Can't test games?

Hey!

I've been having a problem playing my games lately. When I press test game it goes on like normal, but when I hit the play button on my main screen the screen goes black and a popup appears with this message: TypeError: Error #1009: Cannot access a property or method of a null object reference.
   at stencyl.api.engine::GameState/createActor()[/home/stencyl/stencyl.net/jenkins/jobs/StencylWorks-Dist/workspace/plaf/flash/root/stencyl/api/engine/GameState.as:938]
   at stencyl.api.engine::GameState/loadActors()[/home/stencyl/stencyl.net/jenkins/jobs/StencylWorks-Dist/workspace/plaf/flash/root/stencyl/api/engine/GameState.as:779]
   at stencyl.api.engine::GameState/loadScene()[/home/stencyl/stencyl.net/jenkins/jobs/StencylWorks-Dist/workspace/plaf/flash/root/stencyl/api/engine/GameState.as:547]
   at stencyl.api.engine::GameState/enterScene()[/home/stencyl/stencyl.net/jenkins/jobs/StencylWorks-Dist/workspace/plaf/flash/root/stencyl/api/engine/GameState.as:447]
   at stencyl.api.engine::GameState/update()[/home/stencyl/stencyl.net/jenkins/jobs/StencylWorks-Dist/workspace/plaf/flash/root/stencyl/api/engine/GameState.as:1464]
   at org.flixel::FlxGame/update()[/home/stencyl/stencyl.net/jenkins/jobs/StencylWorks-Dist/workspace/plaf/flash/flixel/org/flixel/FlxGame.as:407]



The same thing happens when I publish it to SWF. I haven't tried the other formats yet, though. It seems like it came on overnight, because I had not made any big changes to the game before this. The last thing that I had done before this error started was delete an actor (it was a menu button) that had no behaviors attached to it just yet. Being I deleted the actor before deleting it from the scene, could this have caused the problem?

In the error it mentions API (stencyl.api.engine), so I thought it may have been something wrong with the Kongregate API blocks I'd used, but I deactivated all of them before testing the game, and the game was working fine even with those blocks in it.

So yeah, I don't know what to do. I've looked on the forums and found a couple problems that seemed to be similar. On one there was a suggestion to reinstall Stencyl. I'm all for trying that, as long as my projects will not be carried over to the reinstalled/next version of Stencyl and not deleted. Any help would be appreciated! I've never had this problem before.

Hey Thunder, you mention deleting an actor so the problem is most likely due to that. Check your behaviors/events and you should find a create actor block that is referencing the deleted actor, or even a blank create actor block. Since this is happening on the first scene load I suggest checking the behaviors/events for that scene. Then check for actor behaviors/scenes that are created when the scene starts up.

I reccommend creating multiple files of your project. Clicking File -> Save As and appending something like _999 will work.

Thanks for getting back to me dtrungle! Because of your advice I found the solution to my problem! The problem was actually in the scene behaviors. I had two Kongregate API setup blocks in my game, one in the bootup screen and another in the level select screen. I guess you can't have two of them in the same game, cause when I got rid of one of them, the error stopped occurring. 

I can finally get back to working, and most importantly testing, my games! Thanks again for your help dtrungle, you saved the day!