I've lately been working on Gestalt again (on the basis that it's the project most likely to produce a working product in the next six months) and I ran into a very sudden realisation.

I was facing spiralling levels of difficulty in implementing new functionality. In particular, translating the mathematics of the mechanics from the physics model in Box2D to the screen component used to render the inside of the Node was becoming especially complicated, particularly given that since I discovered that running multiple simultaneous Box2D worlds was impractical, all Nodes had to exist in the same physics world. While I could probably save the previous state and restore, it would be impractically complicated and lead to weird artefacts.

Then somewhere along the line while trying to implement the "flying along a node line" functionality, I realised my error. Having two separate view structures - the Node Map (which now corresponds to the physics world) and the Node Screen was the core of the problem.

Then I realised what was happening.

The existing "Gestalt" is a tech demo, building apparently-living "Axons" from simple physics objects.

But I'm trying to turn it into a game. And that involves a fundamentally different approach.

Quite a large refactor coming up. May be a while, especially given my rather cripplingly slow development rate and a couple of other projects on the go. But once it's done, it's very promising indeed :)