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I’m very glad I did. I threw out the notion of producing a “Dwarf Fortress, but with Vikings and social play” and focused on moment-to-moment pleasures: busy hands in home life (no more setting up situations and waiting for things to happen), sailing with multitouch controls, raiding without complex strategy and micromanagement. I went to a side view with simple sprites (except for the Mode 7-style sailing, inspired by Final Fantasy VI) rather than the isometric projection. I switched to Unity3D so I could get things going quickly and discourage myself from over-reliance on native user interface elements (or, indeed, from fiddling with them to no end). These changes dramatically improved my project’s forward velocity, people enjoyed playing my game more, and I was in a better position to put more social interactions into gameplay.

It seems counter-intuitive that moving towards simple and superficial could make the rich social exchanges I had hoped for more feasible, but it boiled down to the observation my wife had made: If I had spent six months working on home life and farming in such exquisite(-ly boring) detail, there were simply not enough months until May to do the same for sailing, raiding, and social life. I had over-modeled one portion of my game—and not even the important portion, at that! Now that my world signals simplicity, I can employ much simpler types of social exchange without causing inconsistencies in player experience.

So, that’s where Vikingr stands right now. I am currently fleshing it out and extending it with additional social exchanges—not trying to cram sociality into an asocial design.