Tech Trees, and Introspective

First the progress. I've got a pretty good handle on how the campaign will work. I've prototyped it out a bit and I think it's going to work. Basically, threats make the map more wild and unsafe, scouting the land reveals threats, removing threats make the land safer. Safer land allows towns to expand and increase your overall capacity to act. That's the core feedback loop.

Next, I've taken a stab at the tech tree for Legacy. This is very much a first draft, and it's not even really finished, but it might be enough to move forward with in order to test out the core concept. Basically, much of your knowledge comes from researching monsters you fight, and from exploring the lands. You can then combine and extrapolate on that to unlock further capabilities.

Now the introspection. Being a stay-at-home parent is really challenging! I'm not dealing with it as well as I'd like to. I think that's mostly because I expect to be getting work done, but, getting work done is very difficult since Ben is no-longer napping. This leads to me feeling grumpy and unproductive. As a result I'm not as good of a father as I'd like to be, and I still don't really get any work done.

I'm starting to pull out of it. I realized that the shift in my home situation was only half of the reason I wasn't working on the game. Generally, when I avoid something, there's a reason. The reason is usually that I don't understand what I'm supposed to do or why it's important. The trick, and this is surprisingly subtle, is realizing what's going, and then figuring out what is actually blocking me.

In this case, I wanted to work on the campaign, but every time I sat down to code, I came up with an excuse, or I was interrupted by my toddler, or I used my toddler as the excuse. What I realized was that, although I have a lot of loose ideas and plans for the campaign, I absolutely didn't have a detailed design or plan. The action items that were at the top of my list were just not that important. I think I knew this, and so I refused to work on them.

In order to break the funk, I went back to Legacy's first principles, and moved forward from there until I found something I genuinely didn't understand: What is the player doing for the bulk of the (~100+ year) campaign? Writing out this tech tree is an attempt to answer that question directly. The player is climbing this tree, increasing their territory, growing and empowering their heroes, until they can take on the final challenge.

Getting this out is a big relief. It's not final, and might be totally overturned, but I think it will give me a foothold, a place to stand so I can build the next few systems. It's interesting to me that this process, of unblocking myself, is one of the hardest things about being a solo developer. Or at least that's how it feels to me. I miss working in a full-time team!