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 AssetDatabase usage with Resources.LoadAll
Moved save/load paths to Application.persistentDataPath
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 RectTransform
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