A fork in the road. Two possible strategies to develop the game.

Hello! This post got a little long, but is very, very, important!

The Ryona Assassins Unity project got somewhat spaghettified, and I was thinking it could really use a good restructuring. I've learned a lot while working on the game, and all of the decisions I made were the best ones I could make at the time. But my inexperience made me make some errors, that while not directly affecting the player experience, they do have an impact in the way I work on the game. To describe it in a simple way, my project is way too messy, so much that I have a difficult time making things work at moments.

The direct way this affects you is that it forces me to simplify some things about the game. To give you a precise example, I used to have a behavior where the dorus performed a melee attack when the player got too close. I have removed that in the current private development build because the way I coded that logic was pretty chaotic, so to speak, and is not playing well with the new better-made AI.

That is an example of the type of negative effects my spaghetti code is having at this point in the development of the game. Things like that are happening more often than before. The good news is that I think I'm "outgrowing" these newbie mistakes, as I keep discovering more organized ways of coding, just by trying different things out on new projects.

So, this leaves me with a choice for the path I'll lead to project on. I could start again, importing as much logic as I can from the current project, but redoing most stuff in a way that won't give me these type of problems in the future. Or I could work my way to the final game without major restructure.

The first option, to re-do the project, is like an investment. We would invest more time without more apparent progress to the development of the game. In return, we would get a project that could potentially support more features, because adding things to it wouldn't necessarily break stuff constantly that would require me diving deeply into the code of the game every time to see what's causing problems.

The second option, to just work with what we have at the moment, is the faster one. I would finish the game a lot quicker (though I can't think of an ETA). The catch is that there's the chance that I would have to take away some planned features if can't find a way to make them work without having to "entangle" my code even more. Another side effect will be the possibility of having some more notorious bugs in the final game that could be very hard to fix.

Personally, I don't know which one is the right decision. I could pick either one. What is making me feel more anxious about it is that I don't know what my audience, you, would prefer. I've been keeping you guys waiting a very long time, with my HDDs gone and all. I imagine that telling you to wait even more time would be bad news. But I also want to give you a good game!

Vote for the path you'd like the project to take. Long wait with a better result, or faster development with a more simple game?