So What Happened?
After months of silence, this blog finally came back to life a few days ago. I promised then that I’d get around to answering some questions about what happened. That’s what this post is going to be about.
For you guys, the worst part is that some of the most important details are not the kind of thing I can share. There are personal details, and not my personal details. I’ll share what I feel I can, though.
From my reckoning, it was a Friday. What should have technically been day 98. I was thinking that I basically had the weekend to try to finish things up. And I had plans to spend basically the entire weekend doing just that. I had some momentum behind me, and a weekend schedule that was completely clear.
I got home and was excited to get started. But shortly after I got home, I got some news that was mind shattering. It might be like if you discovered a close friend was in a bad car accident. That’s not what it was. It was very different. Nobody was actually physically hurt. There was no hospital to run to or anything like that. But it was the kind of thing that made it so I just could not focus on anything.
Now, I’ll admit, I had a lot of things come up during the 100 days that took my out of my groove. Things that derailed me, and things that pushed back the 100 days. But this thing takes the cake. (It’s actually amazing how many things managed to come up.)
I knew I wouldn’t be able to concentrate on my game that Friday night, so I gave up and just decided to come back the next day.
The Weekend
But on Saturday, I spent hours sitting in front of my desk and just couldn’t get my brain on track to focus on my game. (Because of what happened the day before.) I made tiny bits of progress. But nothing worth reporting on, so I didn’t post anything here.
Sunday felt a little better, but again, there was no real progress to be made.
I decided, as much as I didn’t want to, that I needed to push my time frame back a bit.
The Next Week
By Monday, things were starting to get back to normal, more or less. Things still weighed on my mind, but I was able to function at work just fine for the most part. The problem is, I didn’t want to spend my last three days (day 98, 99, and 100) on weekday evenings. A free Saturday is worth at least a whole work week of evenings, if not more. So I intentionally didn’t work on things until the next weekend. That may have been a mistake.
With respect to this blog, I should have said something about things at this point, but I figured you guys were patient enough that if I came storming back the next weekend with a complete game, you’d forgive me.
The Next Weekend
My memory of this next weekend is fuzzy. I don’t remember what happened, but I do remember things were too busy and too crazy to do anything. If I’m remembering correctly, we were in the final leadup to a new release for our application at work, which took up quite a bit of time. But looking back, I can’t be sure of what was going on.
Just like that, another weekend was shot.
Beyond
By this point, though, any momentum I had was dead, and some of you were starting to ask where I had disappeared to. (Again, I hope you can forgive me.) It became hard to want to re-engage. I felt like I needed to spend some time writing about what caused the delays (essentially, this post). I knew that was going to take more time.
Opening my game project and revisiting this blog felt like going into the bedroom of somebody who had passed away. It was depressing. And frustrating. Because not long before, both had been things that I was excited about. Quite honestly, I’ve never felt like that about a project before. It was eerie.
The Gradual Return
It took a while–maybe months–and I started the slow return. I started posting again on my rbwhitaker.wikidot.com website. I started revisiting this blog. At one point, I even pulled out my game code to try to give it another go. Eventually, after four months, I finally made a new post, which officially brought things back to life.
I can’t help but still feel the need to apologize for the disappearance. I can see from the blog stats that there are still people who are coming here. I can’t tell if any of the people who were here in the past still visit. I hope they do.
But I’m back now. And now you (sort of) know why it happened.
In the very near future, I’ll be posting again about what happens to my game and this blog next.