For about five years now I've been an active racing player in a random weird browser game, AoTTG (I hate this name). Just about three years ago, a fan project started to remake the game, AoTTG 2 (I hate this name even more). The general concept was to make a new version which was open source and far more modifiable, as well as cover hosting for multiplayer (the original game's creator stopped paying for servers). I joined this project, rather idealistically, and worked on it for about a year and a half before I realized that it was basically broken to the core. I could go on for a long time about this (and have, elsewhere), but to cut it short the project lead was a narcissistic liar. This is not a good trait in a leader. Game was never gonna come out, I stopped working on it and only hung around to know what was going on in general.
Late last year, another project quietly started to... do basically the same thing. It was a one man project by a guy called Ricecake, he didn't advertise it at all, and I didn't have much confidence in it being successful. I didn't know this when I joined, but the "AoTTG 2" project is actually the
third attempt to remake the game. Fourth attempt isn't likely to succeed. Come March, Ricecake claims to almost be done, and starts talking to various communities and asking them about things they want in the game. The Racing community wanted racing maps (which are created by players and hosted on pastebin) to be included in the game by default. But Ricecake gave us a limit of twenty maps, which is kinda hard when there's over
three hundred in common usage.
This is just after my little hiatus started. I'm the only active moderator of the racing community who cared enough about the future of the gamemode to actually go through and decide which twenty maps were the best to choose. So I put other things on hold and spent a bunch of time playtesting maps and
interrogating asking other racers what they thought. I also ended up also selecting player-made maps for other communities, because nobody else bothered and I care too much. This wasn't
just because Ricecake asked, I'd also been meaning to set up a speedrun.com page with "core" competitive maps, and choosing those core maps was basically the same task anyway.
This was just about done by the time I posted that message above; hence the optimistic statement of maybe posting earlier than next week. I finished in a few days, as planned, and then
the morning after Ricecake sent a prealpha build to me and the admin of another community, asking us to test it to make sure it was an accurate recode of the original game. Because the madman actually successfully
rewrote literally the entire game's code, and actually managed to have the result be both
far higher quality code and still be nearly perfectly 1:1 with the original game's physics and gameplay.
I did not expect this. I had vauge hopes that it might happen in the future, but I was
certain it wouldn't happen so soon. I also did not expect to be nominated for "half the initial testing team".
After that, the code was given to the AoTTG 2 project, with the caveat that Ricecake replace the old narcissist leader (everyone supported that except the old narcissist leader). And I was given the role of lead tester (for racing), and lead game design (for racing). Both of which more or less immediately lost those (for racing) qualifiers. And then I have more recently been given the role of "custom logic designer", which translates to "person who designs and writes code for game modes in the custom scripting language newly created by Ricecake for this express purpose". Mostly because almost nobody else cares enough to do it, and I can. And also deadlines. Which I care about, for questionable reasons.
Oh and there's other normal time sinks like work and helping family with stuff, but that's not what's killed my free time. Mostly.
No, I have not forgotten SMAK. I'm not stressed about updating it, like I was for PS, but it's also just... not important to me right now. I really could, and probably should, set aside a couple hours to update it, but for the last month I've been in a continual state of either trying to work on something else because of a feeling of impending deadlines, or trying to melt and not think about anything.
TL;DR:
syvarris is very bad at saying "no" when people say "hey we need you to do this", and I've been putting off SMAK, among other things, because there is a continual stream of stuff I've been asked to work on. And want to work on, for the record; I enjoy it. But yes, it is a
black hole for free time, and I'm not good at saying "Yeah I'll do that tomorrow and write stuff today".
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Topic: SMAK: Hunt a ~Magical Girl~ as SWAT! (Read 12110 times)