Timewaste

Last post (all the way yesterday) I said:

So that's that, some small toy projects and a KVM is likely my future at the moment. I could also look at transitioning to making my own DB Client neovim plugin... Or heck, I could go and make something useless just for the fun of it and to learn.

Well, I've landed on making something useless. That whole post made me realize I just have the wrong mindset or at least not a mindset I want to have. I'm so determined to make something useful, likely because I'm chasing some amount of recognition — I had a similar problem when I played competitive video games.

I think the other part of it is I view time as so valuable and I feel like I've wasted a lot of my time up until now (especially on the aforementioned competitive video games). I always need a justification for how I spend my time, but I'm ready to break away from that.

I've titled this differently than all my other project posts as a commitment to myself. I will spend an inordinate amount of time on this project and I accept that there may be no tangible result in the end.

And the best thing is that something like it already exists, so I'm already accepting I'm not making anything necessarily original, niche, or unique.

So...

What is it?

I'm going to be making an MMORPG Simulation which I will be calling Timewaste for now — this name feels almost sardonic, but I swear it's a healthy way for me to view it. As I mentioned, a game — called Erenshor — already exists that does this exact thing.

I'm not sure what my project will look like. I hesitate to call it a game because I really just intend to make the world observable, not to interact with it. But it's definitely a possibility.

I'll be creating it in Rust and intend to create my own engine — windowing, rendering, physics, etc. Already the project is doomed, yay! Which is perfect for me. I also have a minor goal of bringing in as few crates (maybe 0? probably not) as possible. I'm not sure I understand the full extent of what I'm trying to undertake here, but I think that's also the point, right? The point is learning and building and having something that's my own.

Why an MMORPG Simulation?

I'm pretty nostalgic for the days of WoW and EverQuest. EverCrack was a potential name I considered. I'm so sick of being inundated with media, I miss just sitting in a town studying, chatting, hearing about what's going on in the (game) world. Basically I miss downtime. I don't have any delusion that this will recreate that, but I am interested to see what it does become. I've been reading the reviews of Erenshor and people seem pretty geeked.

I also want to create cool imagery and worlds. And to essentially have a sandbox. I really want to make an amazing atmosphere. My original thought was somewhat of an idle game where a party just went from small zone to small zone pulling different camps (cleverly named "MMO Mob Camping Simulator"). But why not broaden my goals if the point is to spend my time?

Plus it's perfect! I just became enamored with Tauri so maybe I can use it to create a launcher 2 years from now when I have a plane in a window.

Final thoughts

I'm pretty excited. I think this will be a strong throughline no matter what I'm working on and it touches on so many layers of interests. Well, until next time! Guess I'm off to figure out how to create a window...