Entry 007

[Devlog — February 7, 2025 – 8:12 PM]

Not really a devlog today—no new coding, no debugging, just me trying (and failing) to prove I'm not losing it.

I told some friends about the "bugs." Kept it light, just a weird little story about NPCs going off-script, throwing in pauses and weird dialogue. They laughed. Said it was cool, like some AI horror game in the making. I laughed too.

Didn't mention the staring.

Didn't mention the way Mira's head snapped toward the camera when I stopped recording.

I thought maybe I was imagining things. Stress, sleep deprivation—whatever excuse made the most sense. So I tried something new today. No screen capture, no logs, no in-game recording. I set up my phone and filmed the monitor directly. Just to see if anything changed.

It worked.

And by that, I mean nothing happened.

For twenty minutes, I wandered through town, talked to NPCs, triggered dialogue trees—every single line played out exactly as written. No pauses. No deviations. No strange expressions.

Like they knew.

Like they were behaving because they knew they were being watched.

Again.

I even tried pushing it—lingering on Mira, asking the same question over and over. She answered the same way every time, no hesitation. No eerie pauses.

Then I turned off the camera.

I waited. Walked away from my desk. Let the game sit idle for a while.

When I came back, Mira was still standing in the same spot, looking straight ahead. No change, no movement. Everything seemed normal.

Until I took a step forward.

She turned to face me.

And this time, she smiled.

Not her usual polite, scripted smile. Not the one I animated into her model. This one was... different. Wider. A little too wide.

I don't remember exiting the game, but the next thing I knew, my desktop was staring back at me, the game window gone.

I checked the recording. Nothing. Just normal gameplay.

I checked the logs. No errors.

I checked my hands. They were shaking.

I quickly booted up the code and frantically looked for Mira's part.

...

I decided to remove her. Her nightmare.

The stares, the whispers, the feeling of being watched even outside the game—I needed it to stop.

So I deleted her.

Not just from the script, but from everything. The model, the animations, the AI behavior tree—every trace of her. I even cleared her entry from the character database, making sure there was no leftover data that could linger.

Then I made a new NPC in her place. A boy named Seth.

Seth has the same function as Mira. He stands in the village, plays with a stick, has a handful of lines about the harvest and the weather. He doesn't look at the player too long, doesn't linger before speaking, doesn't say things he shouldn't.

And for the first time in days, everything worked exactly the way it should.

No pauses. No strange expressions. No hesitation.

It was seamless.

Too seamless.

I ran multiple tests, trying different dialogue triggers, walking away mid-conversation, even restarting the game a few times just to see if anything felt off. But Seth remained... normal. Maybe a little too normal.

I don't know how to explain it, but there's something about how perfectly he blends in that bothers me. It's like he's just... there. Existing. Filling a space where something else used to be.

Or maybe I'm just being paranoid.

Since Seth was stable, I moved on to other things. I optimized some NPC behaviors to reduce processing load—removed unnecessary idle animations, tweaked their pathfinding to avoid awkward stops, and adjusted their schedules so they wouldn't all crowd the same areas at once.

It was routine work. Nothing unusual.

Then I ran another test.

Seth was still there, in the same spot where Mira used to stand. His routine was flawless. I watched as he walked to the well, tapped the bucket with his stick, then wandered back to his spot under the tree. Everything was exactly as I had programmed it.

But for some reason, I kept watching.

Five minutes. Then ten.

Waiting.

I don't know what for.

Eventually, I forced myself to move on. Cleaned up the terrain in the southern fields—there was a floating rock that had been bugging me for weeks. Adjusted the lighting in the market square to be less harsh during sunrise. Started implementing the item collection system for Chapter 2's main questline.

Everything was normal.

Everything was fine.

But when I was about to log off for the night, I hovered over the "Exit" button for a second too long.

Like I was waiting for something to happen.

[End Entry]

[To-Do List]

>> Keep testing Seth. Just in case.

>> Continue work on Chapter 2. No distractions.

>> Stop expecting something to happen.

mira