Overworld Redesign

I've decided after a lot of deliberation the past 6 months that I don't really care much for the overworld I've made. Even in my small testbed project the amount of computation, rendering, and state management happening in the background as a result of the overworld is bogging the entire project down. One such problem is object buildup and teardown is complex, having to rebuild and validate object pointers is a MASSIVE pain in the butt. This makes AI and simulation much more complicated to write and I'm simply not up to the task as a solo developer. It has an additional effect of making it so that combat is essentially "laid over" the overworld, which is paused and made invisible, because destroying and remaking the overworld every time you enter combat is infeasible. And while this *shouldn't* come with a performance cost it seems to anyways. Deleting the overworld on combat start caused a signficant boost in FPS which I need every bit of given how much stuff happens in combat. Finally it just looks ugly and it's a bit embarassing to look at. Given my complete lack of art resources, I would prefer a more minimalistic and abstract approach that I can later scale up with pretty stuff without breaking the bank.

After exploring several options my conclusion has been to switch from a real time overworld to a turn based one, with abstract nodes and edges comprising the overworld more similar to a strategy/board game. My hope is that by replacing physics-based objects with a more lightweight static UI based overworld, I can drastically simplify object state, rendering, and simulation of the world itself.

As this will entail ripping up huge portions of the code base, it's very difficult to give a timeline as a lot is up in the air. I'll project a generic 2-3 months for now and see how things go. I don't know how much additional content will be made during this time, but I'll try to squeeze some in where I can.