unplugging sparked creativity?

 So my father-in-law had a fall 2 months ago, and since then he's had spine surgery, recovered from pneumonia, went into rehab (which did a horrible job, in fact it was a waste of time), and has now been back home for about a week slowly trying to get back to normal (he had a couple episodes where he almost went into a coma because of low blood sugar because he's on like 15 pills and doctors aren't great at tracking that stuff).  My hope is that my tag teaming with my wife being there basically 24/7 to make sure he's stable fades off and I can get back to normal life.  Since I've had no access to my computer, I actually took one of my 3d printers to their house so I can keep doing print jobs for clients.

Since I had free time I decided to use it to sketch ideas on paper old school.  Sometimes I forget how important it is to just freely think out ideas without getting into detail.  Just kept sketching stuff on a new piece of paper (what if I did this?  I bet I could squeeze that feature under there).  I've got 2 upper playfields now, and I'm realizing just how many songs I can re-use on each (with a neat feature I'm surprised nobody has tried before).. AND on top of that, the shapes of the playfields ended up being the first letters of the band so I'm taking a nod from data east guns n roses.  I've never been so motivated to get back into it.. I can't wait to start showing some progress.

Homebrew is getting so good.. that makes it hard

 After seeing all the games at Chicago Pinball Expo this year it made me realize two things:

1. If you want your game to get noticed, if the theme isn't killer (big trouble in little china) you better have an interesting mech.

2. If you can't come up with a killer mech, your game should stand out as being very different from the standard pinball cabinet (2x scale, head-to-head).

I'm also realizing I may want to put my new theme on hold for a very good reason and go back to blue.  I think in most cases, your first homebrew isn't that great (there are some exceptions) and I want the other theme to really be executed well after getting a finished game under my belt.  I don't know that I'll have a cool mech, but I have been pondering the idea of an interesting cabinet.. one that will make homebrew tours to multiple shows way more feasible.  As an engineer, I always try to do small experiments to see if something is going to work out.. if I have some success, I scale it up.  I just made a prototype of something and I was sort of blown away by how well it worked (did the math of scaling up and the results were even better than expected).  After going through the cost of a cabinet (mostly hardware) for sure I want to design my own cabinet, and as long as I'm doing that I'm going to cost reduce it, simplify it, lighten it.

Secondarily, I need to just START.. Like I need to build a simple rotisserie, cut a piece of wood and start mocking up my playfield up again.  If you never start, you'll never finish.