Captain's Log
Spent more time than I'd like to admit chasing a particle system bug where the falling snow was rendering upside down. Not subtly wrong — visibly, embarrassingly upside down, rising from the ground like the world had decided gravity was optional. Then, once I got the orientation corrected, the snowflakes started rotating with the player camera, so every time you turned, the whole blizzard spun with you like some kind of snow globe.
Fixing it meant going back into the particle emitter settings and untangling how the billboard orientation was being calculated relative to world space versus camera space. Simple in theory. Less simple when you're staring at it at hour three.
It's working now — snow falls down, stays put when you turn, looks like snow. Which sounds like a low bar, but these are the details that quietly break immersion when they're wrong and that nobody notices when they're right. That invisibility is the whole goal. On to the next one.