Snow Captain on Nostr: I'm at a crossroads for Seeds of Earth: start a fresh Unreal project and move over ...

I'm at a crossroads for Seeds of Earth: start a fresh Unreal project and move over the stuff I like from the old project, or stick with the current project and re-build things with all of my prior work immediately available. Both have merits. A fresh project allows me to change the organizational structure and remove 5+ years of cruft, prototypes, old assets, and whatnot. However, rebuilding/migrating the things I want to use is a non-trivial process and means that the game is now unplayable, and likely will remain so for weeks while this new start is under way.

It's not clear which approach is the best to take at this time. I have run into this issue more than a few times in my career and it's always a difficult one. In the past, the other engineers and managers would try to ban suggestions to "refactor" or "rebuild" systems because the desire to do so came up frequently, and often did not result in user-facing improvements. The CTO of Backflip once said "We don't make software, we make games. I don't care if the code is messy or unfriendly or old; as long as it delivers the intended experience to the player, we don't need to prioritize "fixing" the code." This is a sentiment I have carried with me ever since, especially since I am prone to falling into this desire to "update, reorganize, and improve" existing code often.

I am still in the process of prototyping and designing the new Seeds of Earth experience, so I have a short while to decide which of these approaches works best. But I can tell that the decision either way will not be an easy one.

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