The last thing I think anybody on this forum would want would be to see you stop developing this altogether.

Whether this takes you another year, or another five years, I look forward to playing this game.

Being somebody who has had similar adventures in the mental health arena, I am proud of you for getting yourself medical attention. It took me months to do the same.

We love you Josh <3 <3

...well holy crap. I got busy and hadn't realized that updates had dropped off...

Seriously, get well. I know firsthand that trying to get your marbles back together can take a frustratingly long time, but it's much worse to leave the healing process half-finished.

It's great to have you back!

Welcome back Josh! Glad to see you're finally taking care of yourself again.

[getting off the slowpoke train]
Welcome back Josh! It's good to see you're already recovering, and i sincerely hope you'll take your time and get back on your feet. We're all here to support you!

Welcome back, Josh!

I've been following for a long time and finally signed up on the forum to post this.

I'm glad to hear that you're doing better. I think most of us have had some experience with mental health issues, either personally or someone we love. I think we're all just glad to hear from you, and to know you're still kickin.

Take'r easy getting back into it.

squidheadjax wrote:...well holy crap. I got busy and hadn't realized that updates had dropped off...

Seriously, get well. I know firsthand that trying to get your marbles back together can take a frustratingly long time, but it's much worse to leave the healing process half-finished.

heh, i feel like i stole your name

Very nice to see you're back, Josh.
During your absence, many speculated that you've retired to your cave and vowed to absolute silence until you finish the game (or at least the beta).
If you did that, you would be a very bad person IMO, and you would also be the person I misjudged most in my life.
What you just described as the real reason is about the only logical reason for your silence besides "josh is kill".

I'm sure you already know it by now: take it easy(ier).

And call me crazy, but I would actually bet money that one of the main reasons for what happened to you is, as far as I understood it, large amounts of diet coke you were consuming.
No amount of that s**t is a good amount. (edit: well, obviously, there is only one good amount: none)

Take care and do awesome stuff (in that order).

I just had one of those days where everything went right so I thought, why not check LT forums and see if Josh is back and you are, amazing

As many others no doubt have said, take your time, no pressure and take care of your self first and foremost, the game will be done when it's done and in the meantime you have a vast support system here just itching to help any way possible

Onwards and upwards

Just register for celebrate your return Josh.
Welcome back!

Welcome back Mr J!

And seriously no pressure, promise us you try to feel no pressure to meet our selfish demands for updates and progress.

In return we'll promise to try to not hype our expectations as high, and well meet you half way, Kay?

Your far from alone causing this situation Josh, even if it is mostly you that personally had to suffer for it. As a group of fans we are also partially guilty in setting impossible expectations and hype that no human can possibly meet, and learning that Josh indeed is also human, not a robot.

You scale back your ambitions of how the game need to be before you can show/share/beta/release it just a tiny bit and we'll scale back our expectations accordingly. Plenty of indie developers are very successful with sharing half finished content with fans. Let's all relax and enjoy without pressure or hype

Good to see you back, Josh. Be sure to walk before you run.

Hi Josh,

I've been lurking here for a while after hearing about the game some year or so after its Kickstart campaign had completed. Like many others, I was rather puzzled by your disappearance. However, my biggest fear was not that you "ran off with the money", but that you got in bed with some publisher like Deep Silver that would insist you keep quiet until their marketing department had everything "handled". That was a worst case scenario to me, or so I thought, up until I read this post.

For the community: I have ADHD and sleep disorders brought on by the treatment for the ADHD, which are strong prescription stimulants. I've experienced sleep deprivation several times and can vouch for just about everything Josh said about his experience. I've experienced the mania and gibberish talking he refers to. There are other things he didn't mention, probably out of fear. But, I can tell you some of what happens gets worse than what he was willing to describe publicly. After a time hallucinations set in, and in my case, the auditory ones were particular bad, causing me to twitch and react to things around me that other people couldn't see or hear. I swirled off the road once because I heard a loud bang in my left ear. In the end, I went to my psychiatrist thinking I was developing schizophrenia or something. He talked to me a while and then chuckled at the suggestion. Then he said, "No, I don't think you're going crazy. All of your symptoms point to severe sleep deprivation. Here's a note, take of work, take some sedatives and get some sleep. You've been overdoing it and unfortunately, your ADHD treatment predisposes you to the behavior. You need to be more careful than other people about overworking yourself because your natural sleep signals won't always work because of the medication you take."

Josh isn't crazy. He isn't going crazy, nor does he sound like some long term victim of mental health issues. (IMO, I don't actually know.) To me, it sounds like his dream project became reality, and then he overworked himself, literally, to the point at which his body decided the subtle nags for sleep were not working and gave him a more serious warning. It's good he caught this now, because it can get worse. Without sleep, the mind gets flaky first but, when the body starts to feel it, people end up hospitalized with organ failures and such.

Josh, I'm glad to see you're back. I never imagined your disappearance was due to you acting all workaholic on this project. Do take it easy, I've been there and know what sleeping 2 hours a night or less for extended periods feels like. My only advice is to keep a log of all your working and sleeping hours. If ever, in any seven day period, your working hours begin to outnumber your sleeping ones, you're headed down that dangerous path again. If you were like me you probably found yourself seriously trying to explain why flying monkeys actually belong in a space sim. It does make you take seriously far too many strange ideas...

Hei. Welcome back, Josh!

Sprints are fine for what they are, but this project of yours is in Dwarf Fortress' league which needs slow and steady above anything else. A workable pace it'll be, or none at all.

Stay safe, buddy. To finish this, first of all we need you whole!

Well, after having lurked for a long time over the years, and finally checking back in after almost writing off LT as done, this seems like a good time to register.

I suffer from a lot of mental illness stuff aswell, and videogames are one of the things that have made life worth living in front of adversity. LT is a game that I have dreamed of many times, but has not yet existed. You are doing the work that I could never dream of doing - just make sure that you yourself is just as healthy as the systems on that huge capital ship.