Everyone says “Finish what you start” but I think thats backwards. I think the trick is to start things you will finish. I have spent my whole life not finishing what I start. It’s something I am somwhat ashamed of… I have countless applications, games, mobile apps and other coding projects that are in various states of “built”. I have mounds of notebooks full of ideas of business I could start. I have 20-30 notion pages of game ideas that I have spent hours researching and planning. I started writing a book, 40 pages single spaced and I stopped. I have wood shop full of wood working projects that need attention. I could keep going, between hobbies to skills to dreams, I never seem to finish the things I start. I don’t know if its a loss of interest, doubt of the ideas, lack of time or just a combination of things, but I never seem to finish the things I start.

But thats not always true. In 2023 I wrote my first mobile app. It was a mobile companion to a board game I love to play called Frosthaven, the sequel to an amazing game called Gloomhaven. Honestly if you haven’t played them, go to steam and check out Gloomhaven, its challenging but incredibly fun. Whats odd is that I started developing the app in the evenings and within 30 days I had launched version 1.0. It was an amazing feeling! I felt like I could do anything. Like for the first time in my life I actually completed something I set out to do, and further more I completed it fast. It wasn’t an idea that was in a notebook or a Notion page for 10 years being ignored, it was an idea that I had and then executed on.

Thats not to say that the development cycle was flawless, version 1.0 had to be hotpatched within hours because I forgot to enable in app purchasing, details… I also had an incredible amount of doubt. A lot of my ideas stop because I start to think “Who would actually want this” or “This is overcrowded and stupid” and “You aren’t a real developer, no one will pay for this”. Those doubts kill my drive, they kill my desires to publish and to work. But somehow, even though those doubts entered my mind during development, I persisted. Actually I know why I persisted, I persisted because I saw value in the app and the friends I told the friends I was playing Frosthaven with that I would make it for us. That accountability and timeline caused me to answer those doubts with “Oh well, then no one else uses it but at least we will” and “ship it anyway”.

Fast forward to this last weekend. I have a 6 month old son, and sometimes I find myself doom scrolling at 2am while I rock him to sleep. This past weekend I came across a video for Shipaton 2026 and I spent the next couple hours deep diving into what it meant and how I could participate. So without further ado, I’d like to introduce you all to my app, or rather start it, that hopefully a tight deadline and some accountability will cause me to finish.

The app is ??? well here in lies the first problem. My idea is simple, I want to create a fitness game inspired by one of my all time favorite games from my childhood, The Shadow of Yserbius. Yserbius is one of the earliest graphical MUDs (Multi-user Dungeons) to have ever been made. Yserbius is an RPG where you explore around a dungeon and fight enemies, level up and complete some basic quests to win the game. Its a fairly long game and back in the early 90’s you could play it with other folks, teaming up to level up faster or take on harder enemies. My hope for my app is to take real world actions, like workouts and steps and translate them into in game actions like moving through a dungeon and boosting attacks on enemies. Allowing users to explore the dungeon based on their exploration of the real world outside. So naturally my mind decided that the best name was DndGo. A mixture of Pokemon Go and DND, which I thought was genius because people would easily be able to identify the core concept of the app. However after discussing it with my sister, who apparently went to law school, she advised me that "infringing on trademarks is a bad idea” or something like that. So if anyone has any good app name ideas, I am all ears.

Here is a rough unpolished, unworking version of what the dungeon maps look like so far. I’ll make a detailed post later about procedureally generated dungeons and tiles and how it all works but the general idea is that we are diving deeper and deeper into the dungeon…

All in all, I think that maybe the secret sauce to all of this is or the secret of being someone who ships things, is being someone who starts things they are likely to finish. As a new dad, I have to be more selective and particular with my time and that selectiveness at first seemed like a limitation, but the reality is, its what enables me to actually ship things. That and some extra motivation. Shadows of Yserbius was one of the first times I really connected to my dad. When I was 4 or 5 the game was released and my dad fell in love with it. He was one of the biggest nerds ever and got me into gaming and all things nerdom. The games servers shut down in 95 but he found a way to have lan parties for him and me in the house. We would sit on opposite sides of the house and join a party. He would take me around and help me kill all these monsters and I was enamored with the whole world… He passed away suddenly and unexpectedly last April and he never got to meet my son. So in some ways theres a little more accountability here for me to help me start what I finish.