Game development is just a pile of increasingly cruel exceptions to the rules you set out at the start.

Ancient me: "things should point where they're moving"

Old me: "things should also be able to move via animation, and have that movement count toward the point-where-moving, but only AFTER animation finishes, so we end up pointed in the right direction"

Current me: "actually things should also be able to, optionally, be told to face in the opposite direction of where they're moving. Or in fact any other radial offset."

Don't get into gamedev unless you're a terrible goose, basically

<sobbing> "I'll just set the tweak to direction wherever the original heading-direction is being set"

"it's surely just in one spot near the top, right"

(some of these are OVERLAPPING, and intentionally override prior set values)

@glassbottommeg I just had this experience with a frikkin 90s horizontally-scrolling shoot-em-up. You'd think this tech would be trivial right? Well, there's some gnarly little details...
@glassbottommeg I'm sure you could get ChatGPT to clean that right up.

@glassbottommeg a thing I said at work the other day:

"it's reasonable, I can support it. mostly. I'm sure six months from now I'll curse my name, my father's name, my entire lineage, but for now I'm cool with it"

@glassbottommeg saving this meme for ...personal reasons :')