The last time you heard from me was during RTB. The Road to the Beta was designed to be the beginning of the end for Limit Theory's dev cycle. Ultimately it, along with a solid year of unhealthy work habits, spiced up with the onsetting of some pre-existing conditions unknown to myself, ended up backfiring and, ironically, was the beginning of the end for my sanity. I wish that were a joke, but it's not really.
In preparation for the third chapter of RTB, I was pushing harder than ever to deliver several new pieces of game content that I thought would really please you all (it included a working custom ship editor...to give you some idea of how hard I was pushing). Unfortunately and much to my surprise, roughly a week before the deadline on RTB 3.0, I very suddenly started to experience new, strange, and scary things, mentally speaking. I'm not going to go into more detail than that...but the point is that it threw me into a world of panic. It also disconnected me from objective reality for an extended period of time (again, I won't go into detail about what that entails).
Retrospectively, I can basically summarize it as such: the mental health issues that had been creeping up on me for about half a year, combined with my drive to wrap up LT finally came to a head and set off a mental condition that drove me into a very scary place. Again, I don't want to dwell on that too much, but in hopes of making my absence a little more understandable, I'll just say that these weren't garden-variety anxiety or mood issues -- what I experienced was frightening and ultimately disabled my ability to work effectively for roughly three months. I still woke up every morning attempting to code, but, to be perfectly honest, my mind was so far gone that I accomplished little.
In what seemed at the time like just a matter of days, three months of my life blew by without any sign of the Josh that you've all come to know. Not surprisingly, I've very little memory of that time.
By some miracle, the thought "something is very wrong" entered my head one day. It must seem so overwhelmingly obvious from an outsider's perspective. But from inside the belly of that kind of situation, and being in total isolation, it's nearly impossible to actually recognize and do something about it -- hence three months seeming like days. But finally, the realization hit me. The very next day, I moved home to Louisiana and told my parents that I needed help from medical professionals.
The next two months were consumed by trying to get that attention and make headway in figuring out how to diagnose and 'fix' me. Towards the end, after long last and with the right treatment, I started to feel Josh coming back again. It was a long and arduous process, but the moment that I felt the first flicker of light return to my mind was one of the most beautiful moments in my life. I'll never forget it.
