Homestuck

[Implode]

So I'm assuming you guys have seen the leaked info about what caused Hiveswap to be delayed almost a year. If not, the original post has been deleted, so he's some pasta.

i’m sure that everyone has noticed by now that the homestuck game is very, very late. boy, do i have a fun reason why!

you may remember that what pumpkin announced that the game studio “the odd gentlemen” was originally attached to develop the game, and you may also remember that they quietly moved to in house development in 2014. what they didn’t tell you: the reason they did this was that odd gentlemen stole kickstarter money and spent it on king’s quest.

i imagine most of us who backed the homestuck game kickstarter are pretty curious about what was going on there. i’ve done some work on the comic and talk to andrew from time to time, so i tried asking about what happened and got some very cagey non-responses. eventually, he tells me he actually can’t tell me anywhere but through kickstarter because of a settlement he signed (already fishy). so, i sent in an inquiry through KS and what i got was a big steaming load of bullshit worse than anything i could have imagined. i’m talking multiple counts of embezzlement and fraud.

according to the timeline in the doc i got, WP gave 788k to TOG in 2012 to develop hiveswap. they then proceeded to do next to nothing, completely blowing off the dev schedule that they agreed to. (the game was supposed to be done by oct 2014. instead, that was when WP ended up having to switch to in house development and start from scratch.) the doc included a detailed rundown of everything TOG actually did. in summary:

“Over 8 months of development, TOG produced exactly one “playable build”. It is a single room, involving one character, no animation, and almost no other key features. Virtually nothing works properly. It was submitted in February of 2014, and no improvements or additional versions were submitted beyond that date.”

a link to it was included in the doc. it’s… probably the worst thing i’ve ever seen in my life?? if you try to click on ANYTHING, joey runs into a bookcase and flies into the air and the demo gets stuck. the only thing that distinguishes it from an out-of-the-box adventure creator demo is its very subpar models and the fact it is unplayably bugged.

at some point TOG apparently just completely gave up working on hiveswap, because they were tapped to develop king’s quest (you can see them admit this in public here at about 1 minute into this video). however, instead of dropping out of developing the game, they decided to just… not tell WP, and proceeded to spend the money they were given on KQ’s development instead.

eventually, after months of platitudes and refusals to communicate (at one point andrew even moved across the country to be able to visit TOG’s offices and get the ball rolling on development, but they wouldn’t even let him come in), WP realized that they’d have to drop TOG, so they terminated the contract in late 2014.

at that stage, TOG said they had 390,000 dollars left of the money WP gave them that they hadn’t spent on “development” or taxes. but, get this – in the 7 months it took them to agree on a settlement for returning the money, they spent 170,000 of it on king’s quest. seriously. like, they didn’t even try to hide it – they straight up spent it after they’d already officially stopped working on the game, and were just like, haha, whoops? pay you back later i guess.

this isn’t acknowledged in a binding settlement like the king’s quest embezzlement is, but i’m pretty sure most of the 190k they claim they spent on hiveswap’s development before they picked up KQ went into neil gaiman’s wayward manor. they picked THAT up at around the time they were supposed to start working on hiveswap, and admitted the workload was conflicting with their ability to devote time to hiveswap. given the egregiously overstated man hours claimed for how little work they actually did, and the fact they admittedly stole the money for another game, i think it’s a pretty obvious conclusion to reach.

it doesn’t look like there was ever a point where TOG wasn’t funneling homestuck’s KS money into another game. it’s unclear whether they EVER actually intended to seriously develop the game. they straight up signed up to steal money from us.

andrew mentioned that this was one of the biggest reasons for the gigapause, and that all the logistics of dealing with TOG’s incompetence meant he couldn’t get much work done on the comic in that time.

why am i posting this? well, king’s quest was developed with stolen money, so it’s probably in your best interest to know this before you buy it. all things considered, it’s a miracle that hiveswap is doing as well as it is – at this point, i think hiveswap has moved past this fiasco and isn’t in any danger of falling through. it’s uh, pretty late, but from what i’ve seen, they’re well on their way to an Actual Game that may be Actually Good despite getting jerked around by a circus of incompetent clowns for 8 months.

at this point, i’m not sure what to DO about this. what pumpkin is bound by the settlement they had to sign if they wanted to get any of the money back at all, so there’s not much that they themselves can do to retrieve the money TOG stole from us. i actually tried messaging sierra, the company that licensed KQ to TOG, but they don’t seem to care that KQ was made with stolen money. maybe activision might want to know. in any case, it’s important that this info get out there so people know what they’re dealing with when buying something from the odd gentlemen.

Hussie has since tweeted that he and WP have no affiliation with this post and WP has gotten the post removed. That pretty much confirms the NDA bit the settlement. I'm really shocked that the situation was really this bad. Also, this combined with devastating personal events most likely caused the gigapause to happen in the first place. I really hope the game still turns out all right; I'm impressed with how far they've gotten since they've basically had to start from scratch in October. That being said, I'm not expecting too much now. It'd be hard to create a huge game in such a short amount of time.

Props to WP and Hussie for sticking it out though. I know there was a lot of shitposting going on saying that Hussie just stole the kickstarter money because they game was delayed so much. Personally, I also think that the gigapause was devastating to the fandom as well. on TOG for being so shitty.

[Scorpion]

Holy shit that is so messed up. Yeah, I don't blame Hussie for gigapausing to resolve that in the slightest.

In less depressing news, I don't think I have ever laughed this hard at an update.

THE TAVROS TELLS VRISKA TO GO SUCK IT CABBAGE PATCH

[Implode]

That definitely was one of the must satisfying updates in a long, long time. Can't wait to see what happens later today!

[Shadow Ninja 2.0]

GUYS I CAN READ THIS FUCKING THREAD

Also, that really sucks about the Hiveswap stuff! Though I'm mostly interesting in it because Andrew's writing it, not for the game itself, so I'll probably love it anyway.

I'm kinda tired at the moment (just got through about 7 hours of Homestuck), so I'm not gonna comment too much on Act 6 Act 6 Intermission 5 right now, but I will say that last animation made me cry.    In a good way, though.

edit: One more thing, how awesome is the song for MSPA Reader: Mental Breakdown? PRETTY FREAKIN AWESOME IS THE ANSWER.

[Scorpion]

That's the Saw theme, though - nothing Homestuck original.

I think.

Also yay to bump the total of the people reading this to three!

I have to say, that the conversations between Dirk and Dave remain my favourite parts of the part that you just caught up on. Also that animation, but those conversations are something else.

[Implode]

MSPA Reader: Mental Breakdown is definitely one of my favorite flashes.

But okay, I'm going to talk here. For the past few months, I've been so frustrated with Homestuck (yes, I'm one of those). There felt like there has been anything really satisfying in almost years. And with the retcon, it just kept getting worse. I mean sure. Updates were funny, some were actually really great (Kanaya with the matriorb and the Striders reunion come to mind), but it still wasn't enough to get me optimistic about the comic again. I always thought that particularly, Terezi's issue being solved by having them be erased without her newer version having lived through them an awful idea. I was thinking that the only way for it to work was for Terezi to somehow remember her past lives.

AND THEN GOD DAMN IT, WOULDN'T YOU KNOW IT, IT HAPPENED. I was literally shaking while watching/reading that last update. It was just like...a huge weight that'd been there for a year had been lifted off my chest. Now of course this update didn't magically fix everything in the comic, but it's really hard to understate just how much this update means to me. For me, it showed that it's possible for the comic to be satisfying again. I don't have to dread every update worrying about what else could go wrong. Now don't get me wrong; it was never to the point where I was going to stop reading or anything. I love this story too goddamn much. But now I've been reinvigorated. For the first time in a long time, I'm optimistic about what's coming in the future rather than just wishing I could be over already.

Just...the scrouge reuinion. Something we've been waiting to see since 2011. I can't say enough about it.

Also, funny thing. I've been talking to ikimaru a lot for the past week or so. If you don't know her, she's been a very popular Homestuck fan artist who also contributed to the canon comic in Vriskagram flash and [S ] Terezi: Remem8er. And I'm so angry, albeit in a funny way. We've been doing nothing but basically venting our qualms with the comic, about the plot, lack of catharsis with characters/relationships, etc. And all the while, she was sitting on this fucking bomb of an update. 

I know that this has been a thing that has been said a lot since even 2010, but I really think we're getting to the end here. Like for real. It's hard to believe that after this pause is over, we'll actually be at the end of the comic. As sad as it sounds, it's literally changed my life, and I'll be sad to see it go.

Edit: I almost can't believe I made this thread almost 4 years ago...that was literally just as I started reading. Crazy how time flies. but at the same time it feels like a lifetime ago.

[Scorpion]

It wasn't anywhere as bad for me as it was with you - I suspect the fact that you basically read the entirety of Act 6 serially has a lot to with that - but I completely understand the feeling that you were having. While the updates were things that I was looking forward to, I do remember that I often forced myself to focus on the good and to not dwell on what was underneath for too long - the Strider reunion and the Roxy-Kanaya thing being the exceptions, really.

But Terezi: Remem8er (also holy shit how long has it been that a character has actually been commanded to DO something?!) had nothing of that, and it puts a lot of things into perspective for me. Just like you, I've had my problems with the retcon - though probably less problems than many other fans - but while the flash doesn't adress all my concerns, or even begin to, it has done one thing: restored my faith into the fact that I can have faith in Hussie to eventually do so.

Don't get me wrong, I love Homestuck, warts and all. But that feeling that I had been suppressing, because what's the point of dwelling on the negatives? - that the retcon was really the easy way out and that nothing pre-GO was relevant anymore, doesn't have to be suppressed anymore, because I am now, more than ever, convinced that Hussie will do an adequate job at handling the remainder of the comic.

[Implode]

Right there with you Scorpion. It's unfortunate that I've seen a lot of backlash against people be disillusioned - people talking about how anyone who complains about the comic was just mad that their fanon wasn't canon and wasn't a real fan or some bs. Like, come on. We can have different opinions and still be fans.

Now we just have to figure what to do during this last pause. Have you guys ever had an interest in fanfiction? I just read one recently called Straw Soldiers. It might be the best I've found. If you're into that, I completely recommend it.

Also, I just read through this thread for the beginning. Though he doesn't post here much anymore, shout outs to Sintheros for being huge loser like me and comparing how much of our lives we've lost to this comic. He's just one of the many friends I've made because of this stupid thing. And that all started in this thread no less!

[Shadow Ninja 2.0]

In the realms of fanfiction, I just found a guy who apparently did a complete version of Dirk's defaced Pony Pals book.

https://archiveofourown.org/works/2427119/chapters/5371283

I've only read a couple of pages, but so far it's amazing.

edit: excerpt:

[Implode]

That's incredible. 

I read a work called Straw Soldiers recently. To anyone who likes reading fan works, I'd totally recommend it. The plot simply revolves around Karkat, who because of his blood color is forced into a military program made to secretly infiltrate Earth. So he must go through this Ender's Game like school and many surgical procedures to make him look human and such. That's really just the first third of the fic too, so a plot summary doesn't really do it justice without getting into spoilers. Really excellent. What really surprised me is that it was written within the last year. I haven't seen good fanfics like that since 2012 it seems.

[Scorpion]

In the realms of fanfiction, I just found a guy who apparently did a complete version of Dirk's defaced Pony Pals book.

https://archiveofourown.org/works/2427119/chapters/5371283

I've only read a couple of pages, but so far it's amazing.

Okay, so I just binge-read the whole thing, and... fuck. That may have been the best fanfiction that I have ever read. Seriously. What started as a hilarious parody turned into he best characterisation that I have ever seen Dirk receive.

[Shadow Ninja 2.0]

RELEVANT INFO re: Hiveswap

[Implode]

This is literally the last time I will necro this thread.

Upd8

EOA6 - 99%

Here is the plan. Starting today, there will be 6 days of updates (about 125 total pages). Then a brief pause. Then on 4/6, I'll post the END OF ACT 6 animation.

That should immediately be followed by 7 days of updates (about 40 total pages), ending with an update on 4/13, the 7th anniversary of Homestuck. That update will contain ACT 7 in its entirety.

The current 125 page stretch was drawn by a few guest artists. Gina Chacon, Mallory Dyer, and Adrienne Garcia (all artists for WP). The panels they did are very good, and I think make for a nice runway leading up to the final animations. Of course there are a lot of other great contributing artists to all that content as well. Thanks for the patience during the Omegapause. I hope you enjoy the conclusion to Homestuck.

It's happening.

[Scorpion]

Oh man, that was a sweet callback.

[Implode]

I appreciated the multiple callbacks for sure.

[Shadow Ninja 2.0]

Oh hey, so I finally read/watched the ending.

Not a whole lot say right now, other than I liked it a lot. The last animation was absolutely gorgeous and fantastic, in addition to hilariously being anime.

I was a bit sad that there wasn't more dialogue between people I wanted to see dialogue between, but then I was mollified when I read the newspost and Andrew said he intended to do some form of epilogue at some point.

Kind of a weird feeling for it all to be over, but... I'm less sad than I expected to be. Mostly I just liked it a lot, and I'm glad that the story has an ending. I've said this before, but this story is pretty much my favorite... anything ever, and even though I know some people have been disappointed with a lot of the recent stuff, I love pretty much all of it.

I guess I'm just glad I got over my initial "wtf is this weird-looking thing" impression the first time I tried to read it. It's been a crazy ride, that's for sure. 

[Scorpion]

I'll be honest, my first feeling was disappointment - mainly because so much was left unresolved. But after re-reading the whole thing I've gained a new appreciation for it, and while there are still some things that I would have liked to be treated in more detail, I also accept that it's impossible to tie up every loose end in a story that spans somewhere around 7000 pages.

I will say that the music for Act 7 was gorgeous, and it was a really good finish to Homestuck, all in all. I just wish that it would have been a little less rushed near the end, with some more plot threads ending up being resolved.

Also, Lord English was seriously underwhelming in battle, I found. Not sure what I was expecting, but... yeah, not that.