8 years ago or so, I got laid off from the infamous 38 Studios. It was my first time being laid off, although I had survived a few sets of layoffs from other tech & game companies. Honestly, it was a relief. I was on my way out anyway.

I was doing a lot (A LOT) of job interviews, and as game job interviews tend to be, they were long, intense, and with a lot of back & forth. In the times I was waiting for callbacks or not doing a design or code test, I decided to sharpen my Unity skills by developing a game. I wanted to bring back an old game I developed on, wait for it...

the Torque engine!

to modern smart phones. With hindsight on this game (Oddictive), and wanting to finish it quickly, I simplified the design. If a Bonsai tree is perfect when no branch can be removed, this was made into just a small twig, compared to the former game. But that was ok, it clicked quickly with the new streamlined design.

I honestly don't know what happened that put it on hold. I remember thinking it was too plain, it was too random, it was a bit frustrating. It was performing terribly on my own smart phone. And I had finally gotten a few offers from game companies.

One or all of the above + a relocation and new job...that probably did it. 

Fast forward 8 some-odd years. Again, I don't know what did it; My recent, game-jam style pursuit of "just making games"? A strange dream about the old game? Or the fact that I updated another game to Unity 2019 + URP, and it was relatively painless, but yielded great results.

The first day I got it running on my phone at 60 fps. Then I added features and VFX and shaders, one by one, to make sure performance remained steady. Eventually, I got the really cool "wiggle" shader working. My old code had plenty of mistakes in it; I righted all the wrongs as I went along, with no judgement, as I was just learning back then. And in fixing, refactoring, and optimizing, I made room for a lot of design space and new features. I didn't want to get too complicated, but I made sure the game ramps up nicely, not the wild-randomness that it was.

Anyway, there's no big conclusion other than here it is, enjoy. Revisit your old prototypes and be nice to your former self.