Hi everyone.
This might seem a bit sudden but I'm going to be stepping away from this project for several reasons. I realise a lot of you are just going to shrug your shoulders and throw obscenities my way, but I've been thinking about this for about a month. I'm going to list the reasons for those of you that haven't already disregarded this post. Please note that obviously this doesn't apply to everyone, just some.
1.) Life. Let's face it, balancing a full time job, a social life (involving three circles of friends), a girlfriend, a health condition that gets worse when I'm stressed and a project that people are aware of and want fixes and updates for isn't going to be easy. However a few of those aspects of my life have gone through severe changes in the past few months and I'm finding my time is always spent helping someone, doing something for them or being told not to stress myself out and I'm getting less time to chill. As much as I thought I was superhuman, I'm not. Being sociable and productive is a difficult act to acheive.
2.) People. I'd like to think that I never misled anyone. I always said that the Basic version of this kit was only partially complete so that people could dip their toes in the coding waters. Well after the first release I realised that no matter what method I use to prompt people into becoming more adept with RGSS, they're just going to ignore it. The first release had some bugs, this I am aware of. But the reporting of these was usually someone telling me what was wrong and wanting me to fix it in the next release. If you can't correct a few bugs then how can you add your own moves, items and abilities? The whole point of this being an Essentials upgrade was to allow people to absorb it into their own project and use the extra scripts, not to demand things that, once you have learned a bit of Ruby, you can do yourself.
3.) Ideology. I'm a storyteller. I like to do this stuff to tell a decent story that people will care about hearing and playing. While I've been working on this project and reading the responses I've just lost the energy and the enthusiasm to carry on. There's no story here, it's just me feeding a starving mob some food that they could have caught for themselves but they haven't even tried, they've just held out their knives and forks, hoping that the microwave still works. I AM NOT YOUR MICROWAVE PEOPLE!! I've turned down other projects to do this, projects that I would have loved to have had a part in. But I said no because of my commitments to this.
4.) Hassle. Yes, I have been hassled. Some people have been intent on getting in contact with me. I'm not a personal helpline. I live, I breathe and I quite like talking about non-games things to my non-games friends. Admittedly this is my own fault for giving out the wrong email, but I would have thought people would have tried the PC methods before resorting to typing obsessive/offensive comments through hotmail.
5.) Scammers. Those of them who read this: 'You know who you are.' So many people have exploited me for so long that I can't even keep track of them. Hordes of people have said 'I can do this for you' and I've believed them, given them a copy of the most recent version of the project and heard fudge all from them after that. If everybody who'd said they could contribute actually DID we'd have been done here ages ago. That's not to say that I don't appreciate the help I have got, I just wish that 80% of the people who approached me hadn't been in it for their own interests and that they hadn't bent me over a table and done hideous primal things to me.
I was going to write more but this is actually more painful to write than I'd have thought. I need to get away from this project. If anyone is interested in continuing this then contact me at
[email protected]. My sincerest apologies to wichu, Shaggy_Typhlosion, Ty 101, Boonzeet & all of the people who had a genuine interest in learning from this experience. If I could go back and do things differently, I would. But Time Turners don't exist and i'm not Dr Emmit Brown. I just don't have the space/energy in my life at the minute for something of this scope. I'm so sorry.
