fandomContinuing from the kickstarter campaign and the work of What Pumpkin NYC....
December 2015: WP NYC Dissolve & A New Look
Update #22 (Public)
We’ve been taking the last several months to pause production on Hiveswap and revise the overall approach to the game, as well as the visual direction, to make things a little more cost-efficient, and more rapidly producible over the full span of the series.
So. You may have seen this one coming. Maybe my language gave it away, or you just know what Hiveswap: Act 1 looks like.
But Hiveswap’s artstyle is 2D now. This means that all the previous assets for the characters and items that were made, shaded, and rendered in 3D won’t be used, including everything shown in the preview video, trailer video, and the rendered 3D screenshots.
Let’s hear more from Andrew(?) before we rush to judgement, though:
The original 3D approach to the game began a few years ago with some high-level discussions with the original developer. Back then, before any work was done or money was spent, the main advantage we discussed about using 3D models related to efficiency. We talked about the ability to reuse character model templates and animation rigs for a big cast, and thoughts along these lines were what led to the 3D direction, even though it was kind of an aesthetic departure from the Homestuck look. Which at the time, I thought was fine! I’ve always liked to mix things up, try different styles and work with different kinds of media, so I welcomed that approach if it meant a more efficient production. I was sure there were some cool things we could do with that look. (And, in fact, we did!)
When we moved the project to our own studio, and as the budget situation continued to evolve over the previous year, some weaknesses in that approach started to become evident. Some additional engineering challenges were starting to pile up that would not have been present with a 2D system. The modeling demands were also racking up, and over time the production started getting pretty heavy, in terms of both cost and time. So, rather than continue down that road and burn through the remaining budget, I thought it would be better to pause, reassess, and make some changes to make the production faster and less expensive. This seemed like an especially important call to make, given that we have an entire series to develop beyond the first episode, and I’d rather there be as little waiting time as possible between episodes.
(Andrew now calls the process of producing models and 3D assets “heavy”, even after a previous update bragged about how the team had developed a “finely tuned system” for producing assets in an efficient production pipeline.)
The new approach should accomplish this. Not to mention, it’s looking pretty great! I have a lot of incredible 2D artists working on this game, who have all been instrumental in making art for Homestuck itself at some point.
Would this have been a better direction to pursue from the start? Maybe! Hard to say, since initial circumstances were so different from what they are now. It’s been a pretty wild ride! Game development is very challenging, and strikes me as a big exercise in rolling with the punches. That’s pretty much all I’ve been doing for the last few years. It is a shame it’s gotten so delayed, but the most important thing to me is that the project is still alive, and is looking as promising as ever.
Also, while it may seem like a shame to let go of the 3D assets that were made during the previous iteration, I would point out that over the last year we have actually stockpiled a massive amount of incredible 2D art assets that are still perfectly usable, and will still make it into the game. So we aren’t missing that much of a beat, aside from the last few months of reorganization.
…
They interrupt this with some concept art, and then more give more important notes:
NYC STAFF: Most of the people who worked on the game in New York unfortunately are no longer with us, as the studio has been restructured to be more of a geographically distributed operation, to help save costs. We really appreciate everything they did for Hiveswap, and the passion that they put into the game. I would like to sincerely thank them all for the great work they did for this phase of the project. Running a studio in New York for a while was actually a lot of fun. They were all wonderful people and I wish them the best. At some point I think I would like to gather all the 3D stuff that was done and present it as an interesting behind the scenes look at the history of this project, so people can appreciate the work the NYC team did. Perhaps at the very least this could be some nice bonus material for backers when the game comes out.
What Pumpkin Games has been “restructured to be more of a geographically distributed operation” to help save costs, which was a complete reversal of the July plan to significantly upgrade What Pumpkin NYC’s offices. The “geographically distributed operation”, meanwhile, included a lot of people from the same remote team that had been working with WP NYC.
The entire NYC staff was fired, including Jess Haskins, James Seetal, and everyone else I’ve mentioned so far. According to reports from WP NYC staff, this was completely out of the blue. Development on the 3D version was going extremely well, the team was testing a completed Hiveswap: Act 1 and working on Act 2, and the team was even told they were fielding multiple interested investors, including PlayStation(!). Then, out of the blue, the entire staff was let go with no warning, no severance, and no healthcare.
Now, it seems to me that moving from a physical office to distributed work doesn’t seem like it necessitates firing the whole team, per se. Geographical distribution doesn’t mean you have to fire your team; that explanation doesn’t hold up. It seems to me that “to help save costs” is the primary motivator here, although it’s not clear that there was a desperate need to do so.
TO RECAP: Hiveswap is still moving full steam ahead, despite pausing a few months to do some highly necessary project reorganization. It’s looking very promising, and I’m probably as excited about the project as I have ever been. Thank you as always to our backers for their ongoing patience and understanding. Happy holidays!
(This was not true.)
Insight into NYC Team Firing
There was extremely poor communication between What Pumpkin and the staff about all of this. According to conversations I had with a member of the remote team, they actually found out about the studio closing through the public Kickstarter post:
then when the kickstarter post about wpny closing and the game switching to 2d got posted i thought ‘holy shit do i even have a job anymore’ because this was the first time i was seeing anything about either of these things
Gio: did you actually find out through the kickstarter update?
yeah
…
thats why it felt so jarring to me seeing that update, because as far as i knew, 3d hiveswap was still ongoing
A journal post that will have been published by an ex-WP NYC employee in March 2016 gives us a little more insight into how brutal the WP NYC firings were, and confirming the other stories. (Source NSFW).
The Shit Storm that started this all
… I LOVED working there. I had taken so many SHIT jobs, working with creeps for bosses, not getting paychecks, working two jobs sometimes, that I felt like I finally made it! It was backed with some money, we had a popular/funny IP, and it seemed like we had a solid team. But in late October, the entire office was laid off abruptly.
Aside from one very incomplete trailer video, which was released onto youtube by our office manager without telling the art team, no one has really seen any of the game that we made in action. And that hurts. To think people believe we worked on this game for over a year, and made garbage really fucking hurts. The finished trailer with proper textures, lighting, FX, frame rate, etc, looked like an actual polished product. Hell, the last month I was working there, I was working on the second game already, because there was [nothing left for me to do] on the first one! We already had an alpha of the first game, and were hoping to reach beta in a little over a month. The fans really don’t know how close we were…it’s insane.
Because [my husband] worked there too, working there went from being the happiest time of my life, to the worst…Now we were both unemployed. Everyone in the office was losing their shit, rightfully so. We had issues with the owners of the company (aka the web comic creator) and them being transparent with us. We had known 2 months prior to the layoffs that there was a tightening of the budget, as we had to let go of an animator, and two writers/data people. A few others, myself included had their hours cut. The night before we all got laid off, we had received an e-mail from our investor recruiter that we had interest from angel investors, and things were looking good! Hell, we might even get pay raises! Talk about mix signals. :) The owners didn’t talk to us. They didn’t tell us when we were in trouble, and we trusted them.
We were a real team. Like a family. We saw each other more than our significant others, we had so many crunch nights at the office prepping for cons together. The day after the layoffs, we all went into ‘work’. We had planned to just pack up and leave, but we all ended up spending the day together. Playing games, drinking, and watching a hilarious homemade mockumentary one of our programmers made like 10-15 year ago. It was awesome. I couldn’t help but feel hopeless....I had worked with so many idiots, I finally had a well oiled team, and no one willing to fund us. We were given an unusable piece of garbage to work with, we remade an entire game from scratch in months, with a limited team, and my old boss decided to reboot the project again for a third time. What a waste of time, talent, etc…
…
My boss never helped. Repeated, friendly e-mails were ignored. Once I was fired, it’s like I didn’t exist. This was the same experience for my other team members. We thought things were fine, then one day, we were told we were all fired, and our health insurance would expire at the end of the month. No severance.
According to this report, things were going well, as reported, or at least that’s what What Pumpkin told its own team. (Also, more details from ipgd’s story are confirmed, and we learn that the amusingly bad trailer was apparently released without approval.) Then, in a complete act of betrayal, the development team was fired without warning and left without severance or health insurance.
Why Andrew killed WP NYC
All of this begs the question: if WP NYC was doing so well, why dismantle it? The above story and other sources affirm that the 3D version of Act 1 was nearly finished, and the team was even making considerable progress on Act 2. Why fire all these good people, and why throw out all the work?
We know WP NYC was doing well and making excellent progress. The dA journal notes:
I was working on the second game already, because there was nothing to do on the first one!
And another source concurs:
at the end of 2014 the first act was in a shippable state, act 2 was nearly done. andrew decided to go another direction and scrap the work.
(WP would much later comment that Act 1 wasn’t ready to be shipped at this point, but did exist in a significant form. Notably the “act 2” cited above consists of material that was included in the shipped version of Act 1.)
It’s hard to imagine how much this cost them. Years of work discarded in order to change the art style of the project, and it’s still not clear why. We can rule out a few possibilities — there didn’t seem to be any legal issues with rights, for instance, or technical issues with the engine — but the truth is, only Andrew knows exactly why he made the decision.
According to a conversation I had with an ex-WP NYC employee, the studio was badly mismanaged towards the end:
Personally I think it was that hussie was in over his head. … I don’t want to put it all on hussie tho, despite my coworkers being super awesome I think we were also mismanaged in office and our game designer was all over the place
Towards the end of WP NYC, maybe like 4-5 months before, our art director and tech director took the reins, and started managing stuff…I mean for months we hadn’t even worked towards a vertical slice.
Like I said before, our manager and lead designer who oversaw the NY company were really nice people, but they didn’t know how to manage a game studio. I think they were also over their head.
Edit: After I wrote this article, I published a separate article with leaks about this specific topic: read my second Hiveswap article for additional insight into this.
Edit 2: Much later, and as a response to this article, Andrew gave some reasoning as to why he dissolved WP NYC. Due to the lack of substantiating evidence and the need for extensive fact-checking, I detail this in my third “fallout” article.
January 2016: Secret side-channel fundraising
In January 2019 (the future!), Daniel Kelly (thewebcomicsreview.tumblr.com) will make a tumblr post detailing how, in January 2016, What Pumpkin contacted him asking for more money.
He signed an NDA that expired, so they were legally allowed to share their experience.
…this is what I was told after I signed it, on January 4th 2016
Hello again!
First of all, thanks for being a Hiveswap backer! We’re working really hard to make sure your patience is rewarded!
As you are well aware, the production of Hiveswap has been mired in a stream of delays. Believe me, it’s been a source of major frustration for us. Partnerships with outside developers didn’t pan out for several reasons and created a budgetary strain on the project. The high quality we expect for the project didn’t materialize with outside developers, either, which leads us to the in-house development structure we have today.
Since making the moves Andrew referred to in his Kickstarter update, development for Hiveswap has been incredibly efficient as well as refreshingly exciting for all of us involved. We’re seeing an amazing game take shape that’ll be at your fingertips in 2016.
In fact, we’re all busy making moves that’ll ensure Homestuck sees a content resurgence next year and beyond. On top of Hiveswap, we’re working on a slate of games to come out in a steady stream over the next five years. Hiveswap is just the beginning!
Outside of games, we’re working with Rufio ((Rufioh??)) himself, Dante Basco, on a suite of digital content so cool it’s hard to keep quiet about. He’s officially a member of the What Pumpkin team while we work on this content.
My job since the beginning has been to bolster this plan and raise the money to execute it. That’s right, we’re raising money. We don’t want to go back to the crowdfunding well. People have already been incredibly generous with their support and have waited a long time for results. This fundraising round is different and includes the potential for investors to share in the success of the company whenever we release a game. We have to put the situation on our backs and move forward.
We’re in the midst of raising these funds (relatively) quietly and creating What Pumpkin Games, a company dedicated to the creation of all this digital goodness.
We’re doing what’s called a Series A round of financing. We feel like we bypassed the typical seed round of funding by virtue of our amazing Kickstarter and the fact that Homestuck is a proven brand. We’re raising $2 million right now to execute the first part of our plan. To be clear, the money we’re raising goes beyond the funding of Hiveswap.
First, I have to interject here: this “proven brand” notion is outright false. All Homestuck had managed to do at this point is delay their game 2 years, lose 2 million dollars, and lie about it to the stakeholders. Nobody had managed to develop even a single successful game, let alone ship it or show profitability. What Pumpkin’s track record consists of lying to the people who paid them and then not delivering a product, which seems like a very poor foundation for asking for more money.
We’ve been focusing on outside investors and investment groups and it occurred to us that our upper tier backers should absolutely be made aware of this campaign in the hopes you’d be excited about investing. It’s not a pledge situation like Kickstarter. You’d be investing in a corporation for equity stake and benefiting directly from the profits of What Pumpkin Games. You’re under no obligation to invest, but we want to make the option available to you!
We’re selling 800 shares of What Pumpkin Games stock at $2500 per share. If you are an accredited investor (link explains what that is, exactly) and are interested in investing, let me know and we can schedule a call or keep the thread going here. Even if you don’t meet the accredited investor criteria, if you know someone who does and would be interested in investing in What Pumpkin Games, please give them my contact information and we’ll talk.
Thanks for your time!
Since I did not have $2500 to blow in 2016, I never responded which probably robs me of some JUICY DEETS I could have held on to until now.
Then Daniel summarizes and cross-references this information. Here’s my summary of that summary:
- The Kickstarter update referred to is this one, about how the game had gone 2D.
- The “outside developers” are probably the Odd Gentlemen, who were originally supposed to make the game. That they “created a budgetary strain on the project” is probably the closest thing we’ll get to an official statement regarding the “The Odd Gentlemen stole all the money for King’s Quest” story ipgd came out with.
- “We’re seeing an amazing game take shape that’ll be at your fingertips in 2016”. Hiveswap: Act 1 released in September 2017 and production on Act 2 stalled out in favour of Friendsim
- Dante Basco being involved in Homestuck was a secret at the time. Whatever he was working on (“Homestuck 2.0”) never panned out and he left. There is no indication that Dante Basco was involved in Hiveswap, nor is he credited anywhere as such.
- I don’t know a lot about investing in businesses, but skipping the seed funding phase because “Homestuck is a proven brand” seems like a bit of a red flag, as does the fact that they were asking Kickstarter backers for more money in the first place.
- The game has been delayed to 2016
So, yeah, that’s the big mystery of the Hiveswap NDA of 2016. They were trying to raise money for Hiveswap and other projects. I have no idea if they were able to raise that money, but the fact that a bunch of people left WP a few months later hints at “no”
This is yet another reminder that Andrew and What Pumpkin continue to be deliberately opaque to fans and backers, and treat Homestuck as a cutthroat business. They literally, unapologetically went back to people who backed the Kickstarter to try to squeeze them for more money, even as Homestuck continued to be a profitable franchise.
February 2016
Forums offline
In March 2016, the MSPA Forums went permanently offline. The only explanation or announcement was this message, which displayed when you tried to access the forums:
Untrue.
According to the MSPA Wiki:
Since March 29th 2016 when Homestuck’s Omegapause ended (two weeks away from the comic’s end), the site went abruptly offline; its main page was initially replaced with a plaintext page claiming that passwords had been compromised, but the forums could still be accessed by typing the urls of the individual subforums. Users flooded the questions subforum looking for answers, but received none. The main page was then replaced by one claiming the site was down for maintenance and a few days later, the entire forums vanished from the website. The site was shown to be closed for maintenance until February 2018, when the domain now redirects to the MS Paint Adventures’ website. In October 2019, it was revealed that the forum’s data got corrupted during one of the many server transfers, and thus all non-archived posts are virtually gone.
Many fan adventures, community projects and miscellaneous posts got lost in the process. After its passing other unofficial communities took its mantle, albeit with smaller userbases. [sic]
What Pumpkin and Andrew Hussie aren’t interested in explaining what happened. For years, the site simply read “Forums temporarily offline”, with no indication as to the problem. The main comic page still linked to the forums all that time, with no indication that they were decommissioned or given up on.
As far as I can tell, Andrew himself never made any official comment about the forums, the issues that led to the entire history and the backups being destroyed, or the choice to not replace the forums in any capacity. Until late 2019, it wasn’t even officially confirmed that the forums were permanently deleted. As for Hiveswap, the guarantee of the backer subforum hasn’t been addressed in any capacity, and won’t be in the future.
The only insight we have to what Hussie currently thinks of the forums, in retrospect (besides Makin’s post here) comes from a dramatic set of emails2 linked by /r/homestuck moderator Drew (no relation to Andrew). In these messages Hussie calls interest in the forums “obsession” and “agonizing over every little bit of minutia”. Andrew writes:
Creators usually let go of old sites and outdated work deliberately. Intensive curation of old things like this, while sometimes interesting, can also carry an obsessive energy..1.
For the purposes of this article, though, the important point here is that the promised subforum for backer updates never happened, and since the MSPA forum was permanently destroyed in March 2016, it never will.
May 2016: RJ 4chan post
According to this post from rj on a 4chan /co/ homestuck thread:
I love how opaque they are about the development process. This means they have spent years doing literally nothing save maybe hitting dead end after dead end
This game is beyond doomed
ok yawn im staying up all night i guess so i’m going to rebuke this because whatever.
i can’t say a lot, but i can say for a true fact that the game has been solidly worked on the entire time at the very least since it moved in house. lots of really insane roadblocks happened along the way, and i’m at liberty to talk about none of it. i can say this: the man gives a shit and the team is putting heart, soul, and a+++ work into something that you’ll probably like.
it’s obvious that the final game is vastly different than what was originally hoped for. that’s not the team or hussie’s fault. maybe there will be a tell all in the future, ala the whole lionhead thing. you’d probably find it fascinating.
point is the game will at least be -good.- do you like point and clicks? did you like broken age? you’ll probably dig it, even in its current form. maybe it won’t be an earthshattering experience the likes of which the world has never seen before, but it’ll be worth playing, at least.
god i wish professional and human courtesy (there are things i know even i shouldn’t know) didnt keep me from telling you all some things because what’s going on is, again, entirely not wp’s fault. nobody on the team is really to blame for the hardship. at this point, including money that’s been lost due to merch cost and other reasons, the game has gone way over its 2 million budget and is being funded basically out of pocket. the fact that it wasn’t straight up cancelled is a testament to the sheer fortitude of what pumpkin.
for the record: i’m not directly involved in the making of this game. nothing is personally at stake here, even career shit. i could probably shit on the game if i wanted. but i don’t. i just want to set this straight i guess.
it does fucking suck for everyone, backers especially. at the very least i learned some important mistakes to avoid when i crowdfund from it, so that’s cool?
This is signed by “rj” as in Robert J! Lake (“rj lake” or “spellbang”), known for his work on the music team.
RJ is one of the few people who doesn’t blame What Pumpkin or Andrew for the issues. He does, though, reveal that the game has gone over budget despite being funded at more than three times the original goal, and implies that Andrew (and What Pumpkin) have been funding development at a loss. While that would be impressive if What Pumpkin didn’t have obligations to fulfil and were just developing a game for profit, it does at least confirm that the money from the Kickstarter is definitely used up.
This still doesn’t make sense, though, since Homestuck is still a multi-million dollar brand that’s continually generating revenue from merchandise, books, and music. Maybe when RJ says “funded basically out of pocket”, he means it’s being funded with that money. That’s somewhat misleading, because it still shouldn’t be the case that Andrew is “in the red” from Homestuck.
June 2016: Hiveswap leak
There was some leaked 3D Hiveswap material put on 4chan. It’s an animation demo reel, similar to Hiveswap Friends, showing some lower-resolution 3D characters and some of their animations.
August 2016: Homestuck 2.0
Mon Aug 15 23:07:27 +0000 2016We've been loading up on Homestuck YouTube content the past few weeks -- looking forward to posting that stuff soon.
John Warren (now from Fanbyte) promises a bunch of “Homestuck 2.0” YouTube content that never happens. Assuming John isn’t lying here, that means the content was produced and written, but never published, for unknown reasons.
October 2016
Tech Coast Angels side-channel fundraising
Remember thewebcomicsreview’s story about being solicited for further fundraising? It turns out that’s not where it ended.
In October 2016, What Pumpkin had a private venture capital seed round. They offered to sell up to $500,000 of What Pumpkin Games, and ended up selling $325K This was all to one party, the “Tech Coast Angels”, a US-based angel investing firm (a kind of venture capital, where one firm will invest money into a business for a share, which it hopes to sell later at a profit, after the company appreciates in value.). Apparently none of the prior attempts at soliciting individuals for investment were successful, as TCA was the sole investor in the round.
Throughout 2017, TCA would internally promote What Pumpkin Games, until exiting in 2018 and reporting a return on investment.
New release date edited into website
The Hiveswap website quietly edited so a newspost contains the following announcement:
Hiveswap: Act 1 will be released January 2017. Follow us at @hiveswapgame for further updates.
Hiveswap: Act 1 is delayed to January 2017. There was significant confusion over the roundabout nature of the announcement:
After almost a year with very little updates (I think, I wasn’t paying too much attention during this time), hiveswap.com edits a years-old newspost to say that the game will be released January 2017. No one has any idea if it’s legit. A What Pumpkin employee seemed to confirm the news but later deleted their post.
Chuck Tingle Dating Simulator
At some point in 2016, Cohen Edenfield (Hiveswap writer) and John Warren (Homestuck 2.0, Fanbyte) were working on Chuck Tingle Dating Simulator, a full motion video visual novel directed by Zoë Quinn (of gamergate (in)fame) revolving around the stories of Chuck Tingle, who is probably not secretly Andrew writing erotic novels behind a pseudonym and elaborate fake persona, as some have speculated.3 Chuck Tingle Dating Simulator was funded on Kickstarter in 2016 with a release date of 2017. As of writing, the game never released, but it also hasn’t been formally cancelled yet either.
New trailer
The Homestuck Official Youtube account posts a trailer for Hiveswap: Act 1, featuring the new 2D art style.
Homestuck Ends
The credits page is posted to mspaintadventures.org. Homestuck is officially over, except for the epilogues, which Andrew says will come eventually.
In theory, the hard copies of Homestuck that Andrew owes the Kickstarter backers can now be produced and distributed, although as far as I’m aware there has been absolutely zero official mention of this. That backer reward technically isn’t due until all four acts of Hiveswap are finished and the hard copies are sent out. Hard copies were due to ship in 2014 but it doesn’t look like that’s going to happen any time soon.
December 2016: Steam Greenlight
Please head over to the page and vote YES so we can get the game approved for Steam as quick as possible, since our planned launch is still January 2017—next month!
Because Steam Greenlight was still a thing (it wouldn’t be fully discontinued until June 2017), What Pumpkin put Hiveswap: Act 1 on it and invited people to vote to let their game on the Steam platform. The targeted release date was January 2017, next month. (This was not a delay, as it matches the information from October)
The page features the recently-released trailer for Act 1, which should have been posted here first, but wasn’t! An unfortunate oversight on our part.
This was also the release of an updated game trailer that used the new 2D art assets. In theory, the trailer would have been posted to the Kickstarter feed some time in the last year, but that wasn’t done (possibly because the trailer was only recently completed?)
There were also a few previews of new music tracks by James Roach (Toby Fox did not contribute to this selection) and an announcement that Hiveswap merch was available on the WeLoveFine store.
Finally, we just want to thank everyone for sticking around. Lots of ups and down, but we’re ALMOST THERE. We’ll be posting another trailer before launch, and this time, backers will see it before anyone else. We promise we haven’t forgotten who made this all possible. We’ll also be answering queries about changed emails and addresses soon, so have no fear!
The game was successfully greenlit before the end of the month.
The very next day, a second post was made mostly announcing an extra album (with the James Roach music) would also be available for Kickstarter backers.
As of this post, we’ve reached #2 (and climbing) of all projects on Greenlight…ALREADY! And HIVESWAP is on the front of the Steam Community page! Wow. Thank you all so much! Where doing this, man.
We will be answering queries about changed emails and physical addresses soon! And we’ve seen some other questions, so just to clarify: When the decision was made to release the game in multiple Acts, backers were assured that they would still be getting ALL episodes of HIVESWAP and each episode’s official soundtrack. This hasn’t changed!
Because it had been several years already since the Kickstarter target date of 2014, address changes were becoming a frequent issue. (There is no mention of long-term shipping goals, like the physical edition of the 4-act set or the physical copy of the Homestuck comic.)
Well, that’s not true. It has changed…for the better. Backers will also be getting THE GRUBBLES ALBUM, announced here for the first time, before it’s available anywhere else!
The Grubbles Album is a small five-track game tie-in album with re-recorded “troll” garage band music. Originally, The Grubbles was available on Bandcamp for $5.00, and its tracks were not included with the $7.99 soundtrack album. This would change.
January 2017: Update, from Andrew
Update #26 (Backers only)
(Confusingly, this update was explicitly marked as “From Andrew”. The first few updates were signed “Andrew” at the bottom, but some subsequent updates weren’t, which may have been written by other What Pumpkin staff. All news posts are published under the general project author name “MSPaintAdventures”, so this isn’t clear. Also confusingly, this was first posted on the MSPA news feed in January, but only released as a “backers only” Kickstarter post in February.)
Status of Hiveswap: the game is just about done. It could still use some more testing to be absolutely certain we are not releasing a buggy piece of shit! To that end it will be worth waiting another several weeks or so.
This is to say that the (very ambitious) release date of January 2017 hadn’t been met, and Hiveswap is again delayed indefinitely.
Thank you as always for your legendary patience.
Regarding questions about physical addresses, for those who backed at the relevant tiers: Physical mailing address updates are not necessary at this time. We will be releasing HIVESWAP: Act 1 in digital form soon. The physical version of HIVESWAP will ship after all Acts are complete.
One more reminder here at the end confirming physical editions of Hiveswap are still to be shipped out. What Pumpkin here says not to worry about updating your address (as the extended delay meant many people’s physical address had changed) because nothing was going to be shipped for a while, yet.
April 2017: Trailer 2
Update #27 (Backers only)
Hey everyone, Cohen here, creative director and head writer for Hiveswap.
This update is brought to us by Cohen Edenfield, the (new) Creative Director and Lead Writer/Scripter for Hiveswap. It’s another trailer in the new 2D artstyle, plus minor notes.
August 2017: Release date
Hiveswap: Act 1 is delayed to September 14.
There is also a new launch trailer.
September 2017: A busy month!
PAX West Demo
In early September, there is a playable demo of Hiveswap available at PAX West (at the WeLoveFine booth.)
Act 1 Release
Update #30 (Public)
HIVESWAP: Act 1 goes live on the Steam and Humble Store at 2PM EDT!
September 12, 2017: A Kickstarter update reminds everyone that Hiveswap launched on Steam. They also remind backers that signed, physical copies of the game will not be mailed out until all four acts of Hiveswap are finished and released.
Hiveswap: Act 1 (possibly subtitled “Kansas City Shuffle”??? this is never made clear) was developed and published by What Pumpkin Games, inc. and released for $7.99. A version that included the game soundtrack was also available for $11.99.
Act 1 received positive reviews on Steam and from reviewers like MetaCritic. In my opinion, it’s a solid game, and the new 2D artstyle is gorgeous and suits the material well.
To date, Hiveswap: Act 1 has sold between 100,000 and 200,000 copies. Of Steam games released in 2017, Hiveswap ranks #4470, above Doki Doki Literature Club, just under Bendy and the Ink Machine, and several spots beneath SCP: Secret Laboratory, Creativerse, and Realm Grinder.
In the announcement when WP NYC was dissolved, there was this note about the 3D work:
At some point I think I would like to gather all the 3D stuff that was done and present it as an interesting behind the scenes look at the history of this project, so people can appreciate the work the NYC team did. Perhaps at the very least this could be some nice bonus material for backers when the game comes out.
This certainly never happened.
There were some immediate issues with feature completeness, though. The Kickstarter stretch goals that were reached included linux support (at $900k) and English, French, Italian, German, and Spanish language support (at $1m) but launched with neither.4 Also on the stretch goals (at $1.5m) was “All backers can beta test adventure game.” Of course, the $1.5m goal was reached, but this beta test, of course, never happened. None of this was (to my knowledge) ever publicly addressed or acknowledged.
Crediting and Art Theft
EDIT: After this article was published, Andrew Hussie sent emails in which he directly confessed to explicitly denying select WP employees credit in games because he disliked them personally, explicitly confirming these concerns.
The release of Hiveswap: Act 1 is also the biggest Hiveswap scandal that nobody talks about. The full in-game credits for Hiveswap: Act 1 is this single bitmap texture:
for a fun game you can play at home, count how many times Andrew Hussie credits himself
This list only includes people who worked on Hiveswap after the December 2015 restructuring. No credit is given to any of the employees of What Pumpkin NYC (except for the single employee who stayed) for any of the work done, even though a lot of that work was used to make the final version. In some cases, assets What Pumpkin NYC designed are used in the final game directly, but still none of the work done by ex-employees is properly credited to them.
For instance, see how the level and environment design5 in the final game matches up with the WP NYC prototypes almost exactly, just redrawn in 2D. It’s pretty blatant, it’s basically the game development equivalent of traced art:
(Left: prototype WP NYC designs. Right: final game.)
Significant portions of the cutscenes were also written and choreographed by WP NYC and simply redrawn by the later team. These environments, levels, cutscenes, UI, and more were designed by the What Pumpkin NYC team and simply re-stylized in 2D, and yet Andrew denied all of the original artists and designers credit. And, of course, WLF sold Hiveswap: Act 1 merch with designs done exclusively by the WP NYC team, again, completely uncredited.
According to a source from WP NYC, this wasn’t something that flew under the radar: this was brought up multiple times with Andrew Hussie himself, who refused to credit the artists for their work. They said it “came as a huge surprise” that he didn’t have any sympathy about this as an artist.
From what we heard about the studio transition, though, it seems like this was actually planned and anticipated. From the “a new look” update,
over the last year we have actually stockpiled a massive amount of incredible 2D art assets that are still perfectly usable, and will still make it into the game.
So it seems like What Pumpkin always planned on using work staff at What Pumpkin NYC did, but they apparently weren’t planning on keeping them on the team, paying them severance, or crediting them for it.
To be clear, I don’t think there’s a legal issue here, or some shady trick to get around compensating the artists. Everything here was almost6 certainly paid work done under contract that What Pumpkin owns the rights to, wholesale.
Proper crediting is incredibly important in the entertainment industry; credit is what allows developers and artists to build a resume, which directly impacts their ability to be employed in the future. “In this business, it’s basically, ‘You’re only as good as your last project,’ so if you’re unable to speak about your projects, it’s very much a hard thing to get out there.” That’s a quote from Alexander Fernandez in this excellent polygon article about white label game development, a controversial practice where games are contracted out to studios who do work with the understanding that they won’t be credited for the final product. But what happened here is far worse than that; What Pumpkin employees didn’t sign up to do uncredited work; they expected to be credited and just weren’t. This is off-the-charts bad. What happened with What Pumpkin NYC was egregiously offensive and unprofessional behavior, especially for an artist-driven project like Homestuck.
What Pumpkin would later comment on the points raised in this article with several statements that directly contradict other testimony.
Hiveswap: Act 1 Review
Since this whole article is about Hiveswap, I suppose I should try to describe the one playable bit of Hiveswap in a little bit of detail. This is mostly for readers who haven’t played Act 1 or want a refresher, you can skip it if you’d like.
The design of the game itself is amazing. The art is gorgeous, the world is really playful and fun, and the writing is great. Some of the animations aren’t as smooth as they might be, but I think it works as a stylistic choice. The writing is great, I’ll repeat: there’s a ton of detail and most of the different adventure-gamey item combinations have unique dialogue. It’s astonishing how many different item combinations have unique dialogue, the jokes are funny, it’s just very tight.
The only problem is that the actual gameplay feels… janky? Just unpolished. It’s generally tricky to move where you want to go, the buttons have odd bounding boxes, and it just doesn’t feel great to play, from a programming standpoint. There are lots of little janky programming things, like the menu with a “Save Game” option but no “Load Game” option, and the cursor not indicating whether or not things are interactable at points. There’s a single snake minigame (the Nokia one, not a cool serpent pal) that’s repeated twice and feels like a my-first-unity tutorial project, and really nothing else. It really feels like the actual programming of the game was rushed and sloppy. I’ll admit I’m editorializing here, obviously, and my game design work probably makes me more sensitive to issues like that.
There’s also nothing particularly clever about it, outside of the writing. In a lot of ways, it mimics the semiotics of Homestuck without introducing any clever new ideas, or even reusing Homestuck’s material.
For instance, Homestuck has this incredibly memorable inventory system, where inventory items are stored and retrieved on irregularly shaped cards based on different data structures. In the comic, this is played for laughs, puzzles, and character development. Hiveswap: Act 1 has an inventory system that… uses the irregular shape of the card. No behaviour, no puzzle, no gags, no charm, just a straight inventory system with a “wacky Homestuck” coat of paint. They even use that shape for assets that don’t make any sort of thematic sense, like menu buttons.
I’m not going to critique every single asset and design choice in the game here, but you can safely take this dynamic and apply it to the rest of the \~4 hour game. It really is just a coat of paint, it’s like they went “haha, funny shapes” but a lot of what made Homestuck fun and charming flew over their heads. The game is fine, but doesn’t hold up on its own when compared to its source material, in my opinion.
Cohen Interview
On September 13, 2017, an “interview” was posted to the What Pumpkin Tumblr page in which Cohen interviews themself about Hiveswap.
Today we’re talking to Cohen Edenfield, that is to say, me. Hi. We’re all pretty busy at the moment, with the release in <22 hours and everything, but I managed to get this handled.
What is your specific role on the Hiveswap team?
I have two full-time jobs on HIVESWAP: Creative Director and Lead Writer/Scripter. As Creative Director, I’ve worked with my team leads Angela, Rah, James and Tauhid and with our programmers to, well, “realize a creative vision.” I give notes, feedback, and broad-strokes direction on pretty much everything on the project, which I’m able to do because I can count on the expertise of the team leads doing an amazing job. I can bring them a rough, sketchy description of the overall “feel” that a piece of music or animation or art needs, and be confident that they’ll spin my straw into gold and make something beautiful. I’ll ask Tauhid for a new UI specific to Alternia, with the vague direction that it use hexagons instead of circles, or I’ll ask Angela for moving clouds, or I’ll ask Rah for a new close-up of a sexy lamp, and I know they’ll get it done. And I’ll ask James for an “8-bit college football fight song,” because he does great work, and because I want to hurt him on a spiritual level.
…
Which brings us, I guess, to my other full-time job, Lead Writer/Scripter, which includes narration, dialogue, item descriptions, etc…I wrote about 150,000 words, all together, if you’re really taking your time, trying different dialogue paths, and actually trying to use everything on everything else. If you’re not, it’s considerably less, but it’s in there.
As for the story, the broad narrative strokes of Act 1 and some specific plot beats were mapped out before I came on board, but in 2+ years of development there’s naturally been some substantial reworking and rearranging to refine things from both a gameplay and a narrative perspective. The characters have changed a fair bit, both to suit a different overall tone and because things change over the course of two years. Andrew looks the finished stuff over, and gives feedback on it, and we make changes as needed. I’ve relied a lot on his storytelling and characterization expertise. I may have penned the current script, but we wrote this game together.
…
When and how did you get your start on the Hiveswap project?
In May 2015 I got an email from Andrew asking if I’d be interested in doing some freelance writing on what I then thought of as the “Homestuck Adventure Game.” I’ve been reading Andrew’s various stuff since like…2003? We used to post on the same forum, so it was this kind of “oh right, hey, I think I know you, actually” moment. I’d finished my Masters in English Lit three days before, and I was looking for freelance work, so the timing couldn’t have been better.
…
How did you get your start in creative direction?
As we restructured the studio to our current remote-working situation, Andrew and I had a lot of talks about what HIVESWAP should actually look like. We kept going back to the gorgeous concept art by Gina and Mallory, and we realized that while the 3D development work that had been done was good, it really didn’t feel like Homestuck. The concept art, the 2D assets… those felt like Homestuck.
There’s one particular discrepancy with Cohen that I’ll mention here. They say here they joined the team in May 2015, which matches up with the timeline: What Pumpkin became the studio in summer 2015, and so Cohen would have been hired soon after as part of WP NYC. Cohen stayed on the team even after WP NYC was dissolved, was promoted to Lead Writer, and wrote the script for the game. That all adds up.
What I can’t reconcile is Update 2 from 2014, where Andrew says the writing for the game is finished. Was there a full script for the game written in 2014 that was later discarded? Assuming that update is true, it sounds like — in addition to all the 3D work — at least one full script for the game was written and discarded. Anyway, for a studio that seems incredibly tight on funds, What Pumpkin sure does end up having to redo a lot of work for no apparent reason.
Hiveswap: Act 1 OST commentary
In late September, Cohen posted commentary to the What Pumpkin tumblr blog written by James Roach and Toby Fox, the composers of the Act 1 soundtrack.
Although this is official commentary, it doesn’t seem to have been preserved by What Pumpkin in any format.
Viz Media deal
On September 14, 2017, Andrew posted a news post announcing a partnership with Viz Media:
What Pumpkin and Homestuck are partnering with Viz Media to work on a lot of cool stuff together in the future. This will include projects based on both the Homestuck and Hiveswap worlds. The possibilities are wide open, but here are a couple examples of things we know we’re going to work on already…
Viz will begin releasing the Homestuck books again, starting next year. These will be nice new hardcover editions, and the plan is to just keep turning out volumes until the entire story is in print. Each volume will be full of my Secret Notes just like the previous ones were. Viz will also be involved in the release of the mysterious epilogue project I alluded to a while ago. Details on format, release date, etc, will remain undisclosed until further notice, but you can expect more information about that to surface next year too. I wanted to do something a little unusual for it, something existing outside the confines of the web story. Working with Viz struck me as good opportunity for this. [sic]
Aside from that, anything can happen. Take a look at the sorts of things Viz has already published or produced. These are all examples of things on the table for future consideration for either Homestuck or Hiveswap. I’ve got plenty of ideas, and so do they. Maybe you do too??
To put it simply, what’s happening here is What Pumpkin is selling licensing rights of the text of the Homestuck comic to Viz, so Viz can republish the work. The details — what rights were sold, and under what conditions — were never explained and remain unclear. There are a number of ways this could go, but the first format they point out is a printed book series. (It will later turn out that Viz has an outsized influence in the internals of What Pumpkin far beyond just publishing and the comic’s IP.)
Andrew mentions “Viz releasing the Homestuck books again”, here, which is somewhat misleading. TopatoCo had already released the first few of a series of Homestuck books, but that series never finished. Unlike the wording of the news post suggests, Viz Media was never involved in the original books. Also, the first of the Viz books is just a direct copy of the TopatoCo series, albeit with additional misprints, somehow. It’s good that Viz is going to finish the Homestuck print run, though, and some fans were excited about that, until later.
There was also an announcement from Viz Media in which they summarize much the same thing, although their post has this blurb from Andrew Hussie about how great Hiveswap is:
“Fans have been looking forward to this for a long time, and I don’t think they’ll be disappointed. Personally speaking, I think it’s the best adventure game I’ve ever played,” says Andrew Hussie, HOMESTUCK creator and co-founder at What Pumpkin Games. “I’m excited to team up with VIZ Media to expand on the world of HOMESTUCK, and work closely with them on a bunch of new projects involving both HOMESTUCK and HIVESWAP.”
Shortly after, Viz formally announced the “Collector’s Edition” deluxe hardcover series of Homestuck books with author commentary by Andrew.
In the capital timeline, this falls just a year after the $325K venture capital round, which lasted for approximately two years, and included the Act 1 greenlight and game release.
Viz Involvement in Hiveswap: Act 1
Several weeks after this article was initially published, Viz responded to my request for comment with this email:
Hi,
Thank you for taking the time to write in with your inquiry, many apologies for our delayed response!
While VIZ Media is no longer involved with Hiveswap, you can contact Fellow Traveler Games[sic] with any questions you may have about Hiveswap here: https://fellowtraveller.games/contact/
You can also learn more about Hiveswap Act 2 here: https://fellowtraveller.games/games/hiveswap-act-2/
If you have any additional questions, please don’t hesitate to write us again.
Take care,
[C] @ VIZ Media
Now, this is odd. C says here that Viz is “no longer” involved with Hiveswap, implying that it was, at some point.
But this implication doesn’t match the timeline or any of the data: Act 1 released on September 12, but the Viz announcement wasn’t until the 14th. If Viz media was involved in the release of Hiveswap Act 1, it was done entirely in secret.
After a brief back-and-forth over a few days interspersed with generic customer service niceties and links to various news announcements, I gleaned the following semi-clarifications from a rotation of people:
As [C] mentioned, we worked with the game developer What Pumpkin to release the first part of Hiveswap in 2017. We have had no involvement with the game since this launch. Thanks!
Best regards,
[L] @ VIZ
As [C] & [L] have mentioned, all the publicly-available information is in the press announcement on our website. What Pumpkin developed the Hiveswap Act 1 game, and VIZ, Homestuck and What Pumpkin worked together to release the game. Since the game launched, we have not been involved in the game.
…
[J] @ VIZ
We do not have any additional information we are able to share on our involvement beyond what has already been released and mentioned in the press releases. We are no longer involved in Hiveswap and any further inquiries should be directed toward the companies still working on the release.
Thank you so much for writing in! I hope you find the information you’re looking for.
Best,
[L] @ VIZ
I’m still not entirely sure what to make of this. The only thing that suggests that Viz was involved in the release of Hiveswap: Act 1 was the assertion in this email chain. Viz doesn’t seem to have ever been involved in the release, publication, or marketing of the game, outside mentioning the game’s existence alongside its announcement days after the game launched. And, although all three representatives agree that Viz has not been involved with Hiveswap since the launch, the one case in which we do know Viz was involved with the management of What Pumpkin Games doesn’t happen until April 2018, several months later. It’s possible this is what they’re referring to.
So… did Viz have some sort of involvement in Act 1? My answer is… maybe?! They certainly say they did, although they’re not willing to elaborate on that assertion at all. It’s possible more details will come to light about this in the future, but for now this remains a bizarrely unresolved thread.
Hardcover Edition Fact Sheet
When Viz media does begin releasing the books to booksellers, they include a fact sheet that reads:
- Releases 4 times a year for 5+ volumes. Series is ongoing. The main run of the comic lasted for 7 years, from 2009-2016, comprising over 8,000 pages of material and 4 hours of video. Further content is currently in development.
- Over 1,000,000 users a day visited the hosting site, MS Paint Adventures, during the height of the Homestuck serialization. To date the comic has over 2,500,000,000 pageviews.
- The Homestuck Official YouTube channel has over 3,200,000 views.
- Homestuck has spawned innumerable fanworks in all genres-art, fiction, music, videos, crafts, cosplay, etc.-along with live fan events all over the world.
- The first episode of an independent video game series set in the Homestuck universe will release on Steam in Q4 2017. The initial Kickstarter campaign for the game raised $2,500,000, more than half a million dollars within the first 24 hours.
This seems to have been for internal use, but some stores listed it as-is, or only changed it slightly. This was probably unintentional, but gives us some insight.
One notable thing here is yet another confirmation that the crowdfunding campaign raised at least $2.5 million. There’s also a reminder that part of the monetary value of the Homestuck brand is its fandom popularity and many fanworks. It’s often easy to forget that Homestuck is a business that directly profits off engagement, but it’s true.
Next: more games, more books, more distress.
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I find this particularly amusing, because “intensive curation of old things” is exactly what I’m forced to do for this article just to put a story together. I don’t know, if I had made a ton of financial promises that I wasn’t keeping, I wouldn’t want anybody paying attention, either. ↩
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I… do not recommend the average person read the leaked emails. It’s part of a very different, very childish melodrama that falls far beyond the scope of this article. But, for the sake of citing my sources, this document and its attribution can be found here. ↩
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To be overwhelmingly clear, I mean this exactly as written. This isn’t sarcasm, I think the theory is false. It’s just funny.
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A caveat here about Linux support: When Act 1 launched on steam it was only available on Windows and Mac. Apparently at some point they went back and added the linux builds to steam without any sort of announcement. Since it was a stock unity game, making a linux build is relatively easy, so it’s entirely possible they just misconfigured Steam on launch day. ↩
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You may note here that some of the visible carry-over between the 2D and 3D versions comes from shared concept art. Most of the concept art in update 16 was drawn by bleaksqueak, who was not credited in the update post, but is credited in the final game under “Concept Art.” It wouldn’t be fair to point to, say, the portal device design in Act 1 and accuse What Pumpkin of art theft over that, because it isn’t. Not every similarity is automatically an act of impropriety; some are harmless outliers. That being said, there is still a lot of uncredited work done by WPNYC in the final product, so I wouldn’t let this distract you too much from the main point. ↩
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I know James Roach and other Homestuck musicians have mentioned in the past that they do retain rights to their songs, but license them to Homestuck, which is an unusual arrangement. If What Pumpkin were willing to do this in other places, it could make issues like this much more complicated. However, Homestuck only seems to do this with music contributions, so I still think it very unlikely that there would be any direct rights issues over the WP NYC assets. ↩