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Sqowopz // scope creep is real

Editorial still-life: a workshop bench overflowing with mismatched objects -- toy pistol, model jet, skateboard wheel, blueprints, a crumbling miniature building, cable coil, a posing mannequin buried at the center -- under a single hanging bulb in a dim studio.

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Sqowopz

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Scope creep is what happens when adding a feature costs less than thinking about whether to add it.

BDL was the first place I noticed. "Make a handgun, add ADS." AI did it. Not one-shot, not perfect, but it wrote hundreds of lines in a blink. So I asked for a slide. It built it. Then I remembered Titanfall and asked for wallrun. Done. None of it took more than a couple of prompts.

Then I tried to write down what genre BDL is, and stopped. A pistol with ADS, a slide, and a wallrun is not a coherent game. It is a movement smoothie. I deleted some of the features and polished the rest, because the cheap part of game development now is the part that does not actually decide what the game is.

BDL training range: a long blue-walled corridor with target dummies, viewed over a held shotgun, a 'BOOTH 2 -- PISTOL: COMPLETE' label up top.
BDL after the feature pile-up. Movement smoothie, no game.

Overmass got the same treatment, slower and bigger. Rubble itself is a scope-creep artifact: it was supposed to be a destruction layer for Overmass and turned into its own project. The original mental image for Overmass was Red Faction Guerrilla with mechs. Every building procedurally fracturable, real-time chunks, the works. Costs follow that model. Levels load slowly because Godot has to generate the buildings and the Voronoi fractures on the fly before the player can move.

Red Faction Guerrilla in-game shot: a structure mid-collapse on Mars, debris cloud, the game's Geo-Mod 2.0 destruction tech demonstration. Image via Wikipedia.
Red Faction Guerrilla, Geo-Mod 2.0. The ambition. Image via Wikipedia.

Then I went back and rewatched the games Overmass is actually trying to channel: MechWarrior 2 and MechAssault on the original Xbox. Neither one has anything close to procedural destruction. Cities blow up because explosions look right. The stack doing the work is small. That was the satisfying part I had been over-engineering for.

MechWarrior 2 (1995) in-game shot: cockpit HUD, low-poly mech rendered in mid-90s 3D, a target on a flat-shaded plain.
MechWarrior 2, 1995. The reference Overmass actually channels. Image via Wikipedia.

So BDL and Overmass are locked at their current scope. BDL pivots to manual work; I am going to model and rig some of its assets by hand instead of asking for the next mechanic. Overmass gets stripped to bare minimum: no lighting pass, no extras, only what supports the procedural animation polish and the moment-to-moment gameplay feel I had drifted away from.

Rubble's building tuner: a single tall building mid-collapse with a chunk blown out of the back-right face, beside a sidebar of sliders for floors, width, depth, taper, and four destruction values.
Rubble, the destruction layer that scope-crept itself into its own card.

Overmass gets the bulk of my attention from here. BDL is on hold but functional. Talon and Marrow stay at the back of the queue. Talon I still like, for what that is worth on a queue that is already long.

If anything new ships from a project that is not Overmass, it will show up here. Until then, "no" is the feature being added.

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