Hello everyone!
I actually originally made this account way back in 2012, then wrote a couple of posts expressing my great joy for having found the forum (and also more broadly speaking the entire roguelike community) and also sharing my ambitions to create a 3D roguelike and to explore some associated prospective innovation ideas for procedural generation... and then I disappeared for over a decade.
You see, at the time I had no idea how bad my mental block on game dev and even programming itself would become. I was employed as a AAA game developer shortly after college but the experience so unsettled me (e.g. toxic office politics, unexpected work conditions, etc) and my creative outlook that ever since leaving that environment in ~2013 I've had difficulty actually doing anything whenever I tried to program and have been slowly trying to recover from that ever since.
During that entire decade though I have still been greatly yearning to make a roguelike and the lack of having done so yet even to this day has been one of the heaviest weights upon my mind these many long years. I feel like I have been waiting a decade for my life to begin (running around in circles in the form of analysis paralysis and anxiety) and I have immense regrets about not having done what I promised myself I would yet.
It may seem that I just appeared and disappeared all those years ago, as if it was not significant to me, but quite the contrary is the case: Procedural generation and roguelikes have been the center focus of my ambition and hopes for years now, but my (perhaps traumatized?) state of mind (e.g. "writer's block" for game dev) has been stopping me from doing so. I realize the self-sabotage and hypocrisy of that, but I have struggled to be able to function well at all ever since my AAA game dev experiences and how they contributed to conditioned me to fear every slightest potential flaw in game dev to the point of crippling me and much of my life in effect.
It has become the nemesis of my creative life (my struggle to break my bad pattern of creative stagnation). So, here I am at long last, reviving my profile from so long ago in the hopes of finally closing the circle on my broken dreams and fulfilling the promise I made to myself to make a roguelike game all those years ago in ~2012-2013!
I've wasted a lot of opportunity by taking so long about this, but I can't change the past but can only move forward now.
It means the world to me to finally overcome this somehow and I hope that perhaps participating here again and taking it seriously will help me to overcome the creative and emotional roadblock that has brought so much struggle and frustration to my life.
I am sorry for disappearing for so long and I hope I'm not too late to mend my own folly and to break the cycle that has stopped my life from moving forward how I've wanted it to the past decade.
Anyway, sorry for rambling a bit here too, but I wanted to get my thoughts off my chest.
I am glad the forum is still around and I hope to finally overcome my internal struggle and make peace with what I wanted my life to be and where to guide it next.
Here's to hoping for brighter creative and personal futures for us all!
