 petals, but when you pull the glider out one instantly falls away because you were only one or two ticks away from it running out.

Now unlike your proposed solution the actual implementation may require two integers, or maybe an int and some kind of floating point number if they use a delta time system rather than fixed interval frames.

So they probably designed the system, realised the petals falling away suddenly and unexpectedly felt like ass, and someone made the quick change to fix it. It wasn't as simple as sitting down and planning out the entire thing before hand. It never is. You're full of shit.

e: For the record, one solution to the infinite gliding would be to have a timer that counts how long between presses of the glide button. If the time between presses is too low then don't round the count down up to a whole petal.