Dev Log 04 - UI and the Self-Reflective Nature of Writing Characters

Another week, another missed deadline. I was hoping to have my inventory and interaction systems fully integrated into the prototype by now, but life had other plans. Most of my time ended up spent wrestling with Unreal’s strange UI systems. Having worked much more extensively with UI in Unity, I find myself burning a lot of mental energy unlearning old associations and replacing them with Unreal’s own components, which often share the same names but behave differently.

That said, I’ve been pleasantly surprised by how much I’m starting to enjoy building UI systems in Unreal. There’s a modular quality to it that appeals to me: simple elements coming together into layered, complex systems. It’s frustrating at times, but also deeply satisfying when things start to click.

I also met with my co-writer this week to talk workflows and the characters we’re building together. Character writing has been an unexpectedly introspective process for me. I lean on people from my real life as inspiration, but doing so forces me to examine my own perspective — to notice how much I project onto them and how often my interpretation says more about me than about them.

It’s a bit like recounting an argument to a therapist. Once the heat of the moment fades, you can finally see the other person more clearly, stripped of all the justifications and quiet edits you made in your head to preserve your side of the story. It can be uncomfortable, but there’s a strange relief in reaching that kind of clarity.

Writing, it turns out, is challenging in ways I didn’t expect. But maybe that’s part of why I love it. Game development feels like an endless rabbit hole where every solved problem reveals five more to learn about, and each one brings some new insight about myself along the way. There’s no endpoint, just a constant unfolding of deeper systems and ideas.

And honestly, that’s what keeps me going. I feel lucky that this work will never stop challenging me, that I’ll never run out of opportunities to learn and grow. It’s exhausting at times, but it’s also beautiful.