So, will it be ever delivered?

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So, will it be ever delivered?

Post by PinPon » Wed Apr 04, 2018 6:02 pm

I am tired of waiting for something to happen. Zero communication, zero delivery of any kind of good.

Almost $300k and nothing has been done in 5 years. This has turned in a very bad deal.

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Re: So, will it be ever delivered?

Post by paarfi » Wed Apr 04, 2018 6:25 pm

I'm sorry we've disappointed you. No one is happy with how things have gone, especially Fred. We're still hoping to release what we have so far (Piro canon-route book 1) later this year. I hope that will help somewhat.
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Re: So, will it be ever delivered?

Post by PinPon » Thu Apr 05, 2018 3:45 am

A date and a firm commitment. And not from you Paarfi, you have tried to be upbeat on the whole ordeal, but from Fred himself. Anything less then that is unacceptable after all this time.

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Re: So, will it be ever delivered?

Post by iffy » Fri Apr 06, 2018 5:17 pm

Not that I'm Fred (I am not Fred) or that this is sufficient as to what is being asked (it is neither firm nor a commitment). But there was an update in the Kickstarter discussion page about two months ago. https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/fr ... e/comments

As far as kickstarter projects go, even actual software development people and companies who are supposed to well know everything about this sort of project aren't immune to this https://cliqist.com/tag/kickstarter-mia/

I'm not too sure of how often status updates (such as they are) should be when there's not really any update to the status. Although probably everyone agrees it's not been often enough. There's almost 5,000 backers many of them wondering. But there are some updates around. Which isn't trying to talk for anyone or excuse anyone or say it's enough or in the correct places.

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Re: So, will it be ever delivered?

Post by legitalltheponies » Sat Apr 07, 2018 1:12 am

They could have switched strategies awhile ago (or they still could today!) and release the game as an actual visual novel instead of an animation, but Fred won't do that. So...basically he's intentionally not going to release the game in favor of something that will happen ~*~*~*~in the future~*~*~*~*~ with ever-moving goalposts on when that will be. In the meantime, try out Doki Doki Literature Club, Dream Daddies, Rose of Winter, or any of the many visual novels that were completed in this time frame.

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Re: So, will it be ever delivered?

Post by Xana12 » Sat Apr 14, 2018 4:15 pm

He's a liar and a scammer. We believed, we backed with excitement and he ghosted us.
Might be contacting some comic sites about his scam and seeing if they'll do a write up, because maybe then he'll address us and not his team.

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Re: So, will it be ever delivered?

Post by paarfi » Sat Apr 14, 2018 4:34 pm

He is neither a liar nor a scammer. He was inexperienced at game development and got in way over his head. And if you will look at the comment section of the kickstarter, you will see that he has responded to people.
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Re: So, will it be ever delivered?

Post by legitalltheponies » Sat Apr 14, 2018 10:20 pm

Paarfi, the last official update was in July of last year. There have been comments on the kickstarter page by Fred and forum posts buried offsite, but communication has been terrible throughout this mess. There hasn't been an official update on what went wrong or a cost breakdown on where the money went or anything confirming or denying that backer rewards will be shipped out. You gave something of an explanation of this in another thread, but we have needed this officially for a long time now and we need it from Fred. There's been no indication that this will change and I'm pretty much stuck reporting to kickstarter at this point.

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Re: So, will it be ever delivered?

Post by Xana12 » Sun Apr 15, 2018 12:11 am

Totally reporting him too. May be reaching out to CBR and/or Bleeding Cool in hopes of them running a story on this mess.

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Re: So, will it be ever delivered?

Post by Xana12 » Sun Apr 15, 2018 12:14 am

paarfi wrote:
Sat Apr 14, 2018 4:34 pm
And if you will look at the comment section of the kickstarter, you will see that he has responded to people.
He doesn't respond to emails which has been stated countless times in the Kickstarter comments, which I'm sure you've seen.
Tell Fred to stop acting like a teenager and to address the people he promised a game to. We NEED HIM TO TALK. WHERE IS HE?!

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Re: So, will it be ever delivered?

Post by legitalltheponies » Sun Apr 15, 2018 6:24 pm

PAARFI. NO ONE CARES ABOUT THE SLOW ANIMATION PART OF THIS. NO ONE CARES ABOUT WHETHER DIALOGUE IS IN SPEECH BUBBLES. NO ONE. It's a stupid tangent that has thrown the project completely off the rails of what it was supposed to be. This was supposed to be a visual novel.

1. At this point since he was making a slow animation, he has a lot of art resources that he could plug into a traditional visual novel, which is what the kickstarter was initially pitched as and was also the title of the kickstarter. He might not even have to draw anything else at this point.

2. In the last thread, you said that a fair amount of resources went into music production. I hope that means that you have some music available to use.

3. One of the main reasons why you argued against making this a traditional novel is because Fred is not a prose writer. So...why not get Thomas Knapp to do it? He's done what, five volumes of Endgames now? I'm guessing the main issue would be working out the best way to pay him.

4. Fred's not a programmer. That's fine. Any programmers left could plop story and art into VN Maker relatively easily. There should be music available to use with VN Maker as well.

This leaves Fred with a completed part 1 in a few months at most with him doing very little work at most. If I'm right about how much he has drawn and can get someone else to write out the story, the most he'd need to do is sign off on it. If he can't get Knapp or someone else to do it, he's already got a story outlined.

Every time he goes back to his computer to make this an animation he is actively choosing to not make the VN.

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Re: So, will it be ever delivered?

Post by Rowandoll » Sun Apr 15, 2018 8:58 pm

Reported. Five years is long enough. If there had been real communication, any attempt to reach out at all...No updates on the backer gifts, no discussion of redress...Only the hope, it would seem, that people would forget and forgive $300,000.

Just report him. It's the last piece of this to do. He doesn't read any of this. He doesn't read emails, and he doesn't read the comments on kickstarter. Just inform Kickstarter that he's a bad actor, so that it will be more difficult for him to fundraise this way in the future.

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Re: So, will it be ever delivered?

Post by Xana12 » Mon Apr 16, 2018 1:16 pm

Can anyone start trying to get a group of people around to write up complaints about all this? Maybe a fire under Fred's butt and the bad press will make him act?!
He mentioned with pride about a write up n CBR, so maybe a write up about the mess of a VN will make him get off his butt

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Re: So, will it be ever delivered?

Post by paarfi » Mon Apr 16, 2018 1:33 pm

Folks, he's doing what he can. He has the comic moving well, and much of the rest of his time right now is being spent on fixing the store backlog. Unfortunately, that's taking longer than he had expected. But once that's done, he expects to have more time to spend on the vn again. If you look at his comments on the kickstarter page, you'll see that he does have an idea of what that will involve.

Again, I'm sorry this hasn't worked out the way any of us had hoped. It's been a frustrating disappointment to us all, especially Fred. But it's not over yet, and I hope we will yet deliver something good, if not everything we planned nor in the timeframe we had hoped for.
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Re: So, will it be ever delivered?

Post by Xana12 » Mon Apr 16, 2018 4:21 pm

People write and draw 22 page comics for DC, marvel, dark horse ect every month without the back log. Fred has been doing this for nearly 20 years there's NO EXCUSE for any of this! NONE.
The questionable content guy, draws two comics with updates nearly daily, and runs his own store. Why can he do that and Fred can't?
When did Fred get blanket orders and when did he actually sent those? Did he take money and give people nothing in return for that too?

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Re: So, will it be ever delivered?

Post by legitalltheponies » Mon Apr 16, 2018 6:40 pm

paarfi wrote:
Mon Apr 16, 2018 1:33 pm
Folks, he's doing what he can. He has the comic moving well, and much of the rest of his time right now is being spent on fixing the store backlog. Unfortunately, that's taking longer than he had expected. But once that's done, he expects to have more time to spend on the vn again. If you look at his comments on the kickstarter page, you'll see that he does have an idea of what that will involve.

Again, I'm sorry this hasn't worked out the way any of us had hoped. It's been a frustrating disappointment to us all, especially Fred. But it's not over yet, and I hope we will yet deliver something good, if not everything we planned nor in the timeframe we had hoped for.
No he isn't. If he was doing what he could, he'd post an update with a breakdown of the costs and explain what's going to happen with the reward tiers. As it is, he's leaving you and anyone else left of the dev team responsible for interacting with backers. This isn't fair for anyone.

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Re: So, will it be ever delivered?

Post by piro » Tue Apr 17, 2018 9:32 am

I don't follow forum threads that closely, and when I do I don't usually respond, so my apologies. Paarfi, as one of my friends helping me on the VN project and other things has been kind enough to respond to people's inquiries.

The TL;DR version of this is to answer the question, will the Megatokyo Visual Novel be delivered? Yes, in smaller chunks than originally planned, but I will be delivering it. The first chunk will be book 1 and ive been working on how best to pull the rest of it together after having lost our primary developer.

I have had a lot of difficulties over the past several years as most readers know, and I have only talked about them infrequently because I would rather spend time trying to attack my backlog and produce art and comics than complain about my continuing issues with health, family and other issues. To be honest, quite a few of things have been hard to come back from, but i've been doing what I can. After so many problems last year I found myself behind on the comic, behind on orders, and behind on the visual novel project compounded buy the loss of our main programmer for the project.

The last few months of 2017 were very difficut for me, but I came out of it with a determination to do what I could to get things back on track. My first effort was to try to get comic production up to a weekly release level for readers. This I have been able to accomplish, in spite of having to work through some very difficult plot problems that I finally managed to overcome.

The next thing to address was my backlog of orders from the store, including the long overdue Miho blanket pre-order. I've been tackling this while also trying to keep comic production up and I've been making progress. I still have a lot of work to do to get caught up, but I have some people helping me with the orders now and I hope this will to be caught up soon.

The next thing to tackle was getting production work on the Megatokyo visual novel back up to speed. As i said, I lost my developer back in the fall (for which I take full responsibility and blame) which was a huge blow to me because I now have to work with a lot of code and structure that I cannot expand upon on my own. The base code for everything works well but we've had to make some drastic changes in how to move forward. I have been working on simplifying and working through some of the structures in how the game works that were proving to be far more burdensome than I had hoped while maintaining the look and feel of the game as we've pulled it together so far. It took a while, but i have confidence that the transition some more standardized progression for the rest of the VN will work ok. Without our developer, there are a lot of special things I was hoping to do that I am working around. As I've said before, a lot of what I had hoped to do was far too ambitious and has proved beyond my ability to produce, so pairing back to a more sensible approach for the remainder of the game I think will actually work out for the best. It was a real blow to lose our developer and it has taken me a long time to come to terms with it and to figure out how to best move forward, but I've been able to reach that point and the next step was to dive in and start producing art according to the new production plan. I apologize that this has taken so long to happen, I had hoped to dive into this back in February, but I'm doing the best I can and I am already starting to tackle it.

I apologize for not communicating with everyone as i am trying to get caught up on all three fronts. It is easier to see the progress in the comic because of the release schedule, but store backlog and the VN are harder to see progress on unless I communicate progress. I am at grave fault for not doing so and I apologize. I like to be able to show progress, not talk about it, which is a flaw in my way of dealing with things.

Some of the upshot of all this is that I am in the process of moving away from handling all orders in the store to other vendors (except for original art). I will not do pre-orders for any further projects until the VN project is finished (if even then). Once I get caught up in the order backlog and have the stores set up it i can focus soely on the Megatokyo comic and the Visual Novel project.

Also, I havent talked about it much, but a lot of my struggles last year were because the health of both my parents has been failing and I'm the only one here who can support them. Mom was supposed to enter Hospice care last week but she has rallied somewhat and it was decided that we should hold off a while and see how she's doing. These are not excuses, it's just what's going on and it is a factor i have to work with as i tackle getting back on track. Thank you for your patience and your support, the snags in the Visual Novel project are unacceptable and I acnowledge it, but it is someting I can do and finish, which I will do.

Fred

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Re: So, will it be ever delivered?

Post by Ace42 » Tue Apr 17, 2018 12:32 pm

legitalltheponies wrote:
Sun Apr 15, 2018 6:24 pm
PAARFI. NO ONE CARES ABOUT THE SLOW ANIMATION PART OF THIS. NO ONE CARES ABOUT WHETHER DIALOGUE IS IN SPEECH BUBBLES. NO ONE. It's a stupid tangent that has thrown the project completely off the rails of what it was supposed to be. This was supposed to be a visual novel.
Exactly this.
All I wanted was a regular VN where I could choose which character to romance and get my flirt on with, investigate a few different story directions for some of the less prominent characters, and hopefully be rewarded with some eroge scenes.

Yeah it would've been nice to be able to buy items and have them branch the story out in a ton of different directions and get to interact with the characters in exciting and strange new ways, but that was always a hope rather than an expectation like the previous paragraph describes.

What I didn't want was a direct rehash of the comic in a slightly different medium, and I was completely indifferent to attempts to redefine what constitutes a visual novel and how the genre operates.
1. At this point since he was making a slow animation, he has a lot of art resources that he could plug into a traditional visual novel, which is what the kickstarter was initially pitched as and was also the title of the kickstarter. He might not even have to draw anything else at this point.

2. In the last thread, you said that a fair amount of resources went into music production. I hope that means that you have some music available to use.

3. One of the main reasons why you argued against making this a traditional novel is because Fred is not a prose writer. So...why not get Thomas Knapp to do it? He's done what, five volumes of Endgames now? I'm guessing the main issue would be working out the best way to pay him.

4. Fred's not a programmer. That's fine. Any programmers left could plop story and art into VN Maker relatively easily. There should be music available to use with VN Maker as well.

This leaves Fred with a completed part 1 in a few months at most with him doing very little work at most. If I'm right about how much he has drawn and can get someone else to write out the story, the most he'd need to do is sign off on it. If he can't get Knapp or someone else to do it, he's already got a story outlined.

Every time he goes back to his computer to make this an animation he is actively choosing to not make the VN.
Yep, exactly so. Scrap anything mechanical that's bogging stuff down; get literally anyone to write the text (hell, you could crowd-source it to the community given how open RenPy use seems to be), and work on filling out the bare minimum of assets needed to push forward (one backdrop per key location; a few "generic" backdrops for streets; some "excessively romantic" scenes for mid-game and end-game win conditions) and then get a beta out the door so there's some semblance of a product to show backers.

That's better than getting just a redrawn version of the comic even if a disaster happened and the whole shebang had to have a disappointing line drawn under it right there.

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Re: So, will it be ever delivered?

Post by Xana12 » Tue Apr 17, 2018 11:58 pm

Fred will never give anyone an outline of where the money has been spent. He will most likely send out one chunk of the VN and hope everyone forgets about it.
So many people do comics that are 22 pages a month or update a webcomic everyday while keeping track of their stores. Fred will also never address why other people can do all that work without problems when he can't.
Fred will never explain why he can't pay someone else to do the writing. Because there's no money left.
Fred will never explain why the game lost the programmer. He's says it's his fault but gives no details.
He left paarfi to the sharks to answer to all of us and couldn't even be bothered to check these forums until someone sent him a link detailing people writing up complaints about him.

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Re: So, will it be ever delivered?

Post by tsubasa » Sat Apr 21, 2018 5:03 am

Note: I'm not a backer of this project.

I tried searching the new and the archived forum by the keywords recruit AND developer. I could not find threads.
How about recruiting new developer(s) for the project? From what I understand by reading the forums and kickstarter, the major pain points are Fred's health/family issues and a loss of a primary developer. For the former we can show our supports to him. But for the latter he or his team can look for more people who can write codes.
---
tsubasa

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Re: So, will it be ever delivered?

Post by legitalltheponies » Sat Apr 21, 2018 8:13 pm

tsubasa wrote:
Sat Apr 21, 2018 5:03 am
Note: I'm not a backer of this project.

I tried searching the new and the archived forum by the keywords recruit AND developer. I could not find threads.
How about recruiting new developer(s) for the project? From what I understand by reading the forums and kickstarter, the major pain points are Fred's health/family issues and a loss of a primary developer. For the former we can show our supports to him. But for the latter he or his team can look for more people who can write codes.
The developer is only part of the problem here. There are three main issues:

1. The amount of art resources that Fred wants to put in the game GREATLY exceeds the amount he can draw and is ridiculous compared to the amount of art seen in the vast majority of visual novels. The ones that do have a team and generally don't have different story paths.

2. The stuff that they are trying to accomplish with programming are more complex than they need to be and the way they've set things up, the programming they can do is tied to the completed art that they have. Visual novels should be fairly straightforward as far as programming goes, the team went and made it overcomplicated. Truth to tell, I don't think they need a developer at all since there are now a couple visual novel makers that don't require programming experience. This was not the case when they started.

3. Neither of these things should be tied to the fact that NONE of the rewards have been shipped out and from what I can tell never will be.

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Re: So, will it be ever delivered?

Post by Hashbrown Potatoes » Sat Apr 28, 2018 11:33 am

Unfortunately, I think this is going to end up as another cautionary tale of the risks of backing Kickstarter projects.

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Re: So, will it be ever delivered?

Post by legitalltheponies » Fri May 04, 2018 4:04 pm

Xana12 wrote:
Sun Apr 15, 2018 12:11 am
Totally reporting him too. May be reaching out to CBR and/or Bleeding Cool in hopes of them running a story on this mess.
I've seen writeups on bad kickstarters occasionally from different places, but I'm not sure where the best place to go to would be or even how you'd ask. Thoughts?

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Re: So, will it be ever delivered?

Post by Xana12 » Sun May 06, 2018 6:01 pm

I emailed Rich Johnston at Bleeding Cool. He might be doing a write up about scam Kickstarters as he was asking people for information on similar undelivered projects. I reached out using the contact page bleedingcool.com/contact/
If you could contact too that would be great! Hopefully this story gets out there.
Also will be shooting an email out to IGN. The more emails sites get hopefully means they'll put the scam story out

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Re: So, will it be ever delivered?

Post by legitalltheponies » Sun May 06, 2018 6:51 pm

Xana12 wrote:
Sun May 06, 2018 6:01 pm
I emailed Rich Johnston at Bleeding Cool. He might be doing a write up about scam Kickstarters as he was asking people for information on similar undelivered projects. I reached out using the contact page bleedingcool.com/contact/
If you could contact too that would be great! Hopefully this story gets out there.
Also will be shooting an email out to IGN. The more emails sites get hopefully means they'll put the scam story out
I'm giving tips@kotaku.com a shot too, they might be more responsive than IGN.

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