Apparently when you completely disappear off the face of the internet without a trace, people who are actually interested in your work end up asking what happened to you. I sure wish I could've seen that coming. But in all seriousness, for those are wondering, no, I didn't die and I didn't just abandon MTO either.

Over the course of the past 14-15 months my life has been all over the place and, I'll be honest, for about 6 of those months now I have been wondering just what the hell I would say when I would eventually show my face again. Not only is everything as a whole pretty complicated, but there is also a sizable number of people that greatly dislike me and I feel that people are gonna be displeased no matter how this whole devlog turns out.

Unfortunately I will vaguely mention people. If you think you know who I'm talking about, that's great, keep it to yourself. If you think that someone has done something bad to me or whatever, that's an alright opinion to have, but keep it at an opinion and don't turn it into an action. The last thing I'd want is for someone to start a witch hunt, regardless of how noble the intentions may be.

I'm going to try my absolute best to be as neutral and vague as I could possibly be. I'm not here to paint anyone in a bad light whatsoever. However, given these circumstances are the direct result of things happening with other people, it's kind of impossible for me to not discuss things from my perspective and how I feel. So if you find yourself absolutely disagreeing with my statements, that's unfortunate and I'm more than happy to discuss that in private, but I'm not opening a public drama discussion.

But now for the question that all 3 of you care about: What happened that made me disappear for a whole year without a trace?

Back in early December my former relationship partner and I had parted ways which I definitely did not take well. After seeing them get with someone else in less than 24 hours, I was left in a rather terrible emotional state, and while I would not want to use such a serious term as "depression" when I'm completely undiagnosed as of writing this, it is most certainly what my friends as well as my family believe I have been dealing with. Acting purely on emotion, I renamed my Discord account to "See you next time" and had all intention of just leaving behind my online presence with little to no thinking and began to isolate myself.

The longer I isolated myself, the more time I had to think. Eventually I came to the realization that this isolation alongside the framing of my account may give off a false impression that I had done something to myself and started to wonder if people were actually worried about my well-being. I think it was the evening of December 5th 2021 when I finally decided to check on the GameJolt page for comments and noticed several comments asking what had happened to the server, and other comments mentioning a raid. I contacted someone on Steam to ask about what happened and went back on Discord the next day.

On December 3rd 2021, the first day after I began to isolate myself, a former admin had rejoined the server and gave admin permissions to other users, who had then unbanned and given admin permissions to previously banned users. Ultimately, this resulted in a severe raid where practically everyone but the raiders ended up getting banned. I cleaned up the server in very little time, but I decided to momentarily delete the invite link to it, as I didn't feel mentally ready to moderate and run it.

Even after returning to Discord, I was still in this awful state and didn't really know what to do. I was so caught up in what I had already lost that I turned away several friends, hardly thinking about what I was actually doing. I kept turning away people for a short few months, barely considering what I was actually doing, all because I was so caught up in my own emotions. To this day, there are still a few people I greatly regret turning away.

For the following months I found myself unable to do basically anything. Emotionally speaking, I was an absolute wreck. On the side I had heard rumors about ridiculous accusations towards me, I actively stayed offline, I didn't change my profile in the slightest.

Over time though, I managed to make new friends. People who actively kept me going, who made me smile, who helped me slowly feel better. And I really can't thank those people enough. Over time, thanks to their help, my state slowly improved. I changed my username back, I eventually began changing my profile picture again and eventually, just this week in fact, managed to build up the courage to perform the absolutely monumental task of "not being invisible" and "showing signs of life". Absolutely crazy, I know.

I wouldn't say everything is perfect, but I'm back in a state where I feel happy and like myself. I've begun making slow steps towards returning to a normal life and will probably begin therapy relatively soon to further improve my mental state.

I actually started writing this yesterday and when I got to the part where I talked about how much people have helped me, I genuinely couldn't help myself but just go ahead and thank all of them. I got so caught up in that, that I lost my train of thought and had to continue writing this today. I cannot thank them enough. And, of course, I'm also really thankful to the 2 people who are still here to show interest and support in the project.

MTO ultimately began as nothing more than me just messing around with GameMaker Studio, trying to improve one fan-made open-source project by taking elements from another open-source project. Somewhere along the way I dropped in a free server extension I had heard about online and then it just sort of became its own thing from there. It'd be a lie to say I ever had a concrete vision when making MTO. I was kinda just putting stuff together that I liked. So in a strange way, MTO is a game that encapsules a lot of myself.

A lot has happened since then. I made a Discord server because people were just that interested in the project. And I'll be honest, I was never a great server owner. Yeah, incredibly shocking, I'm just as surprised as you are. Honestly one of my main problems has always been that I just don't know social norms or social boundaries. I'll do something that I think is right or a funny joke and everyone else will think that I just did something incredibly horrible. Similarly I don't know when to draw the line with what other people do. I made a lot of bad judgements over the years. Hell, I'm not diagnosed, but I absolutely wouldn't be surprised if I had, like, multiple disorders or something, since I am just that incompetent with social boundaries and such.

It's been an incredibly long road full of absolutely wonderful moments and absolutely god-awful moments. I've made friends, I've made enemies, I've made friends who became my enemies. And I don't think I would change anything about it. Yeah, I just had one of the most terrible years of my life, but honestly, I don't think I would change it even if I could. I think almost every experience I've made along the way is one that was incredibly important to me in one way or another. Even if the people that absolutely loathe me now might not want to hear it, I'll continue to treasure every good moment, even with former friends now turned enemies. And over this last year, I think I may have matured just a bit.

Okay, cool, you don't wanna hear my life story, you're here because you want to know what's gonna happen now. Well, as of right now I don't have any plans of publicly re-opening the Discord server, at least for the time being. I think the last thing I need just as I am feeling better is to instantly throw myself into drama hell.

The game? I'll be honest, I have no specific long-time plans. With me wanting to work on original projects and GameMaker Server having an uncertain future it's incredibly difficult even for me to say what's going to happen. But I do wish to at the very least release this unfinished update and then we'll see what happens next. And who knows? Maybe when GameMaker Server bites the dust I could possibly find some kind of alternative method of keeping the game alive.

Personally I'm gonna focus on improving my mental state right now and getting back to taking proper care of myself again. There are still some people I would like to get in touch with, since I want to wrap up all loose ends. Particularly with people I sent away without thinking too much about it. Whether or not that will come to pass is up in the air though.

As a side-note, I recently updated the description. Since I'm not really in contact with any team members anymore I sorta grouped everyone who worked on the game together as "Contributors" and apparently I already messed up there and accidentally removed a name. So if anyone sees their name missing when it should be there, then please let me know so I can fix that. I also think I may have left out names of some people who contributed only to the upcoming version so far, so, again, a simple message will do and I can correct that.

Happy new year, everyone! Remember that even when things look incredibly down, there's always light at the end of the tunnel. Never take people for granted and always appreciate those who care about you.