Thoughts Postmortem

Working on a prototype of a game isn't for everyone, much less a game that you're unsure will ever see light of day.
When I look at this project my main thought about it is that I could've had it done faster, if I had to remake it I could get it done in maybe 1-2 days if I worked diligently.

My main takeaway is probably the simplest, scrap and redo rather than try to constantly improve a failing system. Said system that didn't quite work out in the prototype was the AI. It was sort of braindead.

This was due to that it used of list of actions it could take that it checked every x seconds (0.5s to be exact), whenever it reached an action in that list it checked conditions that affected a score value which if high enough made it take that action during that 'turn'.
This led to that due to movement having higher priority that it moved around a lot but it was mostly aimlessly. It almost never blocked either because the circumstances to reach that required the other actions to have a low score value.

My solution wasn't to scrap the entire system admittedly, but rather to rework it from ground up.
It still checks what to do every X seconds, but when it does it immediately figures out the score of every action it could take. Afterwards it picks the highest scoring action and does said action. Which means that etc. when a player is attacking the guard action spikes in score and the AI tries to block or when a player moves out of range the AI will try to exit a defensive stance to move closer.

Thanks to this the AI acted with a bit of a goal in mind: Get close to player, enter a stance and wait for an opening.

Which honestly in retrospect is how I should've made it immediately, it's an obvious system for a simple duel game. While this doesn't work perfectly all the time, it proved functional enough to where I was happy to release the prototype as is. If I were to develop this further I'd improve animations and make the AI less predictable, but the former I don't have the skillset for and the latter I don't have the time for at this point in time.