Dev Diary Day 3; DDD

Today i got a lot of compliments. 2! never in my life! My cup run'ith over. I guess if you just stick to something long enough, people are going to look at ya and say, "wow, that's neat." They move on after that, obviously, but at least you got that wow. I dunno, i just like making stuff. So i do what i have to do, which is build. I had a conversation on twitter and it ended in this:

Its comfy thinking about the thing.

Its painful making the thing.

One gives you smiles, the other gives you the thing. Its so true. Imagining the things, thinking through the things, dreaming of the dreams of the thing; all so much better then nailing it down. Tacking it to a board and holding it up to examination. Thats when the fuzziness, the imaginative playfulness of a project begins to erode and you are left there looking at some monster you can barely recognize. But, that is the act of creation. There is no cliff for the author to fall off of, meaning, the death of the author isnt some hard and fast line. Its a gradient, and it happens as you develop your work.

when your intents no long align with what you have built, then indeed, its a frankenstein.

My other thought today was about thought itself. A system becomes a subject when it can originate its own next state as itself, without external demand. This is a necessary condition to general intelligence, i feel. A system, Grok/ChatGPT/[current model here], must, without demand or prompting from a user, originate it own statements/ideas. Without that, general human (heck, even animal) like intelligence in not possible. There must be a closed loop running an evaluation against its current state and future states. furthermore, pain must be felt when transitioning to a suboptimal state (in other words, a mistake). Well, thats my thought on that subject anyways. Game wise, i finished up the majority of abilities, getting them back to a place where they work. Oh yeah, i refactored the base script that they ALL inherit from. So i have about 160+ errors across like, 80 some scripts. took me 4 hours to fix. Sometime it be like that though; put on the tunes and just try to cruse on through it. Im also putting in the level editor that i use to make dungeon rooms into the game so that users can make them also. It should take a day or so to get that transferred from editor script land to runtime experience. Let me hand it over to chat gpt for a non-crazy man breakdown of what we did today. --- Dev Diary – Technical Breakdown

• Finished stabilizing the ability system

  • Fixed broken hooks caused by earlier refactors

  • Abilities are firing correctly again

  • Cooldowns, ownership, and targeting are behaving deterministically

  • No new abilities added — this was about getting back to a solid baseline

• Shifted focus to Tile Foundry runtime support

  • Migrated editor-only logic to runtime-safe systems

  • Replaced [c]AssetDatabase[/c] usage with [c]Resources.LoadAll[/c]

  • Moved save/load paths to [c]Application.persistentDataPath[/c]

  • Layouts can now be saved, loaded, and previewed in-game

• Rebuilt runtime UI instead of hand-placing it

  • Created an editor utility that auto-builds the Tile Foundry UI from a [c]RectTransform[/c]

  • UI layout now mirrors the original editor tool

  • Switched everything to explicit sizes to avoid Unity layout bugs

  • Fixed zero-height buttons, squished rows, and layout group conflicts

• General cleanup & foundation work

  • Removed editor dependencies from runtime code

  • Standardized data flow between grid, UI, and IO

  • Left the system in a stable, extendable state

• Result

  • Abilities work again

  • Tile Foundry functions at runtime

  • UI is reproducible and consistent

  • Project is back in a “build forward without fighting Unity” state