While frantically moving house has shot my 12-month plan to pieces, then swept up those pieces and carefully stored them in a reinforced cardboard box, I’m still trying to squeeze in time for Cuthbert between packing and organising a move and weeping and packing some more.

With my time more limited than ever, I’ve really been noticing the somewhat bloated, build-a-bit-at-a-time, more-important-to-get-it-done-than-get-it-laid-out-sensibly structure of the code. I’ve been wondering for a while if I should stop and do some refactoring to get Cuthbert in a more sensible state. It’s a tougher question than it seems; when you’re working on your own projects as a developer, it’s all too easy to fall into the trap of perfecting-and-perfecting-and-perfecting and never getting anything done. I could spend a week now moving everything around, cutting down files, restructuring the project, and in a few months’ time, feel like none of the decisions made sense and it all needs restructured again.

But, equally, losing precious minutes when you only have an hour’s lunch break to working out where the code you need is because you have so many subfolders with the unhelpful name of ‘game’ on them doesn’t exactly speed up the development process either.

I’ve been going back-and-forth on if it’s worth spending a few days getting things in order. I’ve been leaning towards no; while it would be useful for me, it would be time where no progress would actually be getting made on the game. It would be time away from doing other things that get the game closer to being done. And I’m not even talking about improving game performance or anything tangible to people playing it – it would purely be for me to find it easier to get around so much code. That’s hard to justify over finishing the UX or the combat system.

Not even the XKCD chart could help me. Because I don’t understand XKCD charts. _{Randall Munroe, XKCD}

But then my flat exploded. And my timetable exploded with it. And now I’m starting to think spending a little time now to save time every single day I’m coding on this could probably be justified.

Probably.

We’re set to move mid-February, which means I’m not going to be able to work much on Cuthbert until March, since we’ll have all of the unpacking on the other end to get through, along with Pinterest DIYs. And replacing all the furniture we ruin attempting Pinterest DIYs.

My plan is to organise my house, then to organise my code, then to… work out how on earth I can get this project done. And what on earth I was thinking starting it.