Hello everyone!
It is good to see so many people here earnestly following their hearts and pursing their creative whims and dreams so authentically!
I am WraithGlade, an ex-AAA game developer who originally got into the game industry right out of college after much effort and good fortune only to have what I thought would be my big break in life turn into one of the worst times in my life due to toxic office politics and difficulties in adjusting to that even despite much effort. I got along well with most everyone there (as usual for me anywhere), but it only takes a few people and/or bad circumstances to make for a bad environment, especially for use sensitive creative types.
I don't really want to talk about that job though. It was also about a decade ago (a long time and I want to move on). Suffice to say, a combination of (1) the residual effects of that toxicity at what I had thought would be my dream job crushed much of my creative spirit and (2) my own personal counterproductively overbearing tendencies towards perfectionism and analysis paralysis and second guessing things (especially language and tool choices) together have led me to struggle with a miserable creative mental block that has lasted me about a decade, preventing me from actually making games despite it being the central desire of my life for almost my whole life (I'm in my 30s) and something I've sacrificed a lot for and invested a lot of time and expenses in. I've spent literally years just endless making rationalizations for endlessly messing around with obscure languages and tools and reading tons of programming tutorial books endlessly month after month and yet not doing hardly anything real.
I am recently trying to make a big push to finally overcome those mental blocks and fulfill my potential and life responsibilities better!
I feel like I have been waiting a whole decade for my life to even begin, and that has been more frustrating than I can even ever find words to describe. Years ago, I sacrificed essentially all other aspects of my life in anticipation of game dev, yet it blew up in my face instead due to the AAA job and I want more than anything to finally be able to move on from that and start living again. I went from graduating near the top of my class and being hired at a higher position than I applied for at the AAA job (because they were so impressed in the interview) to being unable to function creatively at all with respect to game dev for most of the past whole decade.
I am essentially "your friendly neighborhood traumatized AAA game developer" in a nutshell.
I wish for all of you a much better game dev journey than the painful one that I have walked.
Feel free to say hi or ask a question if you want to know a bit more about something in game dev and I may be able to answer. I am rusty and partially creatively dysfunctional, but I still have learned a lot over the years and I want other people not have to suffer as I did and hence it is important to me to be supportive of other people.
Likewise, I hope that when I am finally able to overcome my creative mental block and release a real project that the good people of Itch will prove to be a wholesome community to share that with so that I can at long last mend the bad mental associations that have loomed over my mind since the dark times of my experiences in AAA and of my resignation from there and the myriad stresses since then.
Most importantly though, as always, I am wishing all here a wonderful creative journey and equally wonderful lives.
May brighter horizons and sustainable creativity await us all!
Thank you for reading and have a great day/night.
(PS: Sorry if I am long-winded. I am notably verbose in my natural speech pattern.)
