From NSSS, to be specific.
Previously, most of the delays and pauses in NSSS's development were caused by other responsibilities - college, work, health, etc.
However, while these things are still contributing somewhat to NSSS's slow development pace, there is a new (and pernicious) factor that has been preventing me from so much as opening eclipse to work on the game.
For the longest time I didn't even know why I had it, or even that I had it. I would keep opening eclipse, loading up some class file that I knew needed tweaking, and just... stare. I knew, essentially, what I needed to do. I knew how I would do it. But, for some reason, I just didn't do it. After a while I couldn't even get to the point of opening eclipse anymore. I attributed this to general busy-ness - I volunteer a lot of man-hours to a computer history museum, and this eats up quite a bit of my free time.
But then, when I took breaks from the volunteer work, and had all the time I needed to dig in to NSSS, I still just... couldn't.
What made this most frustrating was that NSSS still constantly occupied my thoughts - what I'd change, what I'd add, how this should look, how that should sound, how the launcher should work, what will be in the update after the update after next - all the time. My head was constantly bursting with ideas, but I just couldn't find the motivation to actually make them materialize.
Maybe it was because 1.1.12 was in feature freeze, and I was still banging my head against the cloud logic... but that didn't explain nearly enough.
Anyways, a user who had been playing NSSS since it was barely even 6 months old had reached out to me several months ago about possibly making some original music for the game. We chatted a bit about the general feel/tone/instrumentation said music should have, and then parted ways. This was about 10 months ago.
Well, last week they shot me a DM with one of the tracks they had been working on. NSSS was at the very bottom of my mind that day, but I decided to listen to it anyways.
The song was perfect. It was melancholy, soothing, and exciting, it sounded just like "minecraft alpha", it felt familiar and yet brand new, and it was exactly what I felt NSSS should have. And, as I wrote out my full thoughts to them as feedback (I'll spare you the full 10 paragraphs I wrote), it finally clicked for me why I wanted to make NSSS in the first place.
Previously, I always thought I had wanted to make NSSS because I wanted to fulfill my childhood fantasies, or to make a better minecraft than minecraft, or to polish the game as it was in 2010 and move it in a different direction.
But these are all closer to whats than whys.
Imagine returning to your family home and walking into your room and seeing it, not the way you left it, but exactly as it was when you were in elementary school, and there are toys strewn about the floor that you didn't even remember you had until that instant when you saw them again, and everything that was going through your mind, every tiny short-term memory that was in your head that day - what you ate for lunch, what you had to do at school the next day, what time Spongebob was gonna be on - are all just dumped right into the front of your conscious mind as if they'd never left.
But you're an adult. You're a different person. You can look at these things with a different perspective, see things that kid you never possibly could have. And that's never happened before. Like you've been handed a key to your own memories and told "go wild."
The past has been made brand new again. These aren't just dusty old memories that bounce around in your head, slowly getting distorted and thinned out over time. It's the very context that made those memories in the first place, and you're free to keep going from there, knowing what you know now, being the person that you are now.
This, above everything else, is what I have always wanted from NSSS. It's the mentality that has driven me to be so interested in history, period - it's why I volunteer at the museum, it's why I spent nearly a decade of my life archiving media from a certain other block game, and it's why I insist on using antiquated, obsolete tech for what it was intended for, rather than just letting it sit on a shelf looking pretty. I want to make the past brand new again.
After all, 'the past' is just a funny name we use to refer to the parts of the present that have already happened. There's no reason why it can't happen all over again.
To some extent, this is not an uncommon view - the term 'Nostalgia' exists for a reason. But 'Nostalgia', in my opinion, has the connotation of a biased, selective view of the past. It cherry-picks bits and pieces, either because they were remembered more positively, or because they are cheaper or easier to reproduce. A P.T. Cruiser may have 'vintage-y' styling, but it does not make the past brand new - it's too distorted and half-assed.
A few weeks ago I was hanging out with some friends when someone pointed out that Good Burger had gotten a sequel. I had never seen the original before, so we all watched it. Despite having never seen the film, everything about it - the set design, the acting, the fashion, the soundtrack - were extremely familiar to me, as though I had seen it a hundred thousand times before, but it was still brand new to me. And I enjoyed it! It was a goofy, somewhat contrived 90's movie with an only-somewhat-leaky plot and memorable characters.
Then, immediately after, we watched Good Burger 2 and I felt almost nothing. Part of that was because I frankly thought the film kinda sucked - the lessons Dexter learnt in the first film having been ultimately forgotten served to detract from his original character arc, for one - but the original movie was no paragon of writing either, so why did it get such a free pass from me?
Good Burger, despite my never having seen it before, managed to still seem familiar to me because, as a movie made in 1997, it had all the key qualities to slot right in as a movie I plausibly could have watched hundreds of times as a child. Good Burger 2, though clearly intended to capitalize on the 'nostalgia' that other people my age would have had for the original, completely missed the ball in that regard. It was no longer familiar, and thus, every other flaw in the writing, plot, etc. no longer got a free pass from me. It was no longer a 1997 movie with a 1997 movie's plot, it was a 2022 movie with half of a 1997 movie's plot and half of a 2022 movie's plot - it was half-assed. It, like a P.T. Cruiser, couldn't decide whether to be from the past or from the present and ended up in a weird, uncanny worst-of-both-worlds.
I've always been keen to be true to the historical context of whatever historic artifact I'm using - whether it be a typewriter, SGI workstation, palm pilot, or, in NSSS's case, an indie game from 2010 written in Java. It's why I develop NSSS using period tools and constraints - I use an old version of eclipse, maintain strict compliance with Java 5 (which came out in 2004), optimize the game for hardware that is now 20+ years old, built the entire website in .jsp, modeled the wiki after minepedia as it was in September of 2010, etc.
Because I'm not just doing this all to nostalgia-trip, I'm doing this to drag the past back into the present for us all to experience again. It's not going to be exactly as it was in 2010 - I do still want NSSS to be its own thing beyond just minecraft alpha 1.1.2_01 with bugfixes and QoL improvements - but it will be both familiar and new. It will have been made exactly as it would (and could) have been made back in 2010. And you can sit down and play it, and feel just as you did 14 years ago, not just in that you're playing the game as it was back then, but that you're playing a new game just as it was new back then.
As I put it in the discord server last year:
"I want to see someone who first played minecraft 13 years ago, back when they were young and wide-eyed and had never seen a game like it before, someone who got addicted and spent a solid week doing nothing but eat sleep & play, someone who almost pissed themself with fear the first time they got eviscerated by a creeper, someone who woke up their parents in the middle of the night shouting with glee when they found their first diamond, someone who fell in love with the game as it was then and stuck with it as it grew with them, changing and evolving and morphing just as they did, through beta and release and their highschool graduation and their first car and the combat update and the nether update and their first apartment when they finally let minecraft sit dormant on their PC for over a year, when they just lost the last remnants of the spark they had, and they don't even care enough to know why they fell out of love -
I want that person to play NSSS, shake off the cobwebs in their brain as they try to pull out the memories that have become faded and warped with time, just enough that they've forgotten just what this game did to them when they were younger, just enough that they expect the same old experience that they've grown more and more unenthused about over the years -
And I want them to get eviscerated by a creeper for the first time in 8 years and fucking shit their pants."
