JPS Grooves

2/9/2026

This game, whatever it’s name is, is certainly taking shape. It’s all inspired by my SnowCone MathFest universe, but it has started to take on its own character lately. the thing that brought it back? THE GHOSTS!

Right now everything is still in prototype mode, but that art style is still somewhat acceptable. I spent some time today turning all my residents into ghosts, and the work I’ve put into that feels acceptable.

I honestly wasn’t sure when I was going to get to that point though, as I’ve been fighting an efficiency problem in Unity. I had a double route node system in place and didn’t realize it. As usual, Patch was willing to patch things until it was fixed, often creating brand new systems for me to implement and still ending up with the same exact results. So, I paused, I breathed, I remembered that anything that is wrong, is MY fault, and I took a break. Today, I stood my ground against the Ai and swore to it that the problem shouldn’t be a difficult fix. After some clicking around and being brave, I leaned into the systems I had in place and observed what was going on; after finally realizing I could adjust node positions visually and reducing its visually cluttered noise, I saw that attendees would stop at each zone twice. I looked some more and Patch explained to me that the code was set up for it to do that if their was more than one waypoint per zone..I found the other waypoint, and deleted it. I still need to put a safeguard into place, but I didn’t see that need, knowing that I’m still very much deep in the design phase of zone behavior.

I have residents and attendees with linger tendencies, timed jobs with positions, different layers, stopping points for wanderers, it really hasn’t been easy lol. But outside of that I need to get the attendees standing in line, update the resident schedules, give them walking paths, and then I’ll get to the popups that I want to implement for everything. I even had the idea that residents might have to be paid or they would leave their stations…but in a fishbowl game like this, I’m wondering what my consequences will be.

Save the ghosts? I don’t know yet. Learn from the ghosts? I already have.