How to Fix Tower Defense Lives Not Decrementing on Leaks in GameMaker

Leaking enemies should cost lives, but if your end-of-path handling only destroys the enemy, the counter never moves. Wiring the leak to a deduction fixes it. Here is how.

How to fix it

1. Detect the leak explicitly

When an enemy reaches the final waypoint, route it through a dedicated leak handler rather than a generic destroy, so lives logic always runs.

2. Deduct and remove

In the leak handler, subtract the enemy's life cost (some enemies cost more), update the UI, then destroy the instance so it is not also counted as killed.

3. Check defeat after deduction

After deducting, test whether lives reached zero and trigger the defeat flow there, so a fatal leak ends the run immediately and consistently.

Catching the ones you can't reproduce

The hardest version of this to fix is the one you can't reproduce — it only happens on a player's hardware, OS, driver, or save state, under conditions that simply aren't present on your machine. A report that says “it crashed” or “it froze” gives you nothing to act on, so the bug survives release after release while quietly costing you players.

Automatic error capture closes that gap. Each failure arrives with its full stack trace, the device and OS, the build number, and a breadcrumb trail of what the player did right before it broke, so even a failure you have never seen becomes a specific, reproducible issue. Fold identical failures into one signature ranked by how many players each hits, and your worklist sorts itself worst-first instead of arriving as a stream of vague complaints.

This is where a tool like Bugnet earns its place. Its SDK captures every GameMaker error automatically with the full stack trace plus device, OS, memory, build, and game-state context, folds duplicates into one grouped issue with an occurrence count, and ties each to the build it first appeared on — so you fix the problem that hurts the most players first and confirm it is gone when its signature disappears from the next release.