Hi, I’m Aleph, and I have made several poor life choices, I got into software because it gave me an undeserved aura of competence. My actual passion was level design, but I’m in denial about that. Around 20 years ago, I taught myself Hammer (instead of something useful like 3ds max or Maya), under the wildly optimistic assumption that, by the time I graduated high school, Valve would have finally released the Source 2 SDK. That did not happen.

What did happen was various acquaintances from the same sphere of Garry’s Mod communities as me, (kind of people who spent their formative years making helicopters out of frozen ragdolls, and telling others to bind suicide to a key), somehow managed to become fully functional adults, landing jobs working for the guy who made Garry’s Mod.

Meanwhile, in the time it took for that to happen, the world underwent several minor changes.

The economy collapsed. Cars learned to drive themselves. The economy collapsed again. Social media learned how to destroy democracy. We trained machines to think like us, and immediately regretted it. We interfaced computers with brains, we edited DNA, we touched the surface of the Sun, and for the first time in human history, we stared into the abyss of a black hole.

Empires crumbled. Tectonic plates shifted. Children were born, chased dreams, got tired, and found themselves right back where they started. The circle of life continued.

And then, finally, those Gmod shitposters, turned industry professionals, were handed access to the Source 2 engine code. Not because Valve finally decided to release it, but because they decided to just do that themselves.

And so, here I am. Two decades later. 3,000 hours deep into an unreleased successor to a game that already devoured my childhood, staring at Hammer 2 like it owes me money.

And I still have nothing to show for it.

Nice to meet all of you.