Freeze

Hi everyone,

In these blog posts, I’m usually speaking on behalf of my staff members, but I’m going to be speaking in first person for this one because this is more personal than anything else. Please read the whole thing.

So on 9/1/14 when I made it official that MCFunCentral was going to be overhauled, came up with the name Extrillius, and started planning with Bernard, my dream was to be a developer. It still is. The original plan for Extrillius was to fuel my love for developing and help me create amazing applications and plugins using Java, which would eventually lead to other projects such as iOS and Android development. My plan was to learn development and then use that to make Extrillius not only something different for the player, but completely custom and different for us. That’s the whole reason why I waited until January 2nd to purchase the servers instead of doing it in September or a few months later when we were done planning. I wanted to wait until I knew how to use the Bukkit API and how to make plugins.

However, I started to procrastinate. I put all of my focus into school and other things like YouTube (look at TechieGaming, you’ll see I was fairly active during that time) and somehow in the midst of all of that, by the end of 2014, I had learned nothing other than Java basics. So I slightly rearranged my plan, and made it so that Extrillius would still provide the unique experience for players but not completely custom. I thought I could set it up in maybe a week, since I still had all the files from MCFun Central, continue on my learning, and then redo the backend of Extrillius to make it custom as I had originally hoped for.

Enter Mirror’s Edge.

If I hadn’t seen that video in June 2014 from NerdCubed, perhaps things could have been different today. My passion for programming started to die and my overall interest and motivation in Extrillius started to fade away. Since February I’ve been saying “Yes, It’s definitely almost done! We only have a few things to go! But it might be a March release.. sad.” I spent the whole first semester of 2014 on school and other interests, and the whole second semester racking up 200 hours (400 now) on Mirror’s Edge and causing my grades to suffer (I didn’t have any C’s, but I had many B’s and B-‘s). Even though I had signed up for Treehouse which allowed me to directly approach what I wanted to learn, I was not using it. I was only playing Mirror’s Edge. That was all I cared about. March, April, and May whizzed by as I learned new speedrunning tricks and forgot all about Extrillius. By June, many people thought I had abandoned the project. Mirror’s Edge ruined my life.

But what I just realized today is that even though I have a control over Mirror’s Edge and am no longer addicted, therefore keeping my grades all straight A’s so far, Mirror’s Edge is still ruining my life — in a different way. Let me give you a general idea of my daily life on a normal school day and weekend:

– Wake up at 6:30

– Do morning stuff and get on the bus at ~7:25

– School from 8:00-3:20

– Tennis 5-7 on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Homework starts at 8pm on those days.

– Robotics 3:30-5:00 on Wednesdays

– Programming club Thursdays 3:30-5:00 just before Tennis.

– After homework is finished, I sometimes play Mirror’s Edge for 30 minutes to an hour and then watch TV until 10 or 11pm

Weekend:

– Get up at 8 or 9 am

– Watch TV until 11 am

– Get ready

– do nothing (or do homework followed by nothing if it’s a Sunday)

FACT: I have literally not touched a Treehouse course since April (maybe early May)

My point from all of this is that when I started Extrillius, I had two tracks: my dream, and Extrillius. Both are important, and they rode together throughout the first part of last year. But, as the year progressed, the two tracks started to part. Extrillius has become meaningless to me. The whole thing that fueled the project was my love for programming and my hope to make it a different, custom experience. If it lacks that, it lacks what I wanted it to be. I need to get these two tracks back on course, next to each other, right where they belong. And the worst part is, even in early June this year when I arrived in Romania, causing my addiction to Mirror’s Edge to fade away, I spent the whole time working on Extrillius, not realizing this the whole time. I came up with excuses in my head to put off my dream without even knowing.

So, what can you gather from all of this? Well, it’s not good news.

I’ve decided that I need to focus on development. I need to dedicate AT LEAST 15 minutes every day (preferably 30) to only Treehouse courses so that I can learn to be a developer. Mirror’s Edge will be cut out almost completely from my life.

And as for Extrillius?

A hiatus. A break. We are not almost done. We are done. For now. I’ve come to a realization that if I continue putting my time into trying to revive something that’s dead, trying to continue working on a meaningless project, it will only bring me sadness, a feeling of incompleteness, and I’ll end up rooting the backend of Extrillius anyway when I do learn. So, I need 6 months. 6 months to learn Java and how to be a good developer for 15 minutes every day, and redo the entire behind-the-scenes action of Extrillius. Extrillius is a project that means the world to me, and I will never give up on it, but I want to make sure that it is the best it can possibly be. I want to know that I didn’t spent the whole time working on nothing. I want to bring back what I wanted at this time last year. And I need time to do that.

If you want to stop worrying about Extrillius — forget about it, never visit the website again, there’s no stopping you, but I encourage you to stay for the duration of this adventure, and I am sure that if I put my goals back on track, it will be perfect.

~ Matthew, Owner of the Extrillius Network ~