The more things change, the more they stay the same, right?

It's been fourteen years since I last posted here. That's half of my life. I was just a kid at the time (probably a rather annoying one, if anyone remembers me, but hey - we all start life somewhere). It didn't even cross my mind that this place might still be around, let alone intentionally preserved like this. Sometimes I poke around on RPGMaker.net for a while, reminiscing about my imperfect memory of these old communities. Imagine my shock when I finally stumble upon GamingW - maybe not the exact same site as it used to be, but as visually close as possible. Imagine my additional shock when I find that my old login still works, and somehow a good deal of my old posts are still there, just in case I'm really in the mood to embarrass myself.

Everything moves so fast nowadays. Every year is shorter than the last. The internet moves faster and faster, and communities grow larger and more impersonal as time goes on. The indie game dev scene has moved so far past what we used to do here, but I still remember that time as the good old days. I remember when the dominant engine of choice was a cracked and poorly translated version of RPG Maker 2000, so broken that trying to use the "Enter Hero Name" function would just crash the program. I remember when "RTP" referred to not just the officially assets, but also the rips from (definitely unlicensed) games that some madman decided to just throw into the package for fun. I remember when RM2k3's translation was far superior and more stable than RM2k's, but the majority of us being hobbyists, enthusiasts, and most importantly, lone developers, we saw the additional assets required for a side view battle system and ran the other direction, and I remember when there wasn't a damn thing wrong with that.

So many things have changed, now. It's still hard for me to wrap my head around the fact that there's a fully functioning official translation of these old engines sitting in my steam library, or that Ara Fell is being sold for real money on real consoles, or that I'm finally in a position mentally where I might be able to start developing things myself (something I couldn't do back in the day). I don't know if there's anyone hanging around here that remembers me, but for anyone that does, I hope you're all doing well after all these years, and I just wanted to drop this soppy rant to say thank you to all the people that made this a good place to hang out online.

tl;dr, don't read this it's embarrassing