things got crazy toward the end of the week, so i am posting what was meant to be Friday’s entree a day backdated. i went from thinking i had irrevocably broken things and having to loose a week’s worth or so of work from going in the wrong direction, to almost getting the exact functionality i was looking for. i was so confused i started looking up how to more effectively use Visual Studio to debug a Unity project. eventually, i felt like i was backsliding so much that i even unzipped a backup from two days prior. as far as i know, i only changed one or two scripts and was able to salvage my work. still, i hope i am going in the right direction using DontDestroyOnLoad() on the player. the only other thing i can even think to do instead, is save player data at the end of a scene and load at the start. i wonder what the best practice really is?