...one of those fork-in-the-road days. One of those days where you think: right, well working on this has been most educational, but now it's become very flabby with lots of things that aren't used any more, it uses two different systems, and maybe it'd be better if I just started from scratch and cherry-pick the good bits.
Plus, a fair chunk of the code is AI generated. Which was a conscious decision on my part at the beginning, as a) I needed to learn a completely new and different language, and b) my brain was fried from taking 6 grams of poison every day and it nearly killed me.
My brain is mostly back to its normal sparky self, so this could be a good opportunity to rewrite the thing entirely using scenegraph, rather than the hodge-podge of scenegraph, creative props and level loading via data layers, smoke and mirrors.
The AI journey was quite interesting. The mask slipped, revealing the machine inside a few times; mainly where it got so far down a rabbit hole it couldn't step back and look at the bigger picture - I suppose that's where experience comes in. It seemed quite blinkered at times - I'd often say "surely there's something about this in the Epic online docs", and it'd reply with "That's a good idea - oh look - here's a complete solution to our problem!". I can see where slop merchants can get stuck when they don't know what they're doing.
It's also a good time to revise the design. When I first started Bonk! it was merely an exercise for my brain, to shake off the chemo-induced fog and get the synapses firing again. I didn't look into Fortnite, what the game is about, nevermind the myriad of game types, what other Indie games are like on there, the ecosystem, nothing. Probably a slight omission when designing a Fortnite game....
I've never really played FPS games. Despite being there at the beginning with Wolfenstein and Doom, I was more interested in how they executed pseudo 3D than playing the things. "Game design is all about the verbs - what you DO in a game", as Chris Crawford used to say - and all I found was "shoot stuff". Things have moved on a bit since then.
So, before I embark on Bonk v2 (under a different name, part of the redesign), I'm honing my Fortnite skillz to really find out what it's all about. I'll be slaying like a good'un, or realising my reaction times are shot, reflecting the old man I've become 😅