In my Steam demo for Vampy's Big Day, a significant number of players are seeing colored rectangular boxes rendered around various sprites during normal gameplay. These appear to be the sprites' collision or bounding box geometry becoming visible, which shouldn't be rendered at all. This was reported by ~20+ players across a playtest window of roughly 3 days. My suspicion is that is has to do with graphics drivers, but now that a significant enough number of people have reported the issue, I'm wondering what I can do to fix the bug on my end.
What players are seeing:
The boxes vary in color depending on the affected sprite/object type. Reported colors include purple, blue, green, yellow-green, brown/dark brown, white, and translucent/dark grey. Affected objects span a wide range: small sprites (falling leaves, noise particles, sun-hurt animations), NPC sprites (villagers, guards, the ram), interactive objects (keys, garlic, rocks, bushes, pumpkins), UI elements (settings/controls menu buttons), and level select icons. (will attach pictures at the bottom)
Reproduction is inconsistent — this is the tricky part. Behavior reported by players falls into roughly three buckets:
Present from launch — some players saw boxes immediately after the intro cutscene on first boot, and they persisted for the entire session.
Triggered mid-session and then persistent — several players reported boxes not appearing at first, then "turning on" after a few rooms (often noted around the village section or after a load/reload), and not going away after that point.
Randomly appearing/disappearing — a smaller group saw boxes come and go, with re-entering a room or reloading the save sometimes clearing or triggering them.
One player specifically noted: "I made a new save and it looked perfectly fine. Then I reset the level and started seeing it again." Another: "Going in and out of a level can change whether/which sprites have boxes around them."
Platforms
Primarily Windows (the vast majority of reporters). Also confirmed on Mac and SteamOS/Steam Deck. The affected sprite types appear consistent across platforms.
The game functions normally during this bug — no crash, no freeze, no gameplay impact reported. Players universally describe it as a visual-only issue.
My current suspicion is this is related to how C3 handles the Show collision boxes debug flag or a GPU texture/renderer state that's leaking or not being cleared between layout transitions. The fact that it's intermittent and correlated with room transitions/reloads points toward something in layout or object lifecycle rather than a static misconfiguration.
Would love to know if others have seen this in C3 projects and whether there's a known cause. Really just not sure what I should be doing on my end to mitigate the problem.