

Kickstarted video game project Haunts gets mothballed - HarveyKandola
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-20003916

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waterlesscloud
"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.

~~~
masklinn
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".

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

~~~
masklinn
It definitely isn't "the right thing": kickstarter isn't a store where you buy
a product, it's a funding platform for projects. That means the project may
fail, and as a backer you must understand that: you're a grantor or patron,
not a customer.

There may be reasons and justifications to refund backers (or even just good-
heartedness), but short of a knowingly fraudulent project I do not think it
can ever be "the right thing".

And I say that having put about a month of income into various crowdfunding
projects (on kickstarters and other crowdfunding sites) so far: they got me
excited, I'd like them to succeed, but I fully expect that some will fail
(entirely) and others will yield turds or will fail to live up to
expectations.

~~~
waterlesscloud
I understand your position, and it's fine as far as it goes.

But consider the long run for the guy behind this.

Say he wants to run another project down the road. He has the negative of
having failed, but he has the positive of offering people's money back. Which
in most people's mind would mitigate the failure to some degree.

Does that change your view that it can never be the right thing? The backers
and the project leader benefit from his stance. What makes it wrong?

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

~~~
fghh45sdfhr3
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 :)

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

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

~~~
timwiseman
I apologize if it wasn't clear: He could offer a percentage of profits to his
employees/contract coders that work on making this in addition to their
salaries/contract pay.

He could not offer financial returns to the kickstarter backers. That would
definitely violate the terms of service (though I don't see a way it would be
otherwise illegal, assuming no fraud or deliberate money laundering was
involved.)

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goldfeld
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.

~~~
timwiseman
_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.

~~~
goldfeld
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.

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EastCoastLA
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.

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

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OoTheNigerian
Here's a proper and more holistic overview.

[http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/2066438441/haunts-the-
ma...](http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/2066438441/haunts-the-manse-
macabre/posts/331425)

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austinlyons
why don't they just open source it?

~~~
erre
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."""

~~~
yarrel
NC-SA isn't "open source".

~~~
Karunamon
Sure it is, it's just not "free software" using the FSF's definition.

Is the source available? Can you compile it and modify it yourself? It's open
source. That's all that definition means.

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b0rsuk
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
That seems rather rash.

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

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hnal943
I think it would work if the goal was to never attract another programer to
your company again.

