Happy birthday Portal Gun! It was six years ago today that I released the first ever version of the Portal Gun mod for Minecraft 1.3_03 beta, and man, time has has passed. Sadly, Portal Gun has not had an update for over year now, and is not on the latest version of (modable) Minecraft. That is actually partially the reason I’m writing this post.

I first wrote Portal Gun in my last year of high school. Back then I had a lot of free time. Over time I released more and more mods to the point that I’ve lost count on how many I’ve even made. I’ve gone through college, and I’ve midway through university now. Many thought, with my history and experience with photo editing, various scripting languages and Minecraft modding, I would have gone into Computer Science or a computing field.

I did not.

I went into medicine. And if you didn’t know, medicine is a really long course, and a tough one at that. It ranges from four to six years and I’m only just a bit more than halfway to a medical degree now. Understandably so, my free time began to lessen as time went by. More time had to be allocated to working towards my degree and less time for other things such as Minecraft modding. Even now as I write this I think about several case write ups I have to prepare after this post. I won’t bore you with the details but I can assure you I am happy where I am now.

Anyways, my point is, I can’t mod as much as I used to. I still want to, but my lack of free time limits me from doing so. I do have every intention of updating my mods to the latest modable Minecraft version when I can, but that’ll be a slow process. If, on the mod page, it does not state that the mod has been discontinued, I will at my best ability, try to update it whenever possible.

Why don’t I give them to someone else to update? People have offered. People have also tried to do so themselves. But I have declined them. My mods, my work, they all have a very special meaning to me. They have brought me much joy (and frustration), connected me with some of my bestest of friends from all around the world, gained me people that I know I can trust in a heartbeat. To hand them over to someone else would be, to me, admitting defeat. I have, however, stated that if I finally decide to hang up my hat, I will release the sources for all my mods. But until then, I will handle updating them when I can.

That’s really all I have to say at this time. Now, back to those case write ups.

Cheers!

– iChun