🧠 Dev Log Entry — 24 Sept 2025
Title: The Grind Blinked Mood: Shocked, exhausted, victorious Day 49 —
50 days ago, I had never coded anything. Never programmed. Never used Unity. Never touched a terminal. That journey will be its own log. But today... reflection.
🧱 Context: Defeated
This was it. The final attempt before project abandonment. I was stuck. Out of depth. No lifelines. All I wanted was to display a number in a text field. That’s it. Something they were doing in the 1960s. And yet, in mid-2025, with AI at my side, I couldn’t make it work. Every backup folder, every version—used, broken, confused. Every system I had methodically linked together collapsed one by one. All I wanted was for the Player HUD to display a final value—calculated from:
Weather
Temperature
Gear stats
Item stats
Disease modifiers
Story outcomes
Hunger, hydration, health, stamina, blood levels
Buffs, overwrites, food, liquids, and environmental effects
I had a generally working system before this. Everything worked in isolation. But wiring it all together? That was the wall. And I hit it.
🔧 Technical Milestones
✅ HUD Sync Achieved After 3 solid days of prefab/UI binding failures, the Player HUD finally reflected stat changes in real time. Mutation confirmed via ReduceStamina, ReduceHydration, ReduceHunger, and AddCondition.
✅ Event Invocation Fixed Corrected illegal OnStatsChanged call with ?.Invoke() inside PlayerStats.cs. No more CS0070 errors. HUD sync now triggers cleanly.
✅ GameSceneManager Purged & Rebuilt Cleaned and rebuilt GameSceneManager.cs, resolving ambiguity, removing duplicate classes, and injecting test mutation logic. Confirmed runtime obedience.
✅ PlayerStats Refactored Fully modular, prefab-safe, and runtime-obedient. All stat mutation and restoration methods now trigger HUD sync. No fluff. No broken references.
✅ Namespace Collision Resolved Discovered 150+ compiler errors caused by duplicate scripts across Assets/Scripts/InGame. Purged the infestation. Unity finally compiled clean.
✅ SurvivalCostResolver Pipeline Confirmed Mutation logic now flows from story node → outcome → stat impact → HUD sync. Pipeline validated.
✅ Runtime Truth Restored Injected test mutations. HUD displayed correct values. No crash. No silence. System obeyed.
🧱 Mythic Checkpoints
🧿 “The grind blinked.” — First successful HUD sync after near-abandonment. The system responded. The architect did not walk away.
🪓 “The purge.” — Deleted over 150 ghost scripts causing namespace collisions. The infestation was real. The purge was total.
🧬 “Resurrection node.” — node_0005 confirmed as the turning point. Mutation injected. HUD obeyed.
🧠 “Legacy preserved.” — Creating backup folder syncing again. All backups now reflect a working survival engine. This moment is a relic.
🧱 “Dev log shrine.” — This entry marks the moment the survival engine came back to life. The grind continues.
🧠 Emotional Milestones
😤 Frustration Peak — “this is a f*****g disaster” after Unity threw 150+ errors. Namespace collisions. Broken references. HUD silence.
😔 Final Attempt — “this was my very last attempt before I just totally gave up on this project.” The grind was on the edge.
😱 Shock Response — “f**k me it actually did something” after HUD obeyed. The system blinked. The architect nearly did too.
🧘 Recovery Ritual — Plans to refresh the system 10 times, make sure it’s not a dream or a glitch, make backups, and stabilize the working state. The grind is now deliberate.
🧠 Reflection — “I can’t believe it did something. Nearly went into shock.” This was not expected. It was earned.
🔁 The Grind Before the Blink (21 Sept)
🛠️ Centralized Condition Logic Moved all environmental condition logic into PlayerStats.cs, making it the single source of truth for HUD, gear modifiers, and temperature effects. (Later reversed—separation proved more effective.)
🔁 Rebuilt Player HUD from Scratch Stripped all ceremony. Rewired stat-by-stat display. Prefab-safe, event-driven, and modular.
🧼 Refactored PlayerStats.cs Ensured stat persistence, prefab safety, and HUD sync. Fought lag and broken references every step.
🧪 Debug Panel Iteration Built raw stat debug panels to trace runtime truth. Used snail-paced rebuild to isolate failures. (Code names now range from anteater to newt… A–N.)
🧨 Namespace Collision Detected After a recent PlayerStats.cs update, discovered full namespace collision and duplicate class/enum definitions. Began methodical purge.
🧱 Stat Sync Confirmed Began wiring ReduceX() methods to HUD sync via OnStatsChanged. Confirmed hydration and hunger drops in test runs.
🧠 SurvivalCostResolver Traced Began validating outcome-based stat mutation pipeline. Confirmed partial obedience.
🎮 Creative Expansion
Suggested Future Expansion — Mini Games Possible future base editions for a fun break from the story.
🧠 Echos Games Suite — Expanded Continued collaborative design and archiving of arcade relics and meta-simulation modules:
Dead Ball
Whack & Regret
Wormz: Retro Rampage
Death Tank: Porcelain Protocol
SimuCore: Recursive Survival
🎵 Signal Breaker Locked In Rhythm game module confirmed as canon in the Echos Games suite. Tactical, mythic, and recursive.
(These would be a fun addition, and give me a chance to work on something else, try to expand on some dev gaming knowledge and try new things, while still keeping it in the heart of my first ever project.) Not finalized. Idea stage.
🧠 Lore Integration
Began weaving legacy achievements, rivalries, and collaborative rituals into hidden systems and story nodes. The grind is now part of the mythos.
🧠 Final Reflection
This was the make-or-break moment for my project. I lost all hope. Could not see a way out. Tried everything I could think of. With persistence and determination, we—me and Copilot—managed to pull everything together. For this stage, at least.
The hope reignites. But the flame is still small.
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