Devlog: Learning by Doing Has Its Downsides (Patreon)

When I started working on MindWare several months ago, I didn't know what I was doing and most of my time was spent trying to make things work by any means necessary.

Whenever I would successfully solve a problem, I would quickly move on to the next challenge. This continuous shift in focus created a patchwork of solutions that, while functional in the short term, weren't built to scale or maintain. As the game's complexity grew, the ad hoc methods started to conflict with one another, leading to a tangled web of code that became increasingly difficult to manage.

I eventually reached a point where I was spending more time untangling the mess I had created than I was actually making progress on the game. It became clear that I needed to take a step back and reevaluate my approach.

Fortunately, after much invisible work, I am happy to say that much of that work is now done (at least for now), and I'm aaaalmost ready to start working on the open section of Chapter 1. There are still many bugs to be fixed, many optimizations to be made, and many lessons to be learned, but it no longer feels like I'm drowning when I open my editor.

The bad news is that I probably won't be able to release version 0.1.0 this week. Instead, I will release version 0.0.9b to reflect my focus on bug fixes, optimizations, and so on.