Scripters got a heart too

Yesterday, a guy from a forum annoyed me. I had the impudence of posting a little word about how it made me feel. Then someone commented on that, saying I just wanted to "prove my intellectual superiority", and "make the others feel poorly about themselves". As rude and tactless as I might be, I'm also an honest person, so I honestly asked myself:: why do I even bother posting contents and helping people in the first place? Maybe I actually do want to show off, after all.

For you to get a better understanding of my insight regarding this issue, let me tell you about this blog's history. I've written scripts for RMXP for several years now. My Ruby skills have improved a lot in the process (and still is), so there are some of them I've simply abandoned, others I've not completed yet. At first I just wanted to use them for my own projects. I believed sharing them would only result in people downloading them and not even saying thank you. Then I subscribed to a French game-making board thinking: why not just discuss this hobby of mine and share thoughts about it? And that changed my mind, because I realized discussing scripts and helping people with their issues gave me the courage to write even more scripts and excel myself. I realized that the day I wrote the Animated Custom Menu System's very first version - because this was the first time I had written a full system for someone else.

So I started to consider sharing my other works. I must admit I was pretty reluctant. What if people stole them and claimed them as their own? What if people didn't like them or otherwise didn't give a damn? And most importantly, since the point was for me to keep encouraged in exchange for the time and energy I'd spent, what if people just grabbed what they could and never provide any feedback? Well, I wasn't quite wrong about that last point, since virtually nobody has ever commented on my works unless they had something to request - and the bigger the request, the more praise they felt they had to provide. Anyways, I decided to do it, and here we are.

Now you know why my works are free and why my help is free - you actually give me something in return, in the form of positive human energy, which keeps me going and allows me to provide even more quality contents. In short, the price for a work of mine is a "thank you" - and most people don't even bother to pay that.

So it really does hurt when I'm told I think too highly of myself and I just want to make people feel bad. This was the kind of issues I wished to avoid at the time I didn't want to go on the Internet. Maybe I should just tell people who ask for support they should learn Ruby just like I did, after all no one's ever helped me in the process but online documentation. Maybe I should retire, maybe writing scripts for RMXP, even more than sharing them, is a waste of time.

So, as a conclusion, I still don't know what will become of this blog, and of my involvement with game-making communities. My only certainty is that I'm feeling very bad about it right now.