Plans Secured.

Greetings everyone,

It's time to get back on the bandwagon, and explain my current plans. Although they are always subject to change, I wanted to give everyone an update on what's been going on and where I'd like to see my company, Rise to Ruins and my future projects to go in the future.

As you all know, I've taken an extended break from game development as I focused on myself and my own health, my life, and the people around me. Most of you guys who follow me on Discord or Twitter have seen several of the things I've posted or said over the past year or so. A mistake I made on my previous announcement was the timeline though. I was unaware exactly how bad my mental health actually was at the time of writing it, and thus took an enormously longer time than I expected to start recovering.

The previous announcement is now only half the story, the other half is perhaps fascinating, I'm not sure. But it's another half that should be told, now that it can be.

The last 2 years have been quite an experience for me, good, bad and otherwise. It's hard to articulate it, because of who I am and how I am wired. But I will do my best to explain the situation and what happened. I'm not trying to make excuses, I do not care too. That's not the point.

I won't bother going over my life history again as I did in my previous announcement, but I will add some fun tidbits to it that may have some drastic changes on how everything is perceived, and I hope to give a better understanding as to what happened.

The first, and extremely likely most important addition to the story is on December 16th, 2021. I was officially diagnosed with ASD Level 1, or going by a (now obsolete) term more of you will recognize; I am a twice-exceptional person with Asperger's. If you want an example of what this means, I'm basically a real life Sheldon Cooper, just a bit less hyperbolic about it. (Fellow ASD: I get many people with ASD don't like this comparison, but it's very accurate for people like myself, we're just rare even among the ASD community.)

What does this mean? Well for you guys, not much. For me? Again, not much. I am still who I am, labels don't change that. I'm not magically some other person. But, it does give me clarity and explain some of my past actions, behaviors and why sometimes things just aren't in sync. As well, and most importantly, what the hell happened to me sometime in 2020.

What is important to understand, is why this happened. I've been working my entire adult life, non-stop in the pursuit of success to reach a level of security and stability, I achieved that in mid 2020, 20 years after first entering the workforce and 30 years too young, and my life fell apart. (Weird right?). I now can effectively retire whenever I want, although I won't. That feeling sounds great, until you realize I'm someone with Asperger's who made survival paramount.

I was burned out from 15 years of non-stop work. If you've read my previous announcement, you know my life. I've been on turbo for most of it, and I don't know how to not be on turbo. But I am not on turbo anymore, regardless I don't know how not to be. There in is the problem. In 2020, I suffered a complete emotional breakdown. I was never suicidal, but something was "super wrong". I couldn't articulate it, but something was, in fact, "super wrong". Things kept getting worse and worse, day after day.

Well, I figured out what it was more recently. It was a severe Autistic Burnout brought on by probably a decade of pushing forward non-stop.

I had no idea what this felt like, because I've been on turbo for so long I didn't even recognize I burned out (probably) over 5 years ago, yet I just kept on going anyway. People even asked me "How do you deal with burnout?" and my answer was a hilariously now-myopic "I just don't burn out I guess? I don't know how to stop." The first part was apparently a lie, the second was the truth.

I won't pretend I can handwave away the last two years, I won't even bother trying. But now I better understand how I went from a powerhouse, doing the work of 5 developers across probably a dozen skillsets, to so mentally exhausted and broken I couldn't even open my compiler or Photoshop without feeling tired.

That is ending. I feel much better, I am alive, me and getting back on track. I recognize what happened, and now I am working to a much better work/life balance, that doesn't involve me doing the work of 5 developers.

Course the next and most obvious question is a resounding "What the frick now then?!" Well, gamedev stuff obviously! I have been working on a plan over the past few months for my company, and what direction I'd like to take everything. As with all good plans, it absolutely won't go to said plan, but this is what's on the board:

- Reignite work on Rise to Ruins Update 2, adding achievements, a new goals/reward system, and a new essence generation/praying system.
- Release the entire Rise to Ruins source code in the semi-near future, so anyone and everyone can learn, edit, or do whatever they want with RtR's base code and share it openly with others. (Note: This is NOT mod support in the traditional sense, programmers in the known probably get what I mean by this.)
- A complete redesign of the Rise to Ruins website. Effectively turning it into a basic splash page, and removing the forum. (Will probably update the Steam store page too*)
- Launch of the Project Mary website, my next major project that will likely take 3-5 years to complete.
- Working on smaller projects, that will be done between RtR and Project Mary, these are smaller games. Things you'd normally expect to pay like $2-$5 on Steam. These won't be seen anytime soon though.
- Building a new Java-based 2D Engine that is faster than literally anything else gaming related that exists in Java right now. (and yes, I already have a working prototype that is multithreaded, faster than every single Java engine that exists, and uses 'modern' OGL.) This is the engine Project Mary and my smaller projects will be based on.

I will not ask for your support, but I will ask for your patience as I work through restarting work, and seeking a healthy life/work balance that will avoid all this crap from happening again in my life.

Have fun gaming! I look forward to your feedback on the eventual release of Rise to Ruins Update 2. :)