I committed to finally sending over that Unity bug report today (see 2025-07-16). Part of me feels guilty for allocating part of my work shift for this task, but I realize that each day I wait delays the day Unity fixes the issue further and further into the future. Since I’m demoing this Energy Ball project again on September 20th, each day matters and I need to do this now (plus my boss is on vacation!!).
When creating a bug report, it’s best to start with the MVP for bug reproduction. I don’t want to give the Unity team any extra noise to sift through—I’m sure they’re busy enough, and figure that if I was a team member, I’d probably prioritize clean and simple bug reports over sloppy ones.
Therefore, I created a new Unity SRP base project with just VFX Graph installed. I chose the Simple Loop as my base template and created an exposed Transform parameter I bound to a game object in my scene. There was no bug. I figured, hmmm, I bind multiple exposed transforms in my broken VFX graph…maybe the bug will manifest if I create and bind a second one… Still no bug. With that head-scratching result, there was only one logical path to take—recreating my broken VFX graph from scratch.
30 minutes later and sure enough, that fixed it. As you can see in the photo above, my original broken graph (red) simply doesn’t bind to its start position transform (i). These two graphs are the exact same. Smh. I figure the original graph silently broke somewhere along the way as I transferred it to new major versions of VFX graph.
So, what to do now? Well, I’ll need to recreate my hand effects graph from scratch. It’ll take a solid hour to do and I’ll save the task for another time when I’m not at work. Besides, I’m not fuckin’ around here—no copy/pasting and risking new bugs. I’m going to do this carefully and patiently. The good news is that if all goes right, I’ll have some sick open/close hand effects included in my next demo!
I stopped working on this at very odd time with only 1 hour left in my shift. I figured it’d make zero sense to shift my mental context over to Expo App development for work, so I just kept on chugging along here. Instead of remaking my VFX graph, I decided to add support for media captions in this static Quartz site. Now, my captions show up both locally in Obsidian (thanks to this plugin) and in the generated output. Check it out!
Using Claude, it took me 1.5 hours instead of 1 hour, so now it looks like I worked overtime! At least, it would look like that to any management that checks the cameras. My boss probably just checks GitHub though, and I’m sure he noticed that zero changes were made to our repo today. I sure hope he’s enjoying his vacation.
Tags: unity vfx-graph bug-report debugging gamedev workflow quartz