Unconventional radar chart

Devlog #2 – URL & State Persistence Fix
📅 Date: 07/01/2026
⏱ Time Spent: 33 minutes
🧠 Focus: State loading, URL parameters, and persistence

✅ What I Worked On

• Diagnosed an issue where URL/state loading always reverted to the first ability/level (Illumination 1.5)
• Investigated interaction between URL params, localStorage, and initialization logic

🔁 Changes & Fixes

• Relaxed option validation in URL and localStorage loaders
• Ensured loaders return explicit booleans to prevent unintended fallbacks
• Fixed race/overwrite issues by preventing populateLevels from auto-calling updateChart during initialization
• Introduced a triggerUpdate flag so URL parameters and saved preferences can set the correct level before updates occur
• Removed temporary debug logging after confirming the fix

🐞 Bug Details

• Issue: State always reset to default ability/level on load
• Cause: Initialization order caused updateChart to overwrite URL/localStorage values
• Status: Fixed

🧪 What I Learned

• Why initialization order matters in state-driven UIs
• How returning explicit booleans can prevent silent fallback logic
• How to debug race conditions in client-side state loading

⏭ Next Steps

• Add basic tests for URL/state loading
• Harden validation logic without breaking persistence

🛠 Tooling Notes

• Used GitHub Copilot prompts extensively to reason through the bug and validate fixes

Committed previous work.
Ran into multiple issues while testing the site.
Fixed problems including HTML conflicts and broken image paths.
Problem was denoted by the leading trailing slash, server responded with 404 error
Verified that images now load correctly on both local live server and GitHub Pages deployment.