Thrive: A Memoir

You know that feeling when it’s 10:30pm and you have an overwhelming urge to get your thoughts out on something because it’s bugging you and by morning you’ll have forgotten how intense it is?

Yeah. Welcome to a messy rant on Thrive.

If there’s an overarching theme to all the posts I’ve published to this blog since its revamp, it would be the ebb and flow of hope.

How I lost it back in those weird few months when I became obsessed with elections in a foreign country, how it falters but may recover as I watch Hollywood adapt my favourite book series, how a man visits the end of time to die when he realises he has no hope left. I suppose it’s quite a strong influence on my thoughts.

In early 2016, I made a post outlining my experiences with the Thrive project. It was perhaps a more upbeat interpretation of hope than others – in what is still empirically the most successful piece of writing ever accredited to ‘Oliver Lugg’, I argued the future was bright for a game many thought impossible. Go read it if you wish. I dare not. It’s only going to make this feeling worse.

It’s finally time to admit I’ve lost the will to care for Thrive. That doesn’t quite do this emotion justice though – I’m actively angry that I don’t. It boils my blood that I can’t even muster the motivation to reply to someone in the fan Discord asking when the Thrive Main Theme will be completed. I can’t type one Belgiuming sentence. Not one sentence for something I’ve sunk years, maybe even the best years of my life, into.

Is this how everyone who’s ever left Revolutionary Games feels?

I’ve decided to direct this confused bundle of emotions into something productive and give my honest opinions on Thrive. A candid exploration of what it’s done to me and where I stand now. Like that old post, maybe this will become outdated if my feelings ever change, but right now, at 11pm (yes, it’s taken me half an hour to get this far), this is my soul laid bare.

I found Thrive in a YouTube comment mid-2012, so long ago that YouTube’s comments weren’t even integrated with Google+. By early 2013, I’d joined the team as a composer with my finger occasionally dipping into many other pies. This coincided with an anomalous bump in activity thanks to the fabled “Reddit boom”. Perhaps if that hadn’t happened I would have lost hope earlier and never gotten so attached for so long.

Perhaps it was also down to being so young. I was 14 when I joined. I’m now 19. I now have a (kind of) beard. Back then, the only person my age I knew with a beard was a freak who’d clearly done a puberty speedrun.

Getting attached at that age was easy. A realistic evolution game where anyone can contribute? Hot dog!

As time went on, I matured and realised things weren’t going to materialise out of thin air. For the most part, I kept trundling along believing it would happen someday, we just had to work and wait.

There were slow periods back then. Each time I thought I could help motivate people or patch a hole, I did it. I gave up half a summer to the GDD. I helped formulate various iterations of the team structure and work procedure. I’m largely responsible for the website. Somehow, throughout these acts, my influence grew. The lowly composer who did the odd extra bit on the side became one of the project’s core members. I never planned for that to happen, it just did. I had the faith to stick around and the gall to keep telling people not to give up.

I was never part of an internet community before Thrive. It was the first time I felt I belonged with people I didn’t know in real life. At times, the Thrive team were better friends than my actual friends. That’s one reason why it hurts so much that most of them disappeared.

Throughout what may generously be called my formative years, I had Thrive. It had a profound effect on me. Back in 2012, I’d composed nothing but lame attempts at pop-rock in Musescore/Synthesia. Thanks to all the experience and the positive learning environment Thrive gave me, I arrive in mid-2018 with the skills to approach actual game developers and ask to create their soundtrack (well, it’s complicated at the moment…more on that maybe soon-ish). Long story short: I get paid to make music now. That’s cool. That’s down to Thrive.

Nor can I ignore its influence on my interpersonal skills. With a few embarrassing exceptions that shall never be spoken of, I have conducted myself with tact and thoughtfulness in environments full of people older and far more qualified than me. Heck, all that writing of Devblogs, GDDs and forum posts really pushed my wordsmithing forward too. Maybe Thrive has kept my undying ambition of becoming an author alive. I have to thank it for giving me a small audience for these things, at any rate.

I’ve learnt to deal with the anonymous masses of the internet. One of the proudest moments of my life was when I responded to someone with a vendetta against my GUI not with immediate defensive fury, but with measured analysis some days later, where I owned up to my shortcomings and set about atoning for them with another attempt.

But this is where things turn sour. Five years spent soaking up the abuse of those who hate your project takes its toll, especially when it’s not really your project.

One example was a recent (four months ago) encounter with a mathematics postgraduate who assaulted the developers and community with criticism for days on end. As a maths undergraduate, I have first-hand experience of the field’s dickishness, but even I was astounded. I guess from his perspective we were piling on him with ridiculous counter-arguments. But we never started the arguments and we never threatened to go on a crusade through academia slandering anyone’s hard work.

I had to take several days away from the internet just to recover. It was pretty much a nervous breakdown.

The worst part wasn’t the fact he was argumentative. The worst part was I was starting to agree with him.

Like so many before, he saw the project as a naïve, over-ambitious pipedream cobbled together without any semblance of organisation. Where was the structure, the accountability, the funding? The number of suggestions I’ve seen to use Kickstarter must number somewhere in the hundreds. Why aren’t we setting a payment system? Well, I wrote a whole wiki page to answer that. Too bad I don’t agree with it anymore.

I made a post in December suggesting Thrive needed something radical, like monetary input, if we wanted it to survive. The eventual consensus however was…no. Everything would be fine, we just had to wait. I ended with an ultimatum: six months later, if things remained stagnant, we needed to seriously consider another approach.

Exactly seven months from the very day, I remembered that post, thought about bringing it up and decided, “Screw that, I can’t be bothered.”

I’m just fed up. I’m fed up with watching something I put so much time into wither and die. I’m fed up with justifying other people’s decisions to those on the internet who think we’re a joke. I’m fed up with seeing others of the same opinion pull morale down even further. Great job here Oliver, you’re really helping with that.

Sometimes I felt like a community manager getting flak from entitled brats for the inadequacies of others (see the current furore on the Jurassic World: Evolution subreddit for the kind of thing I mean). Alright, that’s mean. None of the core Thrive team have ever been inadequate – they do wonderful things I could never dream of doing – they just don’t have the time or motivation sometimes to keep going. I always tried my best to pick them up because I couldn’t fill the roles and we needed them, but now…I can’t. I can’t delude myself anymore.

I often wonder what ~sciocont’s opinion of Thrive is these days. Though not the founder, he more than anyone is responsible for Thrive as we know it. He always seemed to know what to do. As I was growing up under the wing of the project, I idolised him. Then, all of a sudden, sometime in maybe 2014, he left. A cheeky Google search for his real name reveals he’s now studying mammalian ecology. None of us know why he left, but he probably decided to invest his time in something less risky and less likely to disappoint because of what others do or don’t do. I wonder how he remembers the project.

That’s me today. Over the last year I’ve slipped away from Thrive. I have university work to attend to. I’ve shunned the game in favour of my own projects, like writing books and music.

But I’m forcibly glued to Thrive if I stay like this. It’s a part of my internet identity. Few of my YouTube subscribers care for my music outside Thrive, no matter how hard I’ve tried to convince them. As shown above, the most popular page of my website is still The Impossible Game. People care for Thrive as a brand and idea more than they probably ever could for me as a person. Not that I’m surprised, but when you grow to an age where having an internet presence matters while intertwined with one project that may never go anywhere, it casts an unavoidable shadow.

I really don’t want Thrive to die. That’s what makes it hurt so much to see such apathy in myself and others.

What then can we do?

The best case scenario would be to stumble upon all the great Thrive developers of old – ~sciocont, Nimrod, jjonj, moopli, NickTheNick, TheCreator – and convince them to join again. This is, I think you’ll agree, unlikely.

Alternatively, our current programmers could find the time complete 0.4.0, new engine and all, making it ready to take on the world. I have my doubts. There’s a reason we’ve gone over a year without an update. People have lives to attend to. I’m no different and am guilty of side-lining Thrive for the sake of my life. I just wish Thrive weren’t such a big chunk of that life sometimes.

Otherwise…something money-related may have merit. There are pitfalls that have kept the team away for so long, but perhaps we’re just scared of change. In a choice between seeing so much hard work got to waste or changing things to actually get somewhere, I know which I want.

Or maybe there’s another solution. If you have one, please tell us and prepare for annoyed replies about how we’ve already considered that and turned it down for twelve different reasons.

I wish I knew what to do. I’m out of ideas.

It’s now 1:15am. I have an aimless, fruitless rant handwritten on the desk in front of me. I’ll tidy it up and publish in the morning. Maybe by then I’ll have figured something out.

Spoiler: I didn’t.