Playing devil’s advocate, I personally think that some kind of accountability should always be in place when someone acquires a large amount of money meant for a large scale project like this. How much Kickstarter money was raised? Where did it go to? Is it being stockpiled or is it lining someone’s bank account? They’re pretty simple questions and I don’t think unfair ones to ask.
Caveat: I was not in charge of any of the kickstarter organization or money or any of this. What follows is my understanding of the kickstarter situation, and it may not be fully informed.
This has all been said before many times. The original developer, Developer A went missing between when funds were raised and work began. Backup developer, Developer B, was hired instead. Developer B worked for the three months he was contracted to work, but had overpromised and underdelivered, and when his contract was up he promptly disappeared. However, the kickstarter was not for the work to be completed and released, it was to hire someone to work towards those goals. Developer B did what he was hired to do, but unfortunately did not achieve any of the programming goals besides tiles support. The money in his contract is gone and spent. There remains a modest amount of money from the kickstarter, around $1000-2000, which has been earmarked for a bounty reward for the completion of z-level support.
A few minor corrections. GalenEvil disappeared at an essentially random time, not the end of his contract or a particular unit of work or after a payment, just disappeared one day. Frankly my biggest concern with respect to his disappearance is that he’s ok. He did not abscond with any money or to the best of my knowledge avoid doing any work. Whatever the reason, he just quit.
As for the work done, he knocked out a good bit of infrastructure work that we planned on having him do. He did not make it to the headline feature, but not for avoiding it, he was following the development plan we had laid out and simply did not make it that far.
I don’t have the figures handy, but the kickstarter raised about $9,000, a large chunk of which was paid to the hired developer as planned, and the remainder is in bountysource, waiting for someone to tackle the various issues laid out there to move us toward z-levels. I’m aware of three different people that have attempted to tackle some of them, but so far there hasn’t been any solid progress toward those goals.
To put that figure in perspective, if developed commercially DDA would easily be a million-dollar project if you only count the programmer time spent on it.
We also had a troll who dogged us harder than a lot of those bots we had the other day did, and it left us all ragged as hell about the whole process of explaining where the money went. I nearly mistook LoneTopHat for him given the nature of the criticisms - Again, I am sorry. If anyone gets defensive in a hurry, it’s because we’ve been asked a lot of these questions by a person who didn’t actually want answers, like you asked. Only to be Right. At least, we think that was the motive. The man was nuts. Ask someone in PM for details if you’re really curious, as another rehash does not deserve space in any thread. It was hell.
The situation has been concluded to the best of our abilities (Well, ‘our’ being those actually in charge of handling. I was mostly a voice in the events,) under what amounted to a really shitty situation, what with Galen vanishing and the mother of all trolls. Galen always came across as a good person when we chatted. There was no explanation of his vanishing. I’m still concerned about that.
Thank you everyone for the information. I was not aware you had dealt with a negative element before on this issue, but I can assure you I had the best intents at asking questions. Honestly, it was because I was curious about investing my money into a future crowd funding program for this game, but didn’t understand what occurred before. I assumed the worst, and there has recently been a very public backlash against crowd funding for this very discussion, follow through and accountability. It’s important to talk about it though, as consumers, and I thank the developer for speaking on the subject. It seems like a pretty shitty affair for everyone, and we can hope nothing life changing occurred to the developer who disappeared.
I do have a few remaining questions. How is the development process coming, and what are the chances of stagnation and abandonment? I really don’t want to see this happen. How can I help find you a programmer? Isn’t Deon a programmer? Yell at him, maybe. Indiegogo may be a decent avenue, as well.
[quote=“LoneTophat, post:445, topic:1854”]Thank you everyone for the information. I was not aware you had dealt with a negative element before on this issue, but I can assure you I had the best intents at asking questions. Honestly, it was because I was curious about investing my money into a future crowd funding program for this game, but didn’t understand what occurred before. I assumed the worst, and there has recently been a very public backlash against crowd funding for this very discussion, follow through and accountability. It’s important to talk about it though, as consumers, and I thank the developer for speaking on the subject. It seems like a pretty shitty affair for everyone, and we can hope nothing life changing occurred to the developer who disappeared.
I do have a few remaining questions. How is the development process coming, and what are the chances of stagnation and abandonment? I really don’t want to see this happen. How can I help find you a programmer? Isn’t Deon a programmer? Yell at him, maybe. Indiegogo may be a decent avenue, as well.[/quote]
Oh no the coding scene is really active, I can’t remember what you call it but anyone is able to code in/ fix/ change anything in the code and the main developers decide if it should/ good enough to be added to the game. In fact the newest stable release wasn’t that long ago and had a TON of new stuff, bugfixes, and the like.
Open Source would be the words you’re looking for!
Yeah the whole ‘main devs’ thing is more like ‘top contributors’. Also either Kevin, Glyph, or both technically own the forums to my knowledge. We use github for working on the game and keeping everyone’s contributions from getting messy, and the rule of thumb is that you cannot merge your own additions, only other coder’s submissions. That way, new content is peer-reviewed in some fashion before being added.
I’d get in on the action too but I am not fluent in programming languages. So I am mostly moral support around here XD
I will say this about CC:DDA and I repeat it to anyone who cares to listen. I haven’t spent a single dollar on this game, and no one has asked for one, and I cannot for the life of me remember having this much !!FUN!!
A lot of “free games” are designed to get you to a certain point where you have to invest money to be competitive. CC:DDA doesn’t want you to be competitive and is really more concerned with murdering you in as brutal as fashion possible. The curb stomping scene from American History X comes to mind.
I have never seen a bigger labor of love as Cataclysm. My hats off to any and all who have made this game possible and thank you fine folks for an awesome ever changing great game.
Clarification, we have absolutely no plans of running another funding campaign, crowd- or otherwise. It comes up again periodically, but we literally don’t have anything to spend it on.
Development continues to proceed at a very rapid pace in general, and we have quite a lot of contributors.
Kind of a side note here: The funds left over from the kick starter that are on bounty source, that needs to be advertised better. There is cash money up for grabs. I don’t know, it seems foolish to have something like that and not have it prominently displayed on the front page.