Long time no see to everyone who was around here when I vanished, hello to everyone who wasn't.
I wasn't exactly a frequent visitor back in 2008, but I still feel the need to apologise for my sudden and abrupt disappearance without so much as a word.
Here's what happened:
Around February 2008 I stumbled upon a link to a fan-made Space Hulk computer game (yes, you probably know where this is going). Got hooked. Games Workshop Cease & Desisted the authors a few days after the release, but they kept working on an update and trying to contact GW in the meantime (that is what my post from March 2008 was about when I was looking for Jervis Johnson's current e-mail). While Teardown was not getting any response, I was being very active on their forum - especially in regards to reporting bugs found in the game as it was released. Some weeks later, I ended up with what every fanboy of a not publicly available game aspires to: joining the team as a beta tester.
Large parts of my free time in 2008 and early 2009 were spent focused on hammering out all bugs and glitches in the game, strong-arming our programmer into fixing certain mechanics to bring them in line with the boardgame (or a reasonable approximation), with little time to do anything in regards to my ton of WIP miniature projects (and TBH, I found my interest in the hobby rather waning at the time too).
When we were about done with the 1.1 version of the game, since we never really received much of a response to our previous round of trying to contact GW, we went about that again. Cue lots of e-mails, helping redact our communications to be somewhere near business-like and comprehensible before they were sent ...and still testing. Ultimately we ended up with a better idea of how the licensing deal between GW and THQ worked and a statement from THQ that "we can release the game, but any references to Space Hulk and Warhammer 40k must be removed".
Cue "Death Orbit", aka Plan B - a little pitch I cooked up some weeks earlier and showed the other members of dev team, with some very familiar elements: mankind on the brink of extinction, a deadly alien menace from hell-knows-where-in-space, combat in abandoned colonies and derelict space stations, and combat between walking tanks of powered armor and bizarrely ant-like alien critters thay may be or not be related to humans in a gross way you do not want to know. Not included: The name "Space Marines", genetically modified superhumans, ultra-weird Gothic themed designs, or the Warhammer 40.000 setting. Name didn't survive past a few hours after being pitched, but everything else did. After a few months of even more frantic work (those GW-copyrighted map designs, names and imagery didn't replace themselves), the game saw the light of day on 1st October 2009 as the freeware title "Alien Assault" (some of you might have played it).
So that accounts for a year and a half... well, the same day Alien Assault was released I returned to the studies I dropped in 2005 (didn't have the motivation and could not handle the completely FUBAR schedule - walking five kilometers back home four times in a week around 9 PM wasn't something I enjoyed). First year is best described as somewhere between utter hell and Sparta - I barely hung on without dropping out with passing grades or above on everything but Physics (got to repeat it without repeating the year, fortunately)
except for actual Computer Science-centered subjects in which I consistently excelled. Frankly, it nearly went the same as the first attempt in 2005, except due to certain regulations regarding age and public education it was now-or-never for me - or rather, "failure is not an option, cause I have no marketable skills and all I could work on is some vaguely basic CS knowledge".
During the 2010 vacations, Teardown was pestered by someone from Games Workshop with some vague claims that Alien Assault was infringing on their Space Hulk and Warhammer 40 000 properties... someone had to take care of it, and having been a complete GW fanboy once ago (not anymore, especially not after that debacle) I ended up being the person. About a week's worth of research went into my response, focused on rubbing their own accusations in their face without being derisive, mocking or threatening in a single word. I can't say much about the actual contents but had you seen it you'd shed manly tears at how much concentrated epic awesome it contained in one place. GW's response? "We'll read it and get back to you about it". Since in over a year they never did, I guess that counts as one successful cast of "Dispell nebulous legal threats" (and probably a GW employee having a nervous breakdown at being proven without a shadow of doubt that no, having flaring greaves in the Space Marine armor is not in and of itself copyrightable and no, that is not actually a distinctive feature of their Space Marines either and no, GW does not own the term Marine either; or at least I'd like to daydream that was the result).
Second year was... different. Or maybe it was me who changed. Being one of the top students may be related, as may be being able to get near-maximum grades on a few things that honestly were complete lat ditch attempts on my part (by which I mean this... 6 PM: I has paper to write. 8 PM: Well, gentlemen, been nice knowing ya. 9 PM: Screw it, I win or I fail, at least let's try damage control. 7 AM: Dead on my legs, have too much blood in my caffeine circulation system... can has finished paper. 9 AM: Well, sir, 5 out of 5? Pleasure being one of your students!). Whichever is the case, I genuinely enjoyed most of it, with scores to prove it (and getting a nice scholarship out of it for this year too).
Right now... I'm in the top 10% of my year, with most others considering me somewhere between "not human", "eccentric" and "completely insane". "Sociopathic jerkass abstinent with no sense of humor and a literal Chaotic Neutral alignment" might also figure somewhere but it's my defining character feature
.
Either way, I deeply enjoy programming and think myself pretty decent at it (for someone who's two steps above a complete amateur, at least).
These days I'm an administrator of two online communities (neither closely related to tabletop wargames), part of the dev team working on the design specs for Alien Assault 2, still getting most of my fun out of literary fiction and now combining that addiction with a lot of visits to TvTropes to find more fiction that suits my tastes.
I'm also much calmer and more mentally stable than I used to be in comparison altough that change started back in 2005 with a ban from Bolter & Chainsword which initiated a massive causal chain that led me to redirect my attention elsewhere (and which, I have to admit, was anything but deserved; Kurgan, if you're reading it - I've seen it many times from the other side now... and I do thank you for the wake-up call, even though I still reserve the right to dislike you on a personal level for something else you probably don't remember anymore); coming to terms with my diabetes (not a big achievement, since it took over seven years from the start) and learning to live with my diabetic neuropathy also played a large part to say the truth.
Recently I've been looking at my workbench, which has been mostly collecting dust in last three years and thinking that just perhaps it might be worth returning at least to the miniatures if not really wargaming - which pretty much is like the hobby used to be to me before anyhow; I literally only ever played one game of Epic: Armageddon and one game of Warhammer 40k. The tubes of acrylic glue are now rock-solid mass, but it looks like at least some of my paints survived the hiatus including one small quantity of a "blood" mixture that I mixed... whoa, that will be over six years ago now, how the time flies.
So, for better or worse, I found myself accidentally gravitating to TacComms for fourth or fifth time in last year, reading up on the backlog in the E:A forums and feeling the need to respond to a thread or two.
For what it counts, what I really wanted to say was: Hi, guys; I'm still alive and I might be coming back. But it kind of turned out a bit longer than that (master of understatement, I am not)
I'm not saying I'm definitely back, nor back for good, but I'll do what I've been doing for a while now: take it one step at a time and let's see where I end up.
PS. I wonder where Epic:Armageddon ended since I last checked on it (SIX YEARS AGO!)?
PS2. Also, weirdly enough, it's exactly my 900th post here.
