January 26th
Sometimes the best thing you can do with a difficult problem is to turn to something else. Distraction often opens your mind to other possibilities. It might take a while, but often it’s faster to let it simmer in your mind than to rush into a series of bad guesses that just don’t work. I was stuck fast with my attempt to build the tree for the Barroom Brawl storyworld. I had started at the top and tried to work my way down, but I couldn’t get any further than this:
So I spent the last three days on other tasks. The answer came to me: why start at the beginning? Why not start at the most interesting part and work out from that? So I started over, getting something like this:
I could just go with this, but I think that I can meld some of the stuff in the first tree into the main tree. Poof! Problem solved!
However, I’m not going to rush into implementing this. I want to let it sit in my mind for another day or two. In the meantime, there are some stupid programming and documentation issues that I must get to work on.