My hiatus is over 📄 posted at 25 September 2024 on new danboland

I want to write some long spiel. I want to talk about the state I was in when BR initially released – my health, my weight. The hoarder flat I lived in with barely a trampled forest path between my desk and the adjacent couch where I slept because my bed was no good. The things I’d lose after the release, and the things I’d lose after I lost those things. The things nobody tells you to pay until you’re about to see a bailiff for not paying them. The constant, humiliating costs of being born into poverty. The narrow thread of support offered by local resources, decisively cut when the pandemic hit. The teeth lost and repaired. The addiction relapsed and beaten.

The recovery, the slow-and-gradual weight loss, the good lads from the council who eventually helped clear my place out¹. The promise to commit at least one thing to one of my Github repos every day for the rest of my life. The lessons learned. The years aged. The slow and constant murder of the notion that everything sucks, especially myself, and nothing ever gets better.

The daily extermination of a particular bug in my brain. One that sees work released to the public as under a pure, hateful and perfect scrutiny – an intrusion into space, or at least something that puts one… under suspicion. All these lines of code creating a chasm between myself and “The Audience”, instead of a bridge.

But let’s cut it there.

I’m done hiding and done cursing my own name. BRDA, a new and improved version of a game that still so stubbornly refuses to be either perfect or bad, is now in public beta, and hopefully only a long and vaguely tedious list of tweaks and bugfixes from being truly done.

It’s been humbling to work with player feedback again. It worries me to the point of sickness, but it’s ultimately a good thing. One reason I dilly-dallied on this for so long was that I was scared of somehow stealing away or morphing a game beyond recognition, as so frequently happens elsewhere – the feedback I’ve read in one or two nights has done more to prevent this than seven years of pondering. It turns out if you feel such a sense of obligation to people, it could be a hot idea to actually talk to them?

At times I thought this would be some grand summation of the last seven years. That thought is too terrifying and truly nothing could live up to it. The truth is that it’s a step on a road towards the future. That future has been kind and has waited for me for a while – but if I don’t take this step, eventually it’ll fade away.

I have multiple ideas I’m really excited about taking on soon.

Most of them are STGs.

I’ll see you next time.