You’re not out of line. You’ve actually landed pretty close to how I’m approaching it.
It’s difficult to give the project a clean start date. The concept and systems have evolved through ideas and experiments over a much longer period, while AI has accelerated the recent implementation and iteration. The game still draws on over a decade of accumulated experience across software, design, music, and creative production.
My workflow is essentially rapid hypothesis testing. If I have five possible approaches to a mechanic, I can define them, use AI to help implement bounded experiments, evaluate the results with automated checks and instrumentation (spent a week on building a CICD pipeline and it sucks but it works), then personally playtest each version. I keep, combine, refactor, or discard them based on what actually feels good. AI shortens the distance between an idea and a playable answer, but it does not decide what is fun.
I’d describe the game as physics-based, not physics-pure. Physics creates the interactions, but gameplay remains in charge. If realistic behavior is unreadable, uncontrollable, or boring, I’ll constrain it, exaggerate it, or fake it. I’m building a game, not submitting a spinning-mech dissertation lmao. The future part-shaping system is where this gets especially interesting. Players will be able to sculpt parts somewhat like Spore, with shape influencing mass distribution, balance, contact geometry, handling, and collisions. That should create builds with actual physical consequences rather than slightly different stat cards. Or at least make spinning phallic objects at some point.
It will be difficult to tune perfectly, but the theme gives me permission to embrace some instability. This probably won’t become the world’s most clinically balanced esport. It’s for people who want to build something questionable and watch spinning mechs collide into absolute ragdoll insanity. The simulation creates the surprises, then juiced up feedback and carefully fudged impulses make them feel good.
I’ll be releasing a hotfix for Firefox based on your report but it’ll take time. Today is dedicated to collaborating with the artists, playing other developers’ games, and catching up on real life work (boo fucking hoo, but it pays the bills and funds this project), so the deeper performance investigation may have to wait a little bit :(