The Fuck just happened?!

The internet is a weird thing. A few weeks back I wrote about Depression Quest and how it help me realize a couple of truth about myself that I needed to hear. I posted it up to little fanfare, it was so personal I didn’t post it on my own Facebook page as I didn’t want people close to me to know about it (or know I avoided their calls to play Skyrim) After about a day I saw that no one had really been interested in the life of one sad 21 year old, I thought about deleting but decided not, just let it stay there and rot like most things I write. And rot it did.

That was until today when the putrid stench of that confession got into the nostril of a man by the name of Mike Bithell. For those of you who don’t know Mike, he’s a games developer who made the utterly charming ‘Thomas Was Alone’ and has since become a bit of a figure in the industry. I’ve followed him on twitter for some time, occasionally sending him a ‘witty’ reply to something he’s said, he’d politely give it a favorite and a small part of me would swoon (I am nothing if not a 18th century lady)

Well earlier today after playing a bit of Counter Spy on the PS4 (which is rather fun) I came upstairs, considering maybe having a wank or maybe looking over the blog work. I choose to hold off the former until I at least made a dent in the latter. I went to the stats page (as I do entirely too often) to find that

That this had happened

I was terrified, for most of my time online, nothing I’d ever done had had this many eyes on it, on forums I became Batman, the silent guardian who beat up the odd clown, but here it was, proof that some one had seen my work. I rushed to twitter (clicked the button on Chrome) to find a feller named Ken and that he believed in me, with a link to my blog about Depression Quest, I looked into where all these folks had found me from and it was from Mike’s Tumblr and a post of his called On ‘Famous Developers’

In a bit of my blog on Depression Quest I talked about feelings of inadequacy to those whose work I held in such high esteem, Mike being one, with others such as Phil Fish and Rhianna Pratchett (Who was very encouraging but did point out a spelling mistake of mine, which almost caused me to throw myself into a volcano in embarrassment)  And it’s these points that he addressed with a handy list (I do like a good list).

Going to twitter to thank him, I found a veritable fuckton of activity, with retweets and favorites flying in every direction, It was rather overwhelming. I imagine this is to a minor extent what going viral feels like (without the awkward waiting in the clinic). Taking the advice I’d been given I downloaded Unity, to have a look at making that game I’d always wanted to (Before closing Unity and running from the computer in fear of how complicated it looked) over the coming months and years I’ll look into learning what I can. I’m also making plans to get the Twine project I started in the later months of uni up and running once more, Twine after all is far more approachable than Unity to a novice like myself.

So to everyone who had kind words for me today, and for those who’ve long supported my work, I’d like to thank them. I’m not used to being particularly positive, with Sarcasm being my first language and all, but today has made me very much a C++ (coding joke).