Amusingly after discarding the old todo list I think I got like 4 items done on it this week, plus a ton of miscellaneous things that weren’t on any list. So things are going great. I’ve got two items left on the short list and I’m going to try to push to have them done this week. Not necessarily easy to do since one of them is an issue with the map generation that completely wrecks the intended balance, so it really must be dealt with before testing.

The main reason for the sudden increase in productivity is that I’m really pumped to see whether these changes are actually going to work. It’s so close I can taste it. Even now I can kind of get a feel for how it plays and get the very slight impression that this just might work. And I hope it does. This has been our darkest year, so if we can go out on a win that would make all the difference for morale.

There’s a question that has been on my mind for awhile now: what if the revisions don’t work? Doing another year of just rebuilding the foundation isn’t really acceptable. But it might not be impossible if necessary. A big reason why I altered the game the way I did is because it allows me to make some sweeping changes to it without necessarily programming a ton of new stuff. There’s a fair chance of being able to really mine down into the potential space and finding something better in there. And if it doesn’t end up sucking, it’s still a great way to make the game feel different between each scenario.