Yup, I'm leaving for good. Here's the reason:
So, a lot of stuff has happened. Since the start of this year I decided that I would fade out with my dev activity because I intended to leave the dev team for good sometime within the coming months. Simply speaking, I am too busy IRL to continue working for CM, and I also have other game projects that I want to work on.
Now, this should have been the sole reason behind my retirement, but unfortunately things ended up getting more sour than that. I am tired of how others have been adding new things to the game, while they are in a state that breaks other aspects of the game. For the past two years my major works for CM has been revolving around nightmare creator (the thing that randomizes certain parts of certain maps), research and the map Corsat, all of which have in just the past few months been jeopardized in some way. Nightmare was non-functional for almost two months because it was not compatible with the new map loader (bless Firartix for making the new nightmare system), research has lost its entire reason for existing due to techwebs, and Corsat has been removed from rotation because it does not fit the game flow that techwebs requires. This is just straight up demoralizing to witness. I simply can not agree with the design philosophy, that it is fine to be adding new things that break other things, and expecting someone else to fix the mess later. I also feel similarly about mapping for CM, in that it is simply ridiculous to expect mappers to update maps so as to keep up with with how rapidly we are changing all kinds of balance features. Which is why I stopped doing real mapping activity since last summer. No one likes being expected to fix things other people made a mess out of, especially when you're a volunteer.
So yea, that's basically it. There were still things I had envisioned for CM that I would've liked to add before I retired, such as reworking hydroponics from the ground up, and making OTs a more polished role. But I don't have the motivation to do any of that with the state of how everything has turned out, especially since I intended to quit soon anyway for IRL reasons.
Finally, I would like to mention some positive things. I feel like we often see developers leaving in a rather negative light. So I would like to spend the rest of this post to point out all the positive things that happened during my stay. For despite how sad I am to be leaving while my features are in such a terrible state, overall I have been very happy with my time in this community. I made a lot of friends here (that I wouldn't mind staying in contact with even after leaving), both from among the players, staff and now former staff. I received a lot fun memories from interactions with the community, and it was fun to gradually develop research while listening to feedback from you all. I grew a ton as a game developer and learned a lot about regarding both mapping, coding and just maintaining a game. I especially learned a lot from Neth, Cakey and Vampmare about coding, and Triiodine also taught me a lot about map design. In fact I learned much more from being a dev here than any of my formal education has told me. Nothing beats practical experience. As I continue on towards new projects, the competences I gathered here will surely be invaluable. So thank you for having me.
Regarding research:
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My favorite memories from the community:
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