Chasing Elysium - May 2026 Devlog

May really sucked, I am sad to say. I tried to start finalizing stuff for the prologue and start cracking into chapter 1. I very quickly realized…

some of my code really sucks. Not just some, some critical parts of it.

I also started considering “if I were to show this code to other people, e.g. as part of a portfolio, would I be proud to show it?” The answer is… well I like a lot of the individual bits of code, but the core issue is the architecture is poor. I threw a lot of it together for the purpose of having something working in small bursts during lunch breaks at work.

The good news is I have learned a lot over the last just under a year. I am much better at using Godot, I know some much better practices, I can do this all a lot better now.

So the plan as-of the end of May is I am going to do the really bad thing and rewrite the game. Not from scratch! As I said, there’s a lot of good code I wrote. I’ve made a lot of good general progress. I can reuse a lot of the work I’ve done, and in fact that is the plan. But I am starting from a fresh project, rearchitecting it to be much more well thought out, and pulling good code from the old project to reuse it and get me going a lot faster.

I started this rewrite in the last few days of May. In the last few days I’ve already significantly overhauled the state machine to be far more modular (…I went back to my original design which… I don’t know why I abandoned it so quickly back in July but I sure did!) and rewrote how I handle loading player character data so it’s, again, more modular and easier to dynamically swap which character you are playing as.

I also have plans on how I intend to rework my dialogue engine (which was the third major strike towards “I gotta redo this all”) to make it a lot more usable, particularly in cutscenes, making use of revelations I had a few months ago about using Godot nodes as logic components.

Not gonna lie, I’m real mad at myself right now. But I’m taking it as a sign of how much I’ve learned in just a year. I’m proud of that. Just frustrated. Right now I am working on the game on Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays, and occasionally Sundays. Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays are being used for me to learn web development. We’ll see how it goes!