Inspector assigned variables not assigning in build

So, for the past two hours or so, I was confronting with this weird bug that came out of nowhere.

Without further ado, this is my problem:

Any public variable(that can be assigned in the inspector) isn't showing up/updated in the build but works just fine in the editor. Even if I set the value in code, if the variable is public, it won't show up/be updated. But, if I change the modifier to 'private', it works with no problems.

So, the public variables that existed before the bug, even if I change them(script or inspector, doesn't matter), they hold the value that they had before the bug appeared, and if I try to add new public fields, they just don't show up, here a little example:

 using UnityEngine;
 using System.Collections;
 
 public class TestScript : MonoBehaviour {
 
     public GameObject publicVariable;
 
     void Start ()
     {
         Debug.LogError("publicVariable.name = " + publicVariable.name);
     }
 }

here, I am assigning a gameobject to 'publicVariable' form the inspector. When I run the script in the editor, it works as expected:

 publicVariable.name = GeneratorBoundsLeft
 UnityEngine.Debug:LogError(Object)

However, if I run this on a development build, the Debug.LogError doesn't show up at all.

I hope this was enough information to describe my problem. If code is needed, I will provide.

Any help would be much appreciated.