Another Busy Week
Good afternoon everyone. It’s the 25th of May, and this dev log is a little later than usual because this weekend was honestly cooked from start to finish.
Before jumping into the actual development stuff, life in general has just been incredibly busy lately. Work has ramped up massively over the past couple of weeks and it’s been difficult balancing everything properly. Gym sessions got skipped, streaming became inconsistent, and I’ve basically just been trying to survive one task at a time.
I’m actually writing this about half an hour before a work meeting because it’s the first small pocket of time I’ve had to sit down properly.
We had a project at work that was originally supposed to be due last Friday, but they pushed the gate forward slightly which gave us more time. The problem is they also reworked a huge amount of it, so now a lot of my work has to be redone anyway. It’s been one of those weeks where you feel busy every second of the day but still feel like you’re behind.
By last monday I was so exhausted that I completely forgot stream existed. Friday was also my anniversary, six years together now, so I decided I’d rather spend that night with the person who has supported me for six years instead of sitting at my computer making a video game, which felt like a reasonable life decision.
Camera Bugs & The Simplest Fix Imaginable
The main thing I wanted to tackle this week was the camera issue from the previous dev log.
For some reason, the camera was generating completely incorrect bounds around the map. It wasn’t even behaving consistently either. The limits didn’t line up with the tilemap, they didn’t match any values I had entered, and honestly the whole thing just felt broken in a way that made no sense.
I spent way too long trying to figure out what complicated system I had accidentally destroyed.
The actual issue?
The camera node itself wasn’t centered correctly inside the player scene. That was it.
Because the camera was slightly offset, all the generated bounds were offset too. The second I reset its positioning properly, the entire issue vanished instantly. I think the fix itself took maybe thirty seconds once I realised what the problem actually was.
The several hours of confusion leading up to it were significantly less enjoyable. Still, getting it fixed felt really satisfying because it was one of those bugs that had been bothering me for weeks.
Enemy Scripts Nearly Sent Me Into Orbit
After the camera finally behaved itself, I moved onto enemy systems. This somehow became even worse.
I was following a tutorial extremely carefully and genuinely believed I had copied everything correctly. The scripts kept crashing, functions weren’t working properly, and the game would completely break every time I tried to run it.
I spent around three hours trying to debug it. The issue ended up being that I missed a single underscore in one function name.
One underscore.
That tiny mistake was enough to completely destroy the entire script. I think moments like this are probably a required rite of passage for learning programming because I genuinely could not believe how long it took me to notice something so small.
Huge shoutout again to one of my viewers, LuaViper, who continues to appear like some kind of programming guardian angel every time my project catches on fire. They somehow always know exactly what the problem is within minutes while I’m still staring at the screen questioning my life choices.
I genuinely appreciate how helpful the community has been throughout all of this.
Tiny Little Morons
Despite all the debugging pain, I did finally get enemies functioning in-game. Right now they’re just little slime enemies, but technically they work.
Sort of.
At the moment they have simple idle and walking states. They’ll stand still for a random amount of time, then pick a direction and wander around for a bit before idling again. There’s no actual intelligence to them yet, so most of the time they just walk directly into walls repeatedly like confused little jellybeans.
I love them.
I added multiple slimes into the scene and gave them different colours because I thought it looked cute and it helped make the test area feel slightly more alive.
Combat systems still aren’t implemented yet. There are no hitboxes, no player targeting, and no real AI behaviour beyond random wandering. I have already set up health values for them though, so once hitboxes are added properly the combat side should begin fitting together much more naturally.
I’m hoping the next development stream focuses more on proper enemy AI and player detection systems.
Ideally the slimes will eventually do more than just confidently jump into walls forever.
Learning To Accept Smaller Progress
This week was productive, just not in the flashy way. Most of the week was spent solving problems that turned out to have incredibly simple fixes, but I think that’s just part of development.
I’m slowly learning that not every week is going to be huge progress. Some weeks are exciting breakthroughs, while others are just slowly untangling problems and laying foundations for later systems.
I also realised that game development can’t really be approached with the same mindset I use for the gym.
At the gym I constantly try to outperform my previous self every single week. More weight, more reps, better conditioning, better physique.
With development, that mindset would probably destroy me eventually. If I constantly expect myself to escalate productivity forever, eventually I’m going to hit a point where I’m trying to do thirty hours of development every week while also working full-time, streaming, going to the gym, and maintaining a life outside all of that.
That just isn’t sustainable. So instead, I think the goal needs to simply be consistency. Do something every week. Move the project forward somehow. Keep learning.
Goals, Deadlines & Not Burning Out
One thing I’ve started thinking about recently is project timeframes.
Right now I don’t really have any deadlines attached to Unchosen at all. I’m mostly just building systems that interest me and learning as I go. I think that’s healthy for now.
I’m still figuring out basic systems and workflows, so putting heavy pressure on myself this early would probably just cause me to freeze up creatively. If I suddenly started saying things like “playable prototype in six months” while still learning fundamental systems, I think I’d burn myself out almost immediately.
Eventually I will need structure and proper milestones. but right now I think learning consistently matters more than speed.
Strange Stream Moments
Streaming this week was also weird in general.
At one point my viewer count suddenly jumped from around thirty viewers to over eight hundred almost instantly. I genuinely thought Twitch had broken.
Apparently there’s a good chance it was viewbots, which honestly worries me because I got told people sometimes do that maliciously to try and get channels flagged.
There was also a troll in chat at the same time, so maybe it was related. I have no idea. Hopefully nothing comes from it because that would be incredibly frustrating.
I’ve also noticed the game development category feels a bit stranger lately. There’s definitely been more random negativity than usual.
At one point someone came into chat and basically said:
“Why are you doing this theres tonnes of people way better”
Lol ok go watch them.
Lenny Absolutely Cooked
Outside of development stuff, this weekend was actually really good. We had a competition day with Lenny and he did incredibly well.
This year they split the events into Junior, Novice, and Open divisions instead of grouping everyone together, so we competed in Novice because we haven’t officially won a competition before.
And somehow we got second place in barrels.
CRAZY!
We also picked up another second place ribbon and a third place ribbon throughout the day, so overall it ended up being a really successful event.
The thing I was most proud of though was actually the trail challenge.
They introduced a flag obstacle this year and I was convinced Lenny was going to hate it because it was insanely windy and he’d never seen a flag before. Other horses were struggling with it while riders tried to desensitise them.
Meanwhile Lenny just walked up to the flag, sniffed it once, and accepted its existence immediately.
I picked it up and we casually walked around with it while the wind tried its absolute best to turn it into a sail. Such a brave baby!
We’ve also got a two-day competition coming up this weekend too, so I’ll probably be exhausted all over again very soon.
House Stuff & Upcoming Changes
We’re also officially in the middle of selling the house now, which means life is probably about to become significantly more difficult for a while.
The current plan is to temporarily move back into my partner’s parents’ place while they’re away, save aggressively, pay down debts, and hopefully buy another property once we’re in a better financial position.
It’s a strange situation because it’s not really the ideal time for us to sell, but it is a pretty good time for us to buy, so we’re trying to make the smartest long-term decision possible.
I’m also still trying to figure out what this means for streaming.
I don’t know whether I’ll leave my setup here temporarily or move everything immediately. I might stay here until the end of May before fully relocating things just so I can properly plan next month’s schedule around all the moving chaos.
We’ll see how it goes.
Final Thoughts
Thank you genuinely to everyone who has been sticking around through all of this.
Whether you’re reading these dev logs, hanging out in streams, helping me debug things, or just quietly keeping up with the project, I really appreciate it more than I know how to properly explain.
The website is also currently going through a bit of a redesign, so apologies if parts of it look broken at the moment. I absolutely demolished sections of it last week by accident while trying to update things. Very professional developer behaviour from me.
But honestly, I’m really happy. Like genuinely happy.
I don’t really know how to explain it without sounding emotional, but building this project, writing these dev logs, streaming the development process, and slowly building a community around all of it has been something really special for me.
It’s nice having people care. It’s nice sharing progress. It’s nice building something. Even if sometimes that “something” is just a slime repeatedly walking into a wall.
Thank you all again for being here. I hope you’re having a good week, and if you’re not, I hope things get a little easier soon.
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