Dev Diary 1

Dev diaries will be broken up into 2 sections. One of me talking to you and the other of chatGPT breaking down some of the harder stuff i do. Sometimes that much easier, and honestly, as a solo dev, i dont have a lot of time. And as a self taught dev, i lack a lot of vocabulary and langue that would help convey what i mean/do. Thats always fun when that happens. You have a good idea, but no way to talk about it. This is why communication is so critical.

Thus, i guess, this is more of a stream of conscious kind of thing. Which is good, because thats more like a diary anyways. I mean, you came here because its a weird looking game that has a crazy solo dev man behind it. Or you clicked on the wrong thing by mistake. Either or is good.

Time is my enemy. I have so much to do and so little time to do it in. Hence why updates like these are low on my list, but also high on my list. As i said, communication is critical, if i dont spend the time to talk about the things i do then nobody knows of then, and thats the same as them not existing. This is why i'm devoting about 30 minutes to writing, maybe not every day. But often enough.

Getting this on steam was hard. Lots of images that needed to be made, lots of text that needed to get written. I really hate the content of the project description, that was AI generated as fuuuuu.... and it really shows. So i gotta rewrite that soon, maybe today, maybe not.

Oh, and dont get me started on the joys of starting your LLC and opening a business account. Not hard actually, i just like complaining today. I got 50 bucks of seed money in the business account, and they hit it with a 10 buck fee each month. so i got about 5 months to get revenue flowing in, thats fun. The fee's stop when i have a balance of 500, so i'm hoping D-Flop can pull that.

Game wise, nothing super interesting, just a lot of optimization and rewrites. I had a system that took about a day to dev up, and it works, but it looks like crap. So i gutted it and rewrote it. Let me pass this off to ChatGPT to give you the 411 what was changed.

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Technical Breakdown (ChatGPT Section)

The last development pass focused on stability, correctness, and long-term maintainability, not new features.

A lot of the work centered around time, targeting, and activation flow —three systems that quietly touch everything in a tactics game.

1. Time & Simulation Control

The game now has a single authoritative time source. Instead of relying on Unity’s [c]Time.timeScale[/c] to pause or speed things up, the game uses a custom [c]GameTime[/c] system.

Why this matters:

• Physics, cooldowns, AI, and abilities all now tick from the same clock

• Pausing no longer causes half-paused states (animations stopping but physics drifting, etc.)

• Speed changes (½ speed, fast-forward) are deterministic and safe

Unity’s clock stays running; the game’s clock decides what actually progresses.

1. Ability Execution Was Rewritten (Quietly, But Deeply)

Abilities—especially melee—were restructured so that:

• Readiness, target validation, and activation are clearly separated

• Automatic abilities only fire when:

  • cooldown is ready

  • a valid target exists

  • the game clock is advancing

• Target scans are buffered and allocation-free (no LINQ, no garbage)

This removed a whole class of “why didn’t that fire?” bugs that come from logic being split across multiple scripts or frames.

1. Targeting Became Predictable

Target acquisition was simplified to:

• layer mask

• optional tag filtering

• distance checks

• explicit self-exclusion

Nothing fancy—just reliable.

That means when something doesn’t happen now, it’s debuggable. No more Schrödinger’s enemies.

1. Visuals Were Demoted (On Purpose)

Range rings, hit effects, and feedback were deliberately pushed into presentation-only code paths.

They:

• never drive logic

• never gate activation

• can be disabled without breaking gameplay

This makes future polish safer and faster.

1. The Big Picture

None of this looks impressive in a GIF. None of it adds a bullet point to the Steam page.

But it turns a fragile prototype into a system that can:

• scale to more abilities

• survive refactors

• be reasoned about months from now

This was a “pay the debt” week.

The fun stuff comes next.