Well, uh it's a very... "peculiar" story. And it kind of embarasses me looking at it now lol

(First of all sorry for the bad image I've been busy betatesting my next project and it's being a huge pain )

It all started a year and a half ago, sometime in January 2023. It was probably a Saturday. Maybe even a Sunday.

I was randomly scrolling through Twatter (god I'm so glad I deleted my account from there) and I came across a dude who posted the entirety of the first spongebob movie for the funnies.

I decided to download it because "why not, free movie". Then a little bit later I got sick for an entire week, so I wasn't going to school. I was bored, and just for fun I decided to watch it, and play the 2004 game made out of it for the GameCube (through definitely totally legal methods that are not related in any way to a certain aquatic mammal trust me)

And... I don't know what it was about it, but it completely changed my view of life, and helped me get rid of my depression that I had at the time.

Around the same time I also discovered the music video for Lady Gaga's song "Marry The Night" (which is featured in the extras menu of the game). I already knew the song from a long time ago, but I never paid much attention to it.

After watching that music video and reading what the song was truly about, something changed inside of me. I had lost all of the hopelessness I had, and realized that there was still a chance to fix my (at the time) broken life, achieve my dream and recover what I had lost.

So I started working. And then I made the original drawing of Jairo, back in the 15th of February of last year. And I was like "wait, I know how to draw?????". Back in the day people made fun of my drawings, so I always had a very low self-steem due to that.

But that drawing made me come back to my senses that I was indeed more than enough, and that I was capable of doing things I wasn't able to do before.

My huge motivational streak stayed with me during march as well, and that's where I decided to make the Orjia drawing. A lot of people seemed to liked it, so my confidence was at a high that I hadn't seen in years.

Marry The Night is also what convinced me to contact my old lost friends after 3 years.

If you're wondering, in current day we still talk quite frequently, but sadly we can't physically hang out as much due to being in different schools now.

Well, in my case I haven't been to a school since June because I took what I believe is called a "Sabbatical year" or something like that, basically an entire year where you do nothing related to work and just rest. In my case it was due to trauma I'd rather not talk about too much.

All I'm gonna say is that it was related to a certain kind of abuse that starts with S (man, people can be such a-holes sometimes...) that I don't think GameJolt would allow me to mention.

Not only that, but I was sick and tired of the daily school routine, to the point where it was starting to affect my mental health due to being forced to be in the same room as those pigs, along with all of the work I was given every day.

This "Sabbatical year" or whatever is called is also the reason why I'm able to work on projects so quickly btw

Anyway, back to the storytime. April arrived and since my motivation was still incredibly high, I decided to try and revive Jairo HQ, just like that. At first I was pretty sure that I'd fail, but "it was worth a try".

The first room that was made was the exit. It took a veeeeeery long time to make, but after a while I did manage to finish it.

Progress was very slow but little by little it was getting done.

Then June came around, and with that, my very anticipated day of publishing the Jairo HQ post (y'know, the one that was 30,000 characters long or so)

By then I was very confident that I'd be able to finish the game (or at least the assets for it) so I decided to tease some things like the sound effects and some images in that post, under the disguise that they were a recreation of the assets of V2 (though that technically was kinda true in a way)

As to why I decided to run away from this website the second I made that post, well, there were multiple reasons:

1 - I felt like my account was slowly dying, and that demotivated me quite a lot

2 - GameJolt was just not what it used to be back then, and staying there just made me feel weird and sometimes even uncomfortable.

Those 2 reasons were already explained in that post from June, but there was a third additional reason:

If I really wanted to finish Jairo HQ and make my dream come true, I'd need as little distractions as possible, and GameJolt was a huge one.

I knew that if I stayed, I'd just procrastinate forever, so I decided to leave until I was done with the assets, which was a little bit more than a month ago, when I made my "Looking for programmer" post that I kinda regret now.

And the rest is history. Jairo HQ has been finished, my dream has come true, I've slowly started to recover from the trauma, and now I'm on my way to making my second project (expect more updates about it maybe tommorow)!

TL;DR: Dude watches kids movie, beats depression and fixes his life, lol