Started here on a previous account when I was 12, started developing at 16.

Now I'm just a crusty senior developer at a boring old software development consulting shop.

Kinda miss the good ol days of being a dumb teenager getting dopamine hits from figuring out simple stuff like loops or saving data :P

I legit can't remember all that much specifically about early-mid 2000s Byond, outside of a few games.

I was pretty focused on my own projects which all basically got dropped right as I got the core systems in, because I was a dumb teenager who didn't realize that people weren't interested in proof of concept games that didn't actually have content. If I put in like... 2 more weeks of effort on some of those games, they'd have probably kept a small crowd. (I definitely don't have that issue with my adult personal projects, no-sirree).

I wasn't that big on anime games so I couldn't tell you too much about Zeta, but from the outside looking in, the anime scene pre-Funimation CAD letter was a hilarious pit of people stealing rips from others. The one anime rip I ever played ended up getting duplicated like... 10 times over? and we know it was from that version because I tossed the "owner" some obfuscated code that sneakily added him, myself, and a friend of mine to the admin lists after the game initialized.

12 -> 32 and about to hit 33, I hit my 20 year anniversary of lurking these forums a couple months ago. There used to be some meme about being impossible to leave BYOND. Turns out it's true.

Techgamer wrote:

Now I'm just a crusty senior developer at a boring old software development consulting shop.

I'm in the same boat. I've hopped across some of the biggest names in tech chasing $$$ and "impact" and still don't get the rush I used to when I could get a simple system working in DM. :(