Dear community members,
It's been some time since most of you have heard of me. The question "does Mike even care about PkHonor anymore?" has even been asked a few times left and right.
The answer to that question is: yes, I absolutely do care. In fact, that's probably my biggest problem. I care too much. PkHonor is the single biggest achievement in my whole life, and there is absolutely no way I will let it go to waste. I want it to thrive, and my current inability to do so is definitely one of the biggest frustrations in my life right now. Not a single day goes by without me thinking about what I want to do for PkHonor, what I need to do and what I should do, but in the end being unable to.
Throughout 2021, I have been working on the Chambers of Xeric for what seemed like an eternity. I always want to get all the details right, and to that end I watched hundreds of hours of footage and spent countless hours tweaking details left and right during development. But for all the effort it cost me, I barely managed to finish anything. All that changed when Nazuths started working on CoX, helping me finish what seemed like a near impossible task. For that, I am still immensely grateful to him.
However, I am now faced with the exact same problem, once again. I want to finish and release Nex (have been wanting to for months), but I also want to get all the details right. I know that many - if not most - within the community feel like "hey, I don't care if it's done perfectly, just as long as it's released sooner rather than later". Yet I can't help myself. I'm not sure why it is, it's certainly a part of me that's very critical of myself, a part that tells me "you can do better and you need to do better" and unable to let go of it. There are some details about Nex that I just can't figure out exactly, nor am I sure if I want them to be exactly the same as in OSRS, and it's incredibly frustrating.
Which brings me to my current state of mind. I haven't had a diagnose yet, but judging by what I read and hear elsewhere, it looks a lot like burn-out. In the past, I often spent days, weeks, sometimes months on end non-stop coding. The peak was the second half of 2016, where I literally spent 12 hours a day, 7 days a week for 6 months straight working on the biggest update we had ever released. Coding streaks like those were often followed by weeks (if not months) of being unable to do anything for PkHonor because of sheer mental exhaustion. Eventually, I always got back on track, back into another coding spree for the next update. This time however, I'm not able to get back on track. I still feel mentally exhausted, despite the last biggest update being some time ago already.
About a month ago, my mental state got even worse after my father was hospitalized with acute heart failure. He lives, and is currently recovering at home, but he will be very limited to what he can handle physically for the rest of his life. For me, that was probably the final straw that brought me from burn-out into full-blown depression.
But I never lose hope. I have once had a similar depression in early 2016. I got through it then, I will get through it now. I will get myself back on track, and I will be the developer and owner of PkHonor that I want to be, once again.
Most importantly, I will have to set healthy boundaries for myself, not giving my all but what I know is healthy for me, letting go of my "always trying get all the details right" mindset, allowing mistakes and imperfections to be made without feeling terrible about them and being able to better handle criticism - criticism from others, but also from myself. I still have a long way to go before I get to that point. I have recently started going to therapy to help me get there. Something I should have done a while ago.
On a brighter note, at least one thing is abundantly clear to me: other developers, aside from myself, are absolutely essential to PkHonor. Raj and Nazuths, and others before them such as Dylan, Andres, Thoby and Jeremy, have made such major and important contributions to the game, which I would have never been able to do on my own. Managing the dev team, helping them where needed and in the end rolling out their updates is one of the things that I can at least still do, to some degree. It's not as mentally exhausting as trying to do everything myself, it takes away a lot of the pressure, and I feel much better about it than being stuck knee-deep in the mud (read: in development hell) that I find myself in more often than not while working on a new feature.
As such, we are continuing to give our developers more and more power and possibilities to work out their updates, removing limitations that we imposed out of fear that they would do something wrong or steal our code. I am learning to let go of these fears and to give them the tools and access they need to bring amazing content to this game. And we will continue further on this path, for that is the future.
I am hopeful that I will be able to finish and release Nex in the near future, and shortly after that release the updates from Nazuths and Raj that have been waiting for quite some time now to be released, as they have already been tested by the community. But first I need to find back the mental energy that I have been lacking for quite some time.
Yours truly,
Mike
