16 JAN 2021:
No, Scrapship is not getting a TRON makeover . . . but it might be getting a makeover.
I'll explain:
The past week has been very busy with my regular job. There is still plenty of time in the day to work on Scrapship . . . except that now the game is getting to a point where even small percentages of progress are taking much longer to finish than I anticipated.
It's not hard to see why: Scrapship is now over 5000 lines of code that could definitely be organized better. I now probably spend more time playtesting the game than actually fixing it or making significant changes.
So I've been thinking to myself: What if I start "fresh"?
If you look at the two pictures above, that's basically what I did with my Tron tank I modeled in Blender. I made it the first time (top picture) -- it looked okay, but not great. But I learned from my mistakes that time to remake it as you see in the bottom picture. I think we can all agree that the bottom version is much more accurate.
"Starting fresh" on Scrapship does NOT mean starting back at 0. While the code would be re-written, it would be done in a much more logical way that would prevent a LOT of the issues I'm encountering now. Some code might even be transferable as-is.
Graphics, music and audio would all be pretty much unaffected.
In particular, I would be able to solve the following problems:
Framerate / Game loop iterations -- I hadn't thought about it too much, but too much background-math and file-loading can really can bog things down. Nobody likes to play a game that lags.
Aspect Ratio -- I have much to learn about this still, but it is important to make sure the game looks good at different screen sizes.
Debugging -- This one is HUGE! I could have saved so much time if I had better built-in debugging tools.
The other side of the argument is that I could stick with what I have and "make it work", but that would be like trying to "fix" the top Tron tank model to look more like the bottom one.
I think the analogy makes sense. I'm not 100% decided yet, which is where you come in. What are your thoughts? What would you do in my situation? Have you ever started a project and realized over halfway through "You know, I could do this sooooo much better if I just started fresh?"
Whatever I decide, be assured that Scrapship is not going to be abandoned!