"Why does your prison have no bars, esteemed Jailer?"
"Because the belief that there is a cage is sturdier than any steel I could ever forge."
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I used to post a lot in these threads throughout 2023, then I just... disappeared, like so many before me. I am writing this because I wanted to get some closure.
I started making my roguelike on April 30, 2022, as a fun way to learn programming and to tie the acquisition of a useful skill with my favourite time-wasters - daydreaming and video games.
I followed the Broughlike Tutorial written by the developer of Golden Krone Hotel, because it seemed to be the simplest. Sure, I had toyed around with some Python console printing here and there before... but nothing as involved as a proper application.
For the following 2 years, I constantly wavered between obsession and disinterest, alternating periods of unreal productivity and utter apathy. I restarted from scratch 4, 5, 6 times - honestly, I've lost count at this point. The "core mechanic" got constantly uprooted and replaced by something else, but the surreal characters and setting always stayed.
As it tends to happen when a person does a certain thing a lot of times, I ranked up my programming skill to a tier I can confidently say is "better than clueless", and discovered that my DCSS aptitude for Computing in real life is probably positive.
In February 2024, fuelled by my growing dread about academia and my disillusionment for working in science, things went turbo. I met a truly amazing mentor and friend. I programmed my first ever non-video game piece of software. I had already been interested in the Rust programming language and had done a gamejam game + a partial rewrite of my main roguelike in it, but my torch truly blazed with radiance at this moment, and my studying became relentless. I won a local competition (and started my own website to post a writeup about it). I discovered tech blogging, and found that the denizens of r/rust enjoyed my writing. I posted more.
At the time I am writing this, I am now alternating between my first ever internship at a software company, and my contributions to the Rust programming language as a result of being accepted in their partnership program with the "Google Summer of Code". I am basically doing tech 50-60 hours a week. I'll be going to the big Rust conference happening in my city this September.
It suffices to say, life picked up, and the traditional roguelike community had a major part to play in all of it. It was the seed that made me discover this field, the excuse I needed to get cracking and learning an useful skill.
But. There is something haunting me through all this sudden success, a shadow I can't ever dispel out of my mind. Visions of a forest where the leaves are knives, a spire of intangible fluffy clouds skewering the sky, cyan eyes where individual thoughts go to dissolve in an ocean of lives.
I promised to those daydreams I'd give them a place to call home. A work in which they could exist, somewhere else than within my mind where they keep shifting and spinning like thoughts in a metaphorical laundry machine.
And now that so much is happening... How can it be acceptable to give those visions what they want? I won't learn anything about low-level memory management while making some silly game. I won't receive a killer line to put front and center on my resume and make recruiters collapse in sudden begging. It will just be hours and hours, down and down the drain, chasing a 2-year sunk cost fallacy.
I banish the thoughts, as the logical thing to do is. I go through my day's work. I settle down in bed, happy with a job well done.
A thought pierces through my satisfaction - a spire made of fluffy clouds.