Spore the Next Level: 10 Years and Counting

 I am now officially a senior citizen.

That's right, my beloved interactive series is officially ten years old! When I first started making the series, I had just finished sixth grade and Spore itself had been out for barely three years (and was already dying...). Now, I'm a fully-grown adult looking for a job, but still maintaining my creativity and love of the game even after all this time. To celebrate this momentous occasion, I'm going to be doing another big anniversary special which looks back at the old Revolutionverse and makes use of a few ideas I had floating around for new content before we decided to reboot everything. There's going to be some answers to big questions that have been unsolved for years (not counting the time between the reboot and now).

Also, since this is a short little announcement post, I should probably explain my latest hiatus and the personal reasons I haven't been making new episodes, simply because there's only a few major factors (as opposed to my leaving from 2018-2021, which was for multiple reasons that I could dedicate several posts to).

#1: Lack of Engagement

Ever since the reboot, I decided to put in a new rule: I will only make new parts if I get at least three voters. This makes it more interesting when tallying up votes and allows for interesting combinations that I wouldn't have thought of, and also tells me that people are engaged in the series and want it to continue.

For the past few months, however, I haven't been able to meet this goal. Most of the regular voters have left as quickly as they came back (which is why I ended my first hiatus in the first place). Because of that, I'm not able to get as many votes as I want and I have less content from other people to keep me interested in Spore in the first place. As of now, there's only fungus3 and Pokemonkab churning out anime-eyed shovelware adventures with no concern for quality or player engagement, and I'd prefer not to emulate that.

#2: Depression and Loss

I've been struggling with anxiety and depression for a few years now, beginning in 2018 when I was officially diagnosed and put on medication. When it's at its worst, it makes me lethargic and unable to feel joy from things that I previously considered a blast. At the start of the year, I'd pretty much pulled ahead and felt a great sense of happiness again: I had a brand new house, found a job helping to fight against COVID-19, taken a break from rigorous college education, and in general was enjoying life.

Then it went downhill very fast.

The first troubles came when my contract position expired. I worked on a university campus, and around graduation time the university canceled their contract with my company. Long story short, we'd all stop working soon after the beginning of May. Although somewhat problematic, I didn't think it would be too bad at first: I could find plenty of other jobs, and I'd earned and saved enough money to hold me over until I did. Don't get me wrong, it was still quite demoralizing, but not heartbreaking.

What was heartbreaking, however, was the loss of my beloved cat Snickers.

On May 2nd, at the start of my last week of work, my mom and I had to give her flea repellant because she'd started bringing in ticks from her regular trips outside. So, that evening, we pinned her down and put it along her back, then allowed her to go out again, figuring she'd come back as usual.

As you can probably guess, she never did.

We held out hope that she'd soon return, but eventually we waited weeks without a word. It's been almost two months since that day, and I still have no idea where she is or even if she's alive at all. My grief at losing her was amplified since I didn't have a job or education to distract me, and I fell back into my depression. All the joy was sucked out of my life, and it made getting the energy to make new episodes of STNL:R and Revitalization almost impossible. I'm slowly coming to terms with her being gone, and we're starting to think about getting a new cat (or cats) to replace the void she left behind. It's only now that I feel good enough to resume production (that and doing nothing for the tenth anniversary would be a war crime).