StarQuest #12: One Man Show

Originally Posted on Jan 14, 2016

If you're a new reader of this blog, welcome! This page tells the story of StarQuest from my perspective. You should start reading from the very first post and work your way back up to here. Most of these posts were written about six months after the events that they are talking about, and all told these twelve installments have been spaced out over a couple of years now. You may notice changes in writing style and general worldview as you read through the blog; reading through the earlier posts now, I definitely would've done them differently had I written them today. But I won't update them; the changing style tells a subtle story in itself. Now, back to the story.

After Stealthy left, I took on the responsibility of the entirety of 3.0's development myself. What had been designed to be developed by a team of three senior devs, was being worked on by one. The junior devs Nickmiste and Lawrencethefrog were there to help, but it was significantly more work for myself than we had planned. Nevertheless, I undertook to finish what we had started. For the entirety of that summer, I worked feverishly on 3.0.

I should mention that, during this period as well as all of my days on SQ before, I was working in pursuit of perfection. You may recall that during the later days of 2.0 when 3.0 was being planned, I greatly resisted the idea of a complete reset because I believed that 2.0 was still capable of becoming the game that I had envisioned. My pursuit of that ideal was the fire that drove me. It took Stealthy's urging to convince me that it was never going to be possible to achieve, and that the only way forwards was a full reset and a sharp redesign. So the 3.0 plan was put into effect, and my passion (and idealism) shifted to focus on it. I happily worked long hours rewriting major portions of SQ's systems in order to achieve that dream. Because discontent over 2.0's state was widespread and loud, I wanted to get 3.0 out as fast as possible, so many systems were coded "bare bones", to be polished after the base release.The "filling out" of 3.0 was meant to happen over a few successive updates; like a 3.1 and a 3.2.

When 3.0 was complete, it was revealed with great fanfare, and the response was overwhelmingly positive. The players looked at it, as I did, as the solution to all of the problems of 2.0. 2.0 shut down with a several-week-long apocalypse event, and after that 3.0 launched. Believing all my hopes to be coming true, I reveled in the joy of the playerbase, and felt that all of the effort of the last few months had been validated. I threw myself into bugfixing, and a few weeks later released a "3.1" with a number of improvements and new additions.

Around this period, I began to grow less satisfied with working on SQ's code. A major driver of my efforts has always been the joy I got from learning new aspects of programming. SQ was very much a trial-by-fire experience for me; I often found myself in situations where I had no idea what to do, and I loved the challenge of figuring it out. During the later days of 2.0, George and I would frequently find bits of code that we had written in 1.0, and laugh about how far we'd come. But, with the work on 3.0, I became comfortable working with MySQL, which was the last thing that I had needed to learn for SQ. Once that was done, SQ work wasn't fun anymore; it became a chore. I wasn't progressing as a programmer anymore from what I was doing; it felt like a day job.

During a late-night chat with moneybags, for some reason we got on the subject of coding an entirely new game. I had previously idly thought about creating my own standalone game, but I had never really seriously considered doing it until that conversation. That night, talking with Moneybags, I realized that it was actually something I might be able to do. Over the next few days, we hashed out the basic game design from the wild ideas that had been floating around in our heads, and then I got to work. Just like the early days of SQ, I was faced with the daunting task of doing something that nobody had done before, and something that I wasn't even sure was possible. I had to learn an entirely new programming language, and the programming to make it all work was complicated and difficult in a way that I had never encountered in my work with plugins. I absolutely loved it. Everything was fresh and new, and I was really learning and struggling again. For the rest of the summer, I worked both on SQ fixes and Limitless. I may have started Limitless before 3.1, it may have been after, I don't remember. I had plenty of time that summer, so I was able to produce SQ fixes at a respectable pace while secretly progressing on Limitless. At this point I saw SQ as an obligation, and Limitless as my fun.

Working on both at once worked great up until the end of summer, when I went off to college for the first time. Suddenly, I had much less free time. For a few weeks, I attempted to study, cultivate a social life, and code both projects. It didn't work. I put Limitless on hold, but it still wasn't enough. In high school, I was able to count on a certain amount of free time in a week that I could use for SQ, but in college, everything is in flux. Some weeks I had tons of free time, and other weeks I had none. I was no longer able to maintain consistent updates for SQ, and it was difficult for me to want to work on it. During the summer, it was one thing to "do my chores" and work on SQ; at school, it was extremely unappealing to finish my homework and then move on to what felt like more homework in SQ. Development slowed, and certain things like staff recruiting fell behind. Think of running SQ as juggling. During the Stealthy/George days, all three of us juggled a few balls each. After they left, Moneybags took up a lot of the load. With the beginning of the school year, Moneybags went back to school and his full-time job and was no longer able to juggle his set. At one point I might have been able to juggle all of them myself, but at college I didn't have time for it, and balls kept slipping.

QuietHelper, then a player on the server, noticed that I was struggling to keep everything running smoothly, and made himself known to me to offered his help. He quickly proved himself to be an invaluable asset and he took over a significant portion of the load, allowing me some breathing room. He also made me see that I wasn't going to be able to do it myself and that we needed to recruit some more help. So we began shopping for the next generation of SQ leadership and development.

Next time: the passing of the torch to the next generation. It's also worth noting that there will only be one more "The Journey" post from me; the next installment will conclude with my official retirement and the beginning of the Liggo era. Liggo will continue "The Journey" himself from there. This blog will become his, and I'll probably start a new one to chronicle Limitless.