Moving from Gamemaker to Love2D ate four months of my time but tooling was a big reason why. Before that my big thing was having to recode the level editor but I ultimately ate the cost. It has everything but multiplatform export but I decided realistically, as a first time developer, I wasn't exporting to the switch (for example) anyway. It still nets me windows, mac, and linux export, plus android (and ios I think).
Big thing was I realized how much reinventing the wheel in Gamemaker was eating my time. I spent a couple weeks writing my own tweening library, and then another week debugging it and a week more improving it for some edge cases and specialization. And then theres figuring out the work flows for using arrays as lightweight objects, realizing timelines weren't deltatimed, build times being 1-2 full minutes for a single change (versus other tools that have hot reloading), and so on. 2019 Q4 they're finally bringing functions and methods to objects, plus light weight objects. it was just a bunch of papercut type complaints. Yeah yeah I know, don't blame the tooling.
Eventually I just said "you know, I'd love to be able to export/import to json or another structured format without worrying about if the type conversion is going to lead to errors because of issues with embedding datastructures in datastructures." I wanted a flexible map format and it was just too much to work around GMs issues yet again.
It's still a great tool, but with Love2D I got full access to the filesystem, decent multiplatform support sans console, access to a proper scripting language, object support (and classes, and mixins with moonscript), fast rebuild/testing (seconds), the works. Also plenty of free libs to work with, instead of reinventing the wheel.
In fact I was looking at your map format and it looks like you're using CSV for it? It's funny because thats the exact route I'd started down before I moved to L2D. I was only looking at it because I think it would be interesting to write a map or scene editor.
I think we all like to keep a notebook (or in my case a stack of em lol). Your logic card game looks superfun. I have the opposite problem you do, doing art for too long fries my brain. Used to do art over at opengameart, just little things, was starting to get good, just didn't know what to do with it. Spent a lot of time teaching my sisters. You'd be amazed how easy kids tune out if all anyone does is give them praise. Long time ago I saw an article saying "for every criticism, give them three comments on what they did right." (and vice versa) or something like that and oh my god, it's absolutely true. Just the right amount of feedback on what to work on, and what they did right, and the encouragement of it works wonders. One of them is doing skin packs for minecraft, making $350ish checks a week. Couldn't be more damn proud. Kids are great, teaching is great. It's hard to break people of the "it's all about talent" mantra too. And the better they get the more they bump into the skill plateau and resort to thinking it's about talent, instead of 'work work work, practice practice practice', but thats true of any skill. Got it pretty well ingrained in them at this point.
Same is true of coding I guess. Have to build up your foundation and stamina for it.
The irony of staying healthy I'm only just now starting to recognize. 8 hours in a chair isn't healthy for anyone. "Fail quickly" I wished I'd known sooner, but "if wishes were horses," as they say.
If you already have a sequel planned out I take it that means you have plenty of content planned which is cool.
I'm really looking forward to seeing this succeed, and watching both the game's story unfold, and your own.
How big is your world map btw, and how many current locations do you have? I came across ellie's orphanage and steven's farm so far.