My First Real Wall

When I started building Species Zero, the idea sounded almost too fun to be scary.

A mobile-first creature evolution game. You raise strange little AI-generated creatures. They change over time. You feed them, watch them grow, maybe feel a little attached to them in the way you do with digital pets and plants you forgot to water.

At the beginning, it was called Genesis Beasts, which still makes me smile because it sounds much more confident than I felt.

I started on June 13, 2026, with Lovable Cloud and a stack of technology I did not understand at all. I knew the broad idea. I did not know the plumbing.

And the first real wall came fast.

Account creation looked broken.

That sounds simple enough when I write it now, but in the moment it felt like the whole project had hit a locked door. I was trying to create an account, and from my side it seemed like it had failed. No satisfying confirmation. No clear “you’re in.” Just that sinking feeling of, “Well, that didn’t work.”

Except later it turned out the account had actually been created.

So the thing was working and not working at the same time, at least from my very non-technical point of view. That is a special kind of confusing.

If something is completely broken, you can point at it and say, “That’s broken.” If something works properly, wonderful. But this middle zone — where the system quietly succeeds while the screen makes you think it failed — is where my brain starts looking for the exit.

I remember feeling embarrassed, even though no one was sitting there judging me. I had this thought: if I can’t even get past creating an account, what business do I have trying to build an evolution simulator?

Then came another wall: missing pieces behind the scenes.

There was a missing package called @radix-ui/react-tabs, which caused 504 errors. A 504 error, in plain English, is basically the app saying, “I tried to load, but something took too long or got stuck.” To me, it felt like a blank wall with a number painted on it.

The AI could point to the missing part. It could help fix it. But I still had to sit there in the discomfort of not understanding the language of the problem.

That is the part I did not expect.

I expected building with AI to feel like skipping the hard parts. Sometimes it does. But other times it feels like being handed a very capable helper who speaks calmly while the kitchen is on fire.

The helper may know what to do. I, however, am still standing there holding a spatula.

What made this first wall especially hard was that the game was still so young. There was no momentum yet. No satisfying loop. No little creature I was proud of. Just a half-formed idea, a broken-looking login, and error numbers I did not understand.

It made me question the whole thing earlier than I expected.

And honestly, that feeling has come back more than once. Later, I looked at the game and said, “This game is not good.” That led to better ideas — creature thoughts, overnight dreams, random events, prettier art, and a clearer sense of why a player would come back. But before any of those bigger design questions, I had to survive the boring first kind of panic: the app won’t even let me in.

The fix was not glamorous. It was not a movie moment. It was more like slowly untangling Christmas lights. The account issue had to be understood as a user experience problem, not just a technical one. The missing package had to be added. The app had to be coaxed back into loading.

And I had to learn that “broken” is not always one thing.

Sometimes broken means the code is wrong. Sometimes it means a missing part. Sometimes it means the app did the right thing but explained itself badly. And sometimes it means I am overwhelmed and need to walk away for ten minutes.

That may be the biggest lesson from the first wall.

I did not need to understand everything to keep going. I needed to describe what I was seeing, admit what I did not understand, and let the next small fix be enough.

Small takeaway: sometimes the first wall is just learning how to stay in the room.