was gonna post this on birdapp but balls to that, I want longform!
this thread from delaney king actually touches on something i noticed my prototypes delve into quickly lately--especially menu construction, linking up options to menu selections, and early localization backbones.
the critical thing that delaney mentions here--how it teaches you a lot about structuring your game so that you have less of a chance of not botching your execution on certain things next time--definitely applies here, but it also, at least for me, hearkens back to a personal design philosophy i've tried to spread in my capacity as a teacher to my students during my day job: grit > glamor.
what does that mean? put simply, your game being pretty doesn't mean jack shit if it's not functional--and a large part of functionality is all that nitty-gritty stuff, like getting your menuing set up or having glyphs that adjust to your current set of keybinds, or having your settings save & load correctly, etc.
obviously these are not easy problems to solve, but i think where i stand now is that when you have limited resources (time, etc.) as a solo developer, small team, or indie studio, then you have to make these things your priority first to compensate for the fact that you won't be able to do them as easily later, and at least with the progress i've made with vcb and ulkss so far I think it's largely based on the fact that i have the codebase in place to set up menuing relatively fast and now have the experience to start dealing with localization just as early.