personal feelings approaching the end (Patreon)

another quest done! we've been cutting through this set because a lot of them had previous work done for them that just needed to be wrapped up. only three have yet to be started.

so today, we're going to have a vaguely personal post. 

first, to follow up from our previous poll: the strong majority are in favor of keeping nicknames, and i'm all for that. several people also suggested adding options to disable nicknames entirely on your own side rather than not storing them, and offering to wipe the nickname as soon as you get the mon, and those both sound like great ideas to me so i've written down to get those in at some point before the end. thanks to everyone who voted and commented~

also, side observation, there's about 200 of you here on the pates (much love to you all for sticking around for everything btw <3)  and i saw like a quarter of you vote within like, 24 hours, and over a third have voted by the time of this writing, and i just wanna say
i think that's neat?
i only actually hear from a handful of you all in comments + on the discord server, so i welcome the active reminder of how many of your voices are out there.
i think i might start doing more regular polls about absolutely silly arbitrary stuff just cuz i appreciate knowing where [at least some vague portion of the plural-you] are at. i know it's a lot easier to click a poll button than it is to like write out a whole comment and have the audacity (audacity which is, make no mistake, welcome and venerated, but i know it seldom feels that way) to hope i'll read it and care, (and i always do, friends, even if i don't reply).
so idk, maybe that can be a nice little non-commital back and forth we share. 

so anyway, personal ramblings. 

i feel like i've had a lot of cause to evaluate progress, how the game is, and how i'm feeling lately. the closer we get to the milestone of [finishing the content of the game], the more i feel excited for it, but also... something... else.
like i'm holding myself back from being -too- excited or something.
part of me feels like it's almost a risk for me to get excited about things.
i think i'm trying to untangle that for myself still. 

the primary reason is because we're not -actually- at the finish line yet.
sure, we're nearing it. kind of.
once we finish the quests, i have a lot of updates on the main game to make, and a lot of loose ends, and bug fixes-- even just the two things i said at the start of this post, adding wondertrade options... they won't take very long individually, but i have hundreds of notes like that to clean up.
it could still take months.
i plan to be as transparent as possible with all that and i'm looking forward to having much more ability to talk about those things. i'm excited for being able to do that,
but it's just more time between now and the -actual- finish line of being done.
everything before then is still premature.
it's too early to be excited.
we are not there yet. 

i feel like, at once, i have to keep reminding myself of this, and also reminding myself of it has become so automatic that it's almost concerning.
and i feel like there's a little bit of, i don't want to -say- "trauma", but also that feels like the right word for it, with the amount of time that's passed.
now before everyone reads the previous line and thinks i'm being a bit of a drama queen, (not that you'd be wrong), let me clarify something about trauma. there are actually several types of it:

• Acute Trauma is the one that everybody thinks of: a single disasterous, life-ruining event with far-echoing consequences
• but there is also complex trauma, who cares about that right now tho, not me. what i'm talking about is
• Chronic Trauma, in which someone is kept in a prolonged or repeated situation for multiple years. it can have the same kind of negative effects and PTSD-like symptoms on people as acute trauma can.

i suspect that a lot of people are not aware chronic trauma is a thing and several of you are now reconsidering your childhood circumstances and relationships with your parents.
i know i sure was when i first heard about it.
so, you know, take your time...

i've been either a bit better about it or a bit quieter about it in the past few years, possibly both, but if you know me very well or have followed me for a long time you may know that i have a slightly shaky relationship with the concept of time. this has been true ever since i was a child, and it became especially true as related to development.
to be honest, i think all mortal humans have some degree of chronic trauma with the passage of time, or maybe that's me projecting (either way, spoilers, it's something i hope to explore a little bit in starlight once we get there), but recently i feel like i've given myself a particular kind of it.

for instance, look what just happened in that previous sentence--

• i'm talking about something
• and then immediately i break away to this cool idea that i've been sitting on and hope to finally include in a future project
• but we aren't at that future project yet
• so i feel like i need to cool my jets and not spoil the fun for down the road, because we still have to finish reborn first. 

i have a lot of ideas for potential future things, so that happens a lot, and that's only to be expected...
...but i first announced that i would make starlight after reborn in 2015. we're running up on seven years since then.
i have been telling myself "as soon as i finish reborn" for 7 years. 

how many personal posts have i made only to have all of you reassure me that it's okay?
how many seasonal parties has our community hosted waiting for the end of the game?
how many more will it take?

there's a lot of lessons to be learned in all that time, like setting reasonable development goals, getting the team more involved, there's the fact that i've gotten better at making better stuff faster on a technical level, and so on... but ow.
and again, if you've followed me for any length of time, you probably know that i have historically felt pressured by the community to release episodes faster. there was that time in late 2015 when my hands stopped working because of chronic pain of not working fast enough, and there's all the time since then too.

and huge amount of credit-- you all as a community have been beyond incredible. everyone has generally encouraged me to take time to myself, take as long as the game needs, lord knows those closest to me have put up with no shortage of me whining about the passage of time. huge huge huge appreciation for all of the support you all have given me over the years.
and i'm proud to say i think i have genuinely internalized that-- more and more, it's a work in progress, but i think i've gotten the idea through my thick skull that, yeah, there's not really outside pressure here.
i'm also doing my best to reframe the idea that this game has taken 10 years to make into being something to be proud of, that we were able to put that much time and love into it, rather than fretting about it having taken that long.

...so that's not quite where this post is going.

i'm doing my best to make peace with the time, but in the meantime, that's 7 years of having a lot of ideas of things i want to do, and telling myself "no. focus on reborn. just finish reborn. these are fun ideas, but the path to acting on them is first by finishing what you've started." it's become an automatic response to keep myself grounded and moving forward.
it's also a little suffocating. it's become an automatic reaction, and i'm questioning if i've strangled the excitement out of myself or if this was a necessary thing to do to stop myself from floating off and never finishing anything.

the reason i'm talking about and thinking about this now is because we're coming up on the end of the quests which i've told everyone is the biggest obstacle, to finishing the game. and it's the core content-- absolutely, that's true. i think my approach to development will surely have to shift after finishing that. but i can also feel something else as i think about what comes after it-- thinking about everyone getting excited for the eventual release, thinking about -myself- getting excited to finally release
i feel like i have to tell everyone else, and especially myself
stop
slow down
not yet
it is not time to be excited
we are not there yet.

nothing matters until we are actually done.

all of it is premature. i know it came from a place of excitement but i kind of cringe at myself having made that announcement post six years ago. "only five and a half episodes left" i said, expecting to be done within a year or two. i can't look at it without hurting. i've started crying a couple times in writing this post already. even sillier that this pain is self-inflicted.

and so now, the closer we get to the end, i find myself torn. i want to learn how to approach development with the passion i once had, with unfettered excitement, and learn how to have more fun with it. but i can only say "once reborn is done" so many times before i get sick of hearing myself say it, and i passed that point years ago. 

i'm so used to slamming on the breaks on my own feelings and ideas, that i don't know how to stop. and i don't know if i even should-- this is ultimately a mechanism to keep myself focused. and i am not done yet. i cannot lose focus yet. or i'll just end up hurting more in the long run.

on the other hand, i've been feeling this way for so long, even when we do finally finish reborn-- what promise is there that i won't invent a new reason for myself to not feel it? i already have a fresh hot new project that's been sitting for years waiting for me to not be done with it yet.
so i think i have to learn to not wait for that. not rely on that. give myself permission to be excited even if it's undue, or too early.

i AM excited to be reaching the end. i just have to learn to let myself feel it and express it, and not judge myself too harshly for it being "premature".
this is a start, i guess.
thanks to everyone for reading, and sticking with me for all this time. 

if you're reading this and want to help somehow, just don't let me forget this, okay?
i tend to withdraw too easily, i get quiet.
encourage me to be loud.
remind me of it as we make our way towards and through testing in the next handful of months.
much love ≮̕3҉

~ one teary 3am amethyst

(ps: here's a random a poll question for you all. do you have more trouble expressing positive emotions, or negative ones?)