Should I develop my game idea in text mode first?
I recently came up with an idea for a simulation/strategy game.  I've been sketching out a lot of my ideas on paper about the game mechanics as well as have a few of the basic classes and objects working.  (I'm writing this in C# using XNA).

One thing that is painfully obvious to me though is that I am not a graphic artist and trying to get anything graphical programmed right now is frustrating me.  One thought that came to mind was trying to make the entire game work off the text console first.  I remember spending hundreds of hours playing Zork and Hack as a kid and the majority of my game element ideas don't require real time sprite animations to work.

So my question to the community here is should I try to maintain my enthusiasm for concept by focusing on getting it to simply work in a text base mode first and then regroup on giving it a pretty graphical interface?

OR

Tackle the graphical interface hill at the same time I'm trying to flush out my idea?

During the course of writing this question I think I answered it for myself, but I would love to hear thoughts from people.
Should I develop my game idea in text mode first?
===

I recently came up with an idea for a simulation/strategy game.  I've been sketching out a lot of my ideas on paper about the game mechanics as well as have a few of the basic classes and objects working.  (I'm writing this in C# using XNA).

One thing that is painfully obvious to me though is that I am not a graphic artist and trying to get anything graphical programmed right now is frustrating me.  One thought that came to mind was trying to make the entire game work off the text console first.  I remember spending hundreds of hours playing Zork and Hack as a kid and the majority of my game element ideas don't require real time sprite animations to work.

So my question to the community here is should I try to maintain my enthusiasm for concept by focusing on getting it to simply work in a text base mode first and then regroup on giving it a pretty graphical interface?

OR

Tackle the graphical interface hill at the same time I'm trying to flush out my idea?

During the course of writing this question I think I answered it for myself, but I would love to hear thoughts from people.