… I swear I'm slower than a Slowpoke. Just realized I've been around for six years (as of 22 October). (Actually a bit longer, but messy details, haha.
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Meantime, I've honestly been wondering, what's the favourite area of Lunar Shadow, of those who were brave enough to have played it?
(I say "brave enough" because of a really buggy boss, haha.)
I joined this place when I was 15 with no experience in the things you listed (programming, art, CS Modding), and I didn't complete any* of my mods for four entire years. Everything I made was eventually abandoned due to indefinite procrastination and panicking about "how old I'm becoming without anything to show". During these early years I also faced my own controversies and "agony":
[1.] At 15 I staged a boycott over my own mods over some dumb petition to (in summarization) get the forums to "stop swearing", which resulted in me becoming the laughing-stock of the moment and getting humiliated over my young stupidity.
[2.] At 16 I released "Cave (No Story)" (*the only technically complete thing I released during this time). It was something I made over a weekend without much thought; something I would have rather went under the radar with more attention put to the bigger things I was working on (which as stated before, ended up getting abandoned anyway, but at the time it felt like my future depended on them). Inconceivably, somehow this got sent to Vinny of Vinesauce streaming fame, someone I look up to, and resulted in one of his most painfully boring and cringey streams of 2014. It was a complete embarrassment, and if you find the recording of this stream on YouTube you'll see it's filled with hundreds of comments all pointing and laughing at my expense. I was essentially a joke, and I still feel somewhat responsible for possibly ruining the image of an entire community in the eyes of another.
[3.] When I was 17 I canceled everything I was working on, vented here on the forums, and then left for almost two years.
It wasn't until I was almost 19 and already graduated from High School that I came back here, and months later finished a mod for once. That's how long it took for me to see something to completion. It wasn't a magical switch in my abilities or personality either. During that time away I spiraled into a depression deep enough to require therapy and medication. When I had finished that first mod (Enthology) in 2017 I also promised that I would go back and finish another called Carnage Clash. Guess what, I never did and canceled it a 2nd time. Late that year (4 years ago) I started a mod called "The Booster 8.0". This 30-minute mod is 95% complete and just needs bug fixes for the most part. Guess what, I haven't touched it 3.5 years. You may know me as the guy who runs Doukutsu Club, that website where most CS mods nowadays are uploaded. I started that back in 2018 as an unfinished prototype, and I want you to take a wild guess how much actual development and updates it has seen in the past 3 years.
What I'm trying to point out with all of this is that the comparisons, the embarrassment, the "lack of progress" that your brain is inventing don't actually matter. There's a saying that "the harshest critic is yourself", as only you know your entire life story and are able to spend the time to pick apart its flaws. It's a biological evolutionary habit that our brains do in an attempt to better ourselves over the competition for food and shelter and finding mates etc. Now that our global population is all connected online we are all comparing ourselves to billions of others, which isn't healthy because even if you could quantify happiness/success/fame (you can't), basic math says that there will be billions to millions of people who are better than you. It's literally improbable to be perfect in all regards. You said you were ashamed about being banned and doing something years ago but I'm gonna be entirely honest: as an admin in one of those places I don't even really remember what you did, nor do I think any of it matters. Teenage years are called "the awkward years" for a reason, everyone does several humiliating things and then grows out of it, that's why those bans are temporary. I can't lie and say "nobody dislikes you" because I can't read minds, but personally I haven't seen anybody say anything negative about you for years and I view you as just a normal dude in the active community. Did you know all of those embarrassing things about me or how many years I've procrastinated on working on all that stuff? No, nobody remembers or keeps track of that except for myself. Time erases all of that and normal (non-egocentric) people are concerned about their own flaws 100 times more than those of others.
You stated that you feel like you should be "at least decent at programming, scripting, illustrating, pixel art...fluent in speaking Japanese or...Cave Story Modding". There's a chance that you, like many others do, see me as some adult figurehead in this community that is "just better" at all of this and free from any embarrassment/controversy, but the truth is that I'm at least 8 years older, had my own embarrassing moments, and I can script cave story mods with adequate-at-best programming and that's it. I can't do any of the other things you mentioned. You aren't expected to just be a toolbox of skills (nobody in this community is). If you want to mod CS right now, take your time there isn't a rush. If you want to step away and follow another passion, go for it there isn't a rush. If you currently have no ambitions to do anything right now due to depression ((hey, did you know seasonal depression is really common during the winter? Guess what season it is.)) than take a break, I promise that your ambition towards something will come back later I guarantee it.