reintroduced the coding for difficulty setting and programmed a play time clock, so that I can finally see how long the gameplay itself is added the ticker to the menu and save file displays, although doing so required rebuilding a bit of the player’s prefab and animator graph. learned about sub-state machines as a result and condensed the config menu sections into their own for greater organization. the game seconds you’ve played is stored as an integer in the save game file, then converted back on load using the TimeSpan class and the selected difficulty is serialized as an enumeration also segregated the config sections for the title screen by creating separate prefab versions for that scene, so I wouldn’t confuse them with the main ones. unfortunately, the title menu needs to be sort of a unique scenario, but I did get rid of the hacky way I was animating panels with multiple OnClick events per button and custom scripts, in lieu of creating a single function for each button inside the menu script. it is a more consistent and direct approach, even if the code itself is a bit redundant and should be refactored, but with any luck it will be easier for me to comprehend in the future still need to add the separate calculations for the difficulty settings and a prompt to select one on starting a new game… should also probably add a prompt for lowering it if the player dies on the tutorial stage, or something along those lines