Either you're a solo dev in Unity or you're not. And you will understand this gut wrenching feeling.

It's been many months since I did a build, and we have been developing fast and loose for some time. Upgrading Unity versions (I'm actually on the beta right now). Revamping so many debug tools and pooling systems that do all sorts of intense and crazed things the first frame of the game.

Oh a whim I decided, "eh, let's just do a build and see what happens".

This is essentially like deciding to power on and overcharge the large hadron collider on a whim.

This can go one of three ways:

1. Oh thank god it works, we are on track and whenever we decide to put the game out there, we good!

2. Ah shit, ok well it looks like there's a few kinks that we'll have to sort out and this will take a few hours.

3. Just fucking end me.

Well, we made the build and it was the worst possible outcome. It didn't just not load, it loaded and everything was broken and I didn't know why. No error messages. No means of finding what's causing everything not to work or narrow it down.

It's hard to describe the kind of despair this can be when you're already burned down and running on empty and suddenly you have this new insurmountable task that might take anywhere from 1 hour to weeks to debug if you ever find the issue at all. In my mind I'm thinking to myself, "OK, guess we better gear up for compartmentalizing our scripts one by one so they can function independent of each other, break apart our scene and start creating 30 minute builds one by one until we're able to isolate the issue over several days.

And while this was happening I startd downloading the LTS version of Unity. And in the beta version decided to try the web build to see what would happen.

Then a miracle happened. The web build sent me an error message and canceled the build.

OH THANK FUCKING JESUS

Something about how private wasn't a proper mdofier for a function in my AI script. I knew the issue was only happening in builds, so I was keen to look at logic that only ran in the editor, it was worth a shot, I gave it 20% odds this would be the culprit. I find myself trying to calculate the chances of things working or not so I can set my expectations accordingly, I wasn't optimistic.

But low and behold I saw this bit of logic above, and I thought, "Oh this is the sort of code we're looking for, it's editor only. And then

BOOM! Immediate realization of the problem

YOU FUCKING DINGUS! That bracket isn't going to fucking apply properly and the entire AI script is going to break at runtime as it's encapsulated in the if statement! Musta gotten sloppy and just moved on. Shit like this always happens when you're working 15 hours straight and you don't get an immediate error.

I used to curse that the web build was more finicky with errors. And the PC build “just worked” despite a couple minor errors that didn’t prevent the game from being playable.

But now it’s the best thing that’s happened to me this week. That single console error likely saved me a full day to maybe even a full week of pain.

It’s funny, one moment you can be in the dumps worried about getting hours of pain in the ass progress done, then you hit a horrible snag and you’re immediately just so damned happy the entire project didn’t just implode and your entire week ruined.

The build is now fucking working. We can commence to building up our stupid little fish game once more.

HOPEFULLY tomorrow we have an actual blog talking about forward progress and not just screaming about stuff.

BEFORE I FORGET I AM ADDING TO CHECK BUILDS EVERY SINGLE WEEK FROM NOW ON TO AVOID A HORRIBLE CATASTROPHE DOWN THE ROAD