When making a type of change in your game is tedious, first fix things so that it isn't anymore

So part of my balancing work involved buffing the player's abilities when it makes sense. One way to do this is to add new skills on the skill tree. However, the system I had in place for read/displaying the skill tree made me hesitant to do so, as even a simple change was a lot of work.

The previous system involved a text file with a grid of ascii characters laying out the exact location for each node, along with a list of positions below to match each one up with the associated skill. If I wanted to add more nodes, I'd have to manually place it, then calculate the offset and write it below. If I needed to make the grid bigger, I'd have to recalculate the offset of every node for that tree. It pretty much never should have gotten submitted in that state, but it was "good enough" for the simple trees I had implemented. The horror can be found here for those who are morbidly curious.

I noticed that all my nodes were in a grid, so I converted each text file into an xml file describing the skill tree. One example can be found here. I then wrote the xml reader and which would generate from the stored information the grid of characters to display on the screen. Overall it took about three hours to write, test, and submit.

In less time, I probably could have made my balancing changes and "got out" without making things better, but I would have been more likely to not add new skills in the future. Now adding a new skill is as easy as copy pasting an xml node and changing a few lines of text.