Haven't had a blank slate in years. Just a series of tasks that involve reading stale code for a while, assessing that the code is not future proof/won't do what I need, then deciding whether to tear it up and start over, but then realizing the code is used by about 5-10other systems, then deciding to add hacks upon hacks and let the next person to use it suffer.

I mean, that's most gamedev in a nutshell, I guess. Just feels like I haven't done game design in a decade. What happened?