As a matter of fact, this is the first PackSquash release in... two years. A lot has happened in that time, both for me personally and in the wider world. To the most casual external observer, one oblivious to what goes on in our Discord server, to the steady work that happened on the main branch, and to the fact that PackSquash is still mostly a labor of love by a single person with fluctuating interests and availability, this might look like staleness. Or abandonment. Or any number of other uncharitable labels.

I'm not going to take a page out of the usual corporate playbook and stay quiet about it, or try to gloss it over so a superficial appearance of unrealistic, ever-persistent growth and success can be preserved.

Instead, I want to be atypically human and honest.

I already have a full-time job where I've built great working relationships with people who routinely ask me to make some piece of software do X by date Y for project Z. With PackSquash, I've sometimes tried to please people who see it purely as a cost-effective solution to their business problems: people who bring little to the table beyond idle suggestions and "when will X be done?" questions that demand oversimplified answers. By doing that, I found myself giving assurances I would normally reserve for paid work, but with some crucial differences: they don't try to make their intentions less transactional; the steepness of the ask, which effectively expects someone to effectively be overemployed in their free time, indefinitely, is glossed over; and there is absolutely none of the job stability that lets someone pay rent or a mortgage, or social responsibility that lets them sleep well at night. In short: it didn't feel right, nor sustainable.

So to those people, I want to say this plainly: I'm tired of playing "corporate" on precarious foundations just because cool ideas for a game we love. I won't do it anymore.

What keeps pulling me back to PackSquash is, simply put, passion, and (healthy? unreasonable?) stubbornness. I'm happy when I can explore ideas, think deeply, be creative, and share something genuinely useful with the community, free from the expectations of any for-profit endeavor. There is no business to be made here, and that's the point. This is an open-source project in both license and spirit, driven by the ideal of building a community where people get involved, collaborate for the greater good and for human growth, and care about one another. I need that small shed of light in a world where most headlines are painted in darker shades.

So to everyone who submits PRs, sticks around on the Discord server, shares feedback without ulterior motives, is honestly friendly, or even just respects, uses, supports, and promotes the work in good faith: thank you, truly ❤️. You're exactly the kind of people who remind me that I'm not alone in the pursuit a kinder, more hopeful, more advanced world. One that can start, symbolically, with something as simple as building a tool for a block game. And so far, that has been worth far more to me, and I believe to the wider community too, than pretending to reliably shuffle sprint tasks around under some made up deadline, in service of a hollow business goal.

Let's look forward to continuing to be excellent to each other, without letting ourselves get caught up in institutions that feel so tone-deaf to a collective goal of self-actualization.