The idea was beautiful.
The reality was brutal.
I learned that on the first day I opened a game engine and realized that inspiration meant nothing to a compiler.
Unity's interface stared back at me like a foreign language—panels, inspectors, hierarchies, empty scenes waiting to be filled with logic I barely understood. I had watched tutorials. I had read guides. I had convinced myself that passion would bridge the gap between imagination and execution. But the moment I tried to place a character into an empty scene, the illusion shattered.
The character fell through the floor.
I blinked. Adjusted a value. Pressed play again.
The character fell through the floor.
I laughed—quietly, nervously—then sighed and leaned back in my chair. "Okay," I muttered to no one. "So that's how today's going to be."
Hours passed in fragments. I learned about colliders the hard way. About rigid bodies, gravity, and why nothing worked the way I assumed it should. Every time I fixed one issue, three more emerged. The camera clipped into walls. Animations jittered like broken marionettes. Input lag made movement feel like walking through syrup.
And this was just movement.
Combat—actual combat—felt impossibly far away.
But I refused to skip ahead. I wanted to do this right. If this game was going to carry weight, then its foundations had to be solid. So I started small. A single room. Flat ground. One controllable character. One enemy. No music. No effects. No story.
Just proof that something could exist.
I named the test scene Prototype_Aspect_001.
The first enemy was a cube.
I told myself it was temporary.
Coding the Aspect system nearly broke me.
On paper, it was elegant: Aspects modified abilities, stats, visuals, and combat flow. In code, it was chaos. I rewrote the system three times in one night. Inheritance chains collapsed under their own complexity. Scriptable objects refused to behave. Values reset for no reason I could identify.
At some point, I stared at a block of code for nearly twenty minutes without blinking, convinced it was mocking me.
"You wanted consequence," I said aloud. "Here it is."
When I finally managed to trigger a basic attack—a simple animation, a number popping above the cube enemy—I froze. It was clumsy. Ugly. Barely functional.
But it happened because I made it happen.
I stood up from my chair and paced the room, adrenaline buzzing through my veins. This was it. The first tangible proof that the game could exist outside my head. I returned to the desk and added a second ability—fire-based, rudimentary. A glowing sphere spawned, collided with the cube, and vanished.
The cube's health dropped.
I exhaled slowly, realizing I had been holding my breath.
That night, I didn't sleep.
Instead, I pushed further. I added a resource bar. Not mana yet—just a placeholder. I connected it to ability usage. I added cooldowns, then broke them, then fixed them again. Bugs stacked on bugs. At one point, activating the fire ability launched the player character into the sky like a cursed comet.
I laughed again. This time, louder.
By dawn, the prototype resembled something recognizable. Barely—but enough. A player could move, attack, take damage, and defeat a single enemy. There was no UI polish, no sound, no spectacle. But beneath the rough edges, I could feel the heartbeat of the game.
That was when I introduced the Echo system.
At first, it was just a number—a hidden variable tied to Aspect usage. Every time the fire ability was activated, the Echo value decreased slightly. When it dropped below a threshold, I triggered a test event: the ability flickered. Its damage dropped. A debug message appeared on screen.
ECHO INSTABILITY DETECTED.
I stared at the message longer than I expected to.
This was no longer just a mechanic. It was the soul of the game revealing itself.
I imagined how this would feel to a player later—using power again and again, not realizing what they were losing until the game showed them. A whispered line of dialogue. A missing NPC. A song that no longer played. Loss encoded directly into interaction.
I sat back, suddenly exhausted.
For the first time, doubt hit hard.
Who was I to attempt something like this? Studios with hundreds of developers struggled to balance narrative-driven systems. I was one person, sitting alone in an apartment with outdated hardware and an overactive imagination. There were moments—long, quiet moments—where the scale of the project felt suffocating.
I opened a folder labeled SCRAPPED IDEAS and hovered my mouse over it.
Then I closed it.
"No," I said firmly. "Not yet."
I saved the project and backed it up twice. I took screenshots of the prototype—not because it looked good, but because I needed proof for myself. Proof that the dream wasn't delusion. Proof that progress, however small, was real.
Before shutting down for the first time in nearly thirty hours, I renamed the scene.
Prototype_Aspect_001 → First Flame
It felt right.
As I lay on my bed, staring at the ceiling, the game continued to run in my mind. Systems intertwining. Stories branching. Vestiges waiting patiently for form. I realized something then—something both terrifying and exhilarating.
I wasn't just building a game.
I was binding myself to it.
And like the Vestiges I had imagined, I suspected there would be no walking away once the Echoes began to fade.