State of the Game, or "Honey, I Broke The Estate!"

(Tl;Dr: Game code is busted, need to start from scratch, could take a while. I could move the story over as is, or take the chance to fix it and put more game in the game. Whatcha think?)

[This is copied from the Discord server, since I know not all of you are in there]

The Estate won't have a public release for January, and it's still very up in the air as to whether I'll even have something for Patreon.

The reason? I've hit a sinkhole. My attempts at setting up the framework for the new content have not been going well, and I've once again fallen into a cascading failure situation. (Fix one thing, two more things break)

Given that this has been happening nearly every dev cycle, I've come to an unfortunate and inevitable conclusion:

I need to remake the game from scratch.

The code base for this game has at this point been three different games. A pet project clone of another fan favorite game that I intended to use to learn Twine development, a game designed to have effectively multiple games worth of content and features, and now a single modular path story that is intended to have a concentrated set of features. As a result, There's a lot of useless code helplessly entangled in regularly-used functions that I'm constantly trying to fix. I've tried going the "rip it all out" method with the unused code, but that only caused a nearly unclimbable mountain of errors. I've gotten a lot of compliments about the game, and I really appreciate them, but the honest truth is I've been inefficiently hacking my way to a finished product, and it's becoming more trouble than it's worth at this point. Eventually, It's going to become unmanageable.

Plus, as a user in another discord server so eloquently put it:

"One of the most important things I've learned over my years is you don't want to go back to your own code 6 months later and not understand the logic flow."

That's the lesson I'm learning the hard way right now. I'm looking back at a lot of my early code, and I had a bad habit of purpose-building, a.k.a making a mountain of functions that only work for a single instance, and in plenty of cases I have multiple functions that do nearly the same thing.

I won't lie, I got so frustrated recently that I spent a day looking at other game engines I could move the game to, and very heavily considered just making this a RenPy VN, but I decided that would be a drastic overcorrection, and would take too much time given I don't know python very well, and I don't have the art to support it.

So, where does that leave us? Well, to be honest, I don't know. I've never had to remake one of my games from scratch, so I don't know what kind of time frame we're looking at.

If I only do a code rebase, then I could probably have this done by the February release. I know what I need the game to do now, and I'm a bit more efficient and knowledgeable with my coding, so I could probably get through it quickly. The bonus here would be that I can just dump the existing story back into the recoded game, and go forward from there!

...I think. I'm also foreseeing a problem with this approach, as the game code and story are also intertwined. I'd have to almost manually retype everything into the new base to make sure I don't end up inheriting any of the issues of the old base, and I have no earthly idea how long that would take, but it probably wouldn't take too long. Mind you, this is just for moving the story as verbatim as possible.

However, this presents a bit of an opportunity. I'm well aware of the glaring errors, extremely linear nature, and plot holes in the story, and have longed for a chance to fix them, but the current setup would require me to have to go through and change a lot of points in the story to properly patch all of these holes. Having to rewrite the game from scratch gives me this opportunity, and I could go back and make those changes, as well as neaten up the story a bit to try to cut out all the admittedly useless part and add more opportunities for player decisions.

So, what do you think? Should I move the story verbatim to get a release out quicker, or should I take the time to polish the story to make it better and more enjoyable to play through? Mind you, this is a decision I'm going to have to make on my own, but I do want to know where everyone sits on this.