As soon as I start having game data, I immediately create the functionality for saving and loading it.

I use POCOs to store the data, and I always make sure that they are easily serializable to json.

This was not always so.

I used to persist to a SQLite database.

Which made adding new world data slower than it needed to be.

And it made refactoring it absolutely awful.

So now: JSON!

My save and load functions become effectively one line.

And once I have any sort of world data object, I can persist it to a file and load it from a file.

And thus completes all of the non-gaming part of the project.

Approximately, it took 4-6 hours to get to this point.

Now I can FINALLY make this into a game!