Edit: TYPICAL, I type all this and Enlit responds themselves, hahaha. But my idea that it could theoretically be a complete overhaul seems to be correct. What technical issue did HRT encounter
enlit3d ?
Well for starters, there is that famous stuck at "loading" bodyMeshNAnim.json bug that affects 5%-10%? of people. I could never reproduce it on my machine and I tried many guess-work fix builds with various people that had this issue but no dice. It's not stuck at loading bodyMeshNAnim btw, its stuck at the initialization stage in between loading is completed and game start. It's not a crash either - the game is actually running so there is no stack trace. I suspect it's a multi-threading problem/dead-lock, potentially from a bug in the runtime environment.
The other big issue is that the code is written in Javascript, which with it's typeless nature means it doesn't scale up well to large size software. I knew this beforehand. My original plan was to only make Heroine Rumble (a smaller and much simpler game) and then be done. So Heroine Rescue Team was very much an encore after hearing people want more games from me. I got lazy and decided to continue from Heroine Rumble code base. Bad idea.
So with JS, the performance was not on par with what I wanted. As you know, I wanted to make a Mount and Blade style game with large battles, which means I want to support like 100 on screen units so it can be 50v50. But the game can only do about 30 units on 60 FPS. Looking back, some of it stems from the game design. The anybody-can-sex-anybody feature requires lots of concessions elsewhere. For example, if I do not need to implement during-combat-sex, I can get away with unit skeleton with much less bone count, like how it is in Mount and Blade and TotalWar games.
That's where CATC comes in. A remake of a HRT-style game in a new, much faster engine. I chose a tactics game because it's the kind of game I personally enjoyed, but it also confers certain advantages over real time games: one-hand-play-ability, direct control of what your party members (I got a ton of suggestions on various AI party member grievances in HRT), pausibility (how long it is to escape sex during combat is a very difficult topic), easier time to implement non-humanoid units due to less animation requirements, and so on.