Kickstarted video game project Haunts gets mothballed

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-20003916

by HarveyKandola • 14 years ago

31 42 14 years ago

bbc.co.uk

"In his blogpost, Mr Dakan apologised for how Haunts has turned out and pledged to refund any backer who wanted their money back out of his own pocket."

Well, at least he's saying he'll do the right thing about it.

masklinn3• 14 years ago

No, that is not "the right thing", there's absolutely nothing right about doing that. It's good natured and nice of him, but in the grand scheme of things if it's anything that anything is "a terrible idea".

Karunamon4• 14 years ago

It's not right to give the people who backed him their money back? What.

austinlyons3• 14 years ago

why don't they just open source it?

erre2• 14 years ago

From the latest update:

"""A lot of you have mentioned that we should open source everything if worse comes to worse. In fact, the code is already open, but if we cannot pull together to make this a retail product, we will absolutely fully open source everything, content and code and turn it over to the community. Actually, at some point we’d like to do that no matter what, even after a retail release (however many years later, when it makes fiscal sense). But right now the code is under the same modified BSD license as the Go programming language and the contents are all Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial Share-Alike."""

erre2• 14 years ago

Besides, I should point out that the project owners haven't abandoned it yet. They are trying to find ways to make it happen.

austinlyons3• 14 years ago

oh thanks, I hadn't seen that. I think it would make more fiscal sense to open source it now and get it finished rather than let it sit, reimburse backers and then open source it.

yarrel• 14 years ago

NC-SA isn't "open source".

EastCoastLA2• 14 years ago

It would nice to see all crowd source projects have a clause that if the project fails or is mothballed, then the project code and assets are released open source. Haunts: The Manse Macabre and all assets could be place on github for the users to continue.

austinlyons3• 14 years ago

I agree. For all the people wanting to learn/practice Go, finishing Haunts would be a great opportunity

OoTheNigerian• 14 years ago

Here's a proper and more holistic overview.

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/2066438441/haunts-the-ma...

Titanous• 14 years ago

The source code for the game (Go/Lua) is already on GitHub: https://github.com/runningwild/haunts

fghh45sdfhr3• 14 years ago

I had no interest in this game so far, but now I will try to run this. Open sourcing almost any project is to programmers, like blood in the water is to sharks :)

wvenable• 14 years ago

$28,739 isn't a lot of money to hire programmers to work over any reasonable amount of time. This hardly seems surprising.

timwiseman4• 14 years ago

You have a point, but remember that he had substantial work on the game finished before he turned to kickstarter, so he wasn't trying to make a whole game on $28K.

Also, unless somehow agreed otherwise the creators still keep copyright in things funded through kickstarter, so he could promise perecentage of future returns along with immediate payment (it's not clear from the article that he did, but he certainly could have.)

technotony• 14 years ago

Offering financial returns would be against kickstarter terms of service (and possibly illegal depending how it was structured).

goostavos• 14 years ago

That's what jumped out at me, too. Considering, the fact that 28k isn't even an acceptable yearly salary for one employee, trying to fund a small team on that minuscule amount seems.. odd.

It's not entirely surprising that the engineers left to go back to jobs that pay a livable wage.

b0rsuk• 14 years ago

Label them (those who left) as quitters without ethics or loyalty and make sure it comes up high in google searches. Do you think it would work ? I know potential employers google my name.

RobotCaleb• 14 years ago

That seems rather rash.

Do I think it would work what? Do you have a goal other than attempting to destroy someone's career?

hnal943• 14 years ago

I think it would work if the goal was to never attract another programer to your company again.

eternalban• 14 years ago

You really need to amend that suggestion with "I am not a lawyer" ...

sejje• 14 years ago

Maybe I'm not understanding properly, but the article said one programmer was hired for 1 year by the project. He served his year, and now is done. He opted not to continue.

What is his sin?

elliottcarlson• 14 years ago

We don't know the circumstances behind this - if the employer is hard to work with, perhaps unreasonable at times - then it is in someones best interest to quit. We don't know the whole story so we can't judge either side.

king_jester• 14 years ago

Last time I checked, when you are hired for pay to write software, you aren't obligated to finish when things go sour just because of "loyalty".

goldfeld2• 14 years ago

I don't mean to bash the guy, but when it comes to small software projects on a shoestring, that seem more like a side project than a stable income, I'd have been worried about any in which the project's owner and visionary isn't a coder himself. It's not that he could have kept the ball rolling the hard way, all by himself (though he could, had he been the lead programmer instead of placing that weight on a volatile hire), it's more about the morale in knowing the biggest stakeholder is also knee deep in the guts of the game. It does wonders to programmer employees, and might not have ended up with them quitting so early on.

I've been noticing this trend on Kickstarter that more and more people seem to be coming up with coding projects and then waiting on the money to solve their core problem: getting the project coded, since they can't code themselves. I don't know if it's good or bad, it's definitely good that designers can bootstrap a coding project this way, but then coding is becoming increasingly easier that I'd rather see these people learn to do it and then bring their full vision into a product. Otherwise they deny software projects their biggest advantage; that they can be done on the side with no resources but your own time, which you are more than happy to spend doing that wonderful hobby which is bulding things and seeing them work.

timwiseman4• 14 years ago

I'd have been worried about any in which the project's owner and visionary isn't a coder himself

I'm of mixed feelings. As a programmer and DBA myself, I would certainly find it good for the project lead to at least have programming experience so they really understood the process.

But you can be "knee deep in the guts of the game" in more ways than programming. A competent writer, level designer, or graphics artist are as deep in a game as the programmers, just in different ways. I would be extremely hesitant to back anyone who was just a "visionary" or "idea man", but I would happily support someone who had created a detailed script, level designs, and a thorough project organization plan and now needed programmers to turn that highly detailed set of requirements into code.

goldfeld2• 14 years ago

As much as I agree with you on other parts being as much important, I wasn't necessarily meaning an artistically accomplished project, as long as an MVP could be put out. And unless Mr. Dakan is writer, game designer and graphic artist all-in-one, there seems to be the case that the project was mothballed because of a lack of coding, not of any of those other things.

In the end, average-quality work on all these other fronts is much more easily replaced or makeshifted than code, even if poor code. Without a programmer who can make progress, even if not maintainable in the future, the project halts, as it has. Or it has to resign to being a board game, a story or a graphic novel, and not an interactive digital game.

Meanwhile, a sufficiently creative coder who is the project lead can probably come up with placeholders for everything else. Or call upon the community. People seem to be far more eager to offer game design and writing ideas than to jump in and code. You could even outsource parts of design on marketplaces like 99designs. Code isn't easily outsourced, one must have a whole understanding of it, or at least of each component, and there's always the (mostly exacerbated) fear of being copied.

Kickstarted video game project Haunts gets mothballed

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