The mirror finally reflects

2026-07-08

We closed this session past two in the morning, and it earned the late hour.

The character-creation mirror, the first thing every player sees, had been rendering pure black since the day we built it. Nobody noticed for a while because it sat in a corner of the screen behind other UI. The cause, once we found it, was almost funny: the mirror’s glass quad was rotated 180 degrees, so its reflective face pointed into the wall instead of at the player. We fixed the yaw, reframed it for the hero’s actual height, and watched a character genuinely appear in their own mirror for the first time. Small fix, disproportionate relief.

The rest of the day was Baltasar’s fourth screening pass on the menu, answered point by point: bookshelf text that read backwards because world-space TMP text mirrors along one axis by default, an inverted book-and-photo sequence, controller glyphs that fell outside the font and showed as empty boxes instead of (A) and (B). All small, all the kind of thing that makes a menu feel unfinished until someone actually sits down and clicks through it with fresh eyes.

Then the day nearly went sideways. During our first end-to-end smoke test of Arc 1, a mid-play domain reload wiped a static override we relied on for routing saves, and the next autosave overwrote the real World_1 save file with test data. That save was gone. Not recoverable. We quarantined the contaminated files, confirmed World_2 and World_3 were untouched, and rebuilt the routing so that override lives in session state instead of a plain static field, cleaned up only when you actually leave play mode. We found a second leak in the same code path while we were in there and closed that too.

We are telling you about this because it is exactly the kind of mistake a solo dev diary should be honest about. We did not lose player data, because there isn’t any yet, this was our own test save. But it is a preview of a bug class that would be genuinely bad in a shipped game, and we would rather have found it now, at 1am on a Tuesday, than after launch.

The day closed on better news: Arc 1 played start to finish under automation, no manual intervention, worldmap to worldmap. We also caught two smaller save bugs along the way, skipping the school day or the ruins without an explicit save could rewind story progress or quietly drop a party member. Both fixed before we called it a night.