SBAHJ Kickstarter

Andrew Hussie, in conjunction with comedy writers KC Green and Dril, launched another Kickstarter for a hardcover spin-off of the Homestuck sub-comic Sweet Bro and Hella Jeff.

This campaign was a success (180% funded) and the book was written, printed, and shipped to backers in 2018. Make That Thing is a subsidiary of TopatoCo, a book publisher which previously handled MSPA merchandise.

One interesting note is that Andrew Hussie made a new Kickstarter account for this, possibly in violation of the Kickstarter terms of service, because Hiveswap is in such poor standing that Kickstarter has banned Andrew from starting more Kickstarter projects. If this account were set up just to evade the ban, that would explain it.

Troll Call

A newspost on mspaintadventures.com announces the “Troll Call”:

Every week we’ll be revealing some new troll characters from Hiveswap until Act 2 is out. Follow the Troll Call here, and meet the first two here. Expect a few more surprises like this to drop in coming weeks.

Sure enough, a later news post announces an exciting new redesign for the hiveswap.com website, including an “extended zodiac” and a personality quiz. This is the extended set of symbols that was teased much earlier. This new set of symbols also includes some character symbols from designs as early as June 2014.

To match this new schedule, WP announced that Hiveswap: Act 2 would be released in Spring 2018. This date also keeps in line with the promise that switching to a 2D artstyle would allow new acts to come out quickly. Phew!

Scrapped Hiveswap Forum

Some time around February 2016, What Pumpkin NYC hired a team of eight interns to build a forum platform to “alleviate growing discontent in crowdfunding backers and general fanbase” about Hiveswap. The project was headed up by Phillip Huang, an intern at What Pumpkin:

Hey guys!

I’m Phillip Huang of What Pumpkin! _{(please don’t hurt me)}

I’m happy to announce that, a few weeks ago, I was assigned to rebuild the forums!

Look, I understand WP has really been dropping the ball on keeping the community up to date with regards to the forums. I wasn’t a part of the team until pretty recently, so I can’t really speak on behalf of them or whatever policies they had to follow in the past. But I do know two things:

First, please do not think for a second that we don’t care about you guys. Andrew and the rest of the team absolutely feel the growing animosity and discontent, and we’re working as hard as we can every day to try to keep the fanbase happy. By my personal observations, the reason the forums have been on the back burner is because there are just too many other things to be working on right now (most notably Hiveswap—game development is a BEAST).

Second, starting with this post, I am going to try to make amends by increasing transparency, feedback, and communication, at least with regards to the forums and their reconstruction. Technically I’m not supposed to announce very much now, but if you have a burning hot question go ahead and ask me here (not PM pls so I don’t have to repeat myself) and I’ll see what I’m allowed to say. Once the new forums are up, I’m going to try to get some of the other WP team members to start posting on them so they can answer questions about more general things (no promises though! ). A part of this initiative is me trying to contact the old mods and other prominent community members to help shape the creation of the new universe relaunch of the forums…

So what happens now? WP probably won’t be making an Official Announcement^TM about this until the forums actually launch. I can’t make any promises on a launch date or any features. In the meantime, it’s probably best to keep this news and your hypes on the down low. … Also, please don’t pester the mods to give any info, and mods please don’t leak anything else (I SEE YOU “flowey” ).

Alrighty, thanks for your patience y’all. We really appreciate your dedication to this community throughout all of these difficulties. Hopefully I’ll see you on the new forums! _{(when they launch, which is never)}

Phillip posted regular updates on the “Fate of the MSPA Forums” thread on the omegaupdate fan forums. He gave unofficial apologies for how poorly What Pumpkin had treated people and how flippant they had been about the forums in general. Part of the project, as he understood it, was to import the old forum data once the new system was up and running. If What Pumpkin was aware that that data was unrecoverable (and it is likely they did), Phillip was kept in the dark about it. He continued giving updates and answering questions to the best of his ability until his internship ended in 2017 without the forum ever being launched.

In January 2018, Phillip returned to report that “What Pumpkin has told me that the forum relaunch will be handled professionally by a department of a larger media company” (Viz) and “Sadly, they didn’t mention any timeline regarding this relaunch. … This will conclude my involvement with this project, so this will be my last update.”

Viz media has yet to launch any such replacement forum. According to Makin, who worked on the project,

I was told after the fact by one of the people working with me that viz was the one to cancel the new forums project

because forums were passe or something

It’s also possible that Viz may not want to launch a new forum because that would be a reminder that they failed to preserve the old forums or restore the precious historical data. Either way, it looks like Viz may not ever relaunch any sort of forum, despite the huge community push and the work being already done.

Comic Contest

What Pumpkin announced an official comic contest for on the Act 2 characters featured in Troll Call:

One of the best parts of the weekly TROLL CALL has been the great FAN COMICS. We love them, and we want to reward your enthusiasm. So, here’s the deal. Every week, we’re going to be giving away gift cards to For Fans By Fans, the central hub of Hiveswap and Homestuck merch. Second runner-up gets $25, first runner-up gets $50, and the first place winner gets $75!

Also…ALL first place winners will be entered into our GRAND PRIZE contest, the winner of which will get their fantroll added to Hiveswap as an NPC! What Pumpkin Games’ writers and animators will work with you to develop YOUR fantroll into a CANONICAL CHARACTER

The results were announced in April. The grand prize winner was announced to be fefsprites with this animated comic. Fefsprites is currently under NDA about Act 2, but plans to submit their fantroll Idarat Catlaz.

What’s notable about the contest is that, at time of writing, all official record of it seems to have been completely obliterated from the internet. The contest details and the prize announcement have been scrubbed from tumblr, and the contest rules have been removed. Even the winning comic is a 404, even though the blog is still active.

Homestuck.com redesign

On April 02, 2018, Viz Media retired the mspaintadventures.com site in favor of a new, completely redesigned homestuck.com. Homestuck.com is designed to be mobile friendly, and converts the old flash content to static video files. There were a few news announcements for this:

More broadly than just converting Flash pages, this adaptation serves another purpose. My intent for MSPA was never to have it last forever, or to concern myself with maintaining a labyrinthine, crudely-coded website for the rest of my life. At some point, the right thing to do was always going to be figuring out how the stories hosted on it could persist long into the future. VIZ Media is about as good as any organization I can think of when it comes to publishing long-running series, and preserving them for future readers. They print many classic manga series and get those books on shelves all over the world, thus keeping those series alive and widely read, well beyond their initial publication. So the VIZ team and I are working together to preserve the original content while updating its delivery, but Homestuck’s unusual format makes this a unique challenge. (Incidentally, they’ll also be releasing the full run of Homestuck in print as well, to complement the work online.)

My hope is you will see these changes as a net-positive, and perhaps can enjoy the work again in ways that weren’t possible before (such as on your phone). Again, this adaptation will continue to evolve and improve. Any feedback you may have when it comes to the performance or presentation, feel free to contact the site team at VIZ. They’re taking everyone’s remarks seriously. Thanks again to all who continue to care enough about Homestuck to stop by and read this. We all appreciate your support.

I do want to note that one of the main reasons given for the partnership with VIZ Media was media preservation. I’m an archivist, myself, and I believe very strongly that media preservation and continued publishing of works is crucial, so I’m glad to see that preservation is one of the key expectations What Pumpkin has of VIZ media.

The homestuck.com redesign wasn’t off to a great start on this, however, as they made the old site design inaccessible. There was also no mention of making previously published Homestuck works — like Paradox Space or the SBAHJ Kickstarter novel — available again, which is another point against them. Hopefully VIZ will change its mind on these points and make an effort to preserve these works, but so far, it hasn’t done so.

The new Homestuck website was a partial success, with the glaring exception that the main promise of continued maintenance never happened.

Many of the video files are only temporary, and will be replaced in coming months, either with HTML-converted files, or higher quality videos.

Viz did not follow through on this or any of their other promises to polish the site, and a significant portion of the site is still broken in 2020. For instance, many of the flash files were recorded to video and uploaded to Youtube, who incorrectly blocked some of them, making the pages unreadable. VIZ (a media giant with its own CDN, who could easily host and stream videos itself) has not addressed this, or seemingly even contacted Youtube at all about the issue.

There are other issues with the way Viz handled homestuck.com, but further detail on that is beyond the scope of this article. As of 2021, Viz has failed to preserve the bulk of Homestuck’s flash content, and fan projects have had to step in to fill the void.

Newsrama Andrew Hussie Interview

On the same day, Andrew also published an interview with Newsrama about the VIZ-published book versions of Homestuck:

Nrama: How did the collections from VIZ come about, and what’s the experience been like working with them?

Hussie: The VIZ people are great, and are all true professionals when it comes to manga and anime. That’s why Homestuck was the perfect fit here. You’ll never see a better anime than Homestuck.

Nrama: Have you had any talk about reprinting your other MS Paint Adventures in hard-copy form?

Hussie: There are old editions of Problem Sleuth floating around out there. You can probably buy used copies on Amazon for like $100 each. But maybe we’ll make new and better editions of those for VIZ too, who knows.

Nrama: What are some aspects of multimedia storytelling you’d like to see explored, both in terms of what you’re creating, and from other creators? It often feels like there’s a lot of untapped potential out there.

Hussie: I tried to make Homestuck the thing that taps all the untapped potential. At least when it comes to the web format, circa 2009-2016. I don’t know if you could do much more with it than was done, unless you start grasping at straws for new ridiculous things to try out. Which Homestuck did a lot of itself, the further it went along. There’s always more to try.

Nrama: What’s next for you?

Hussie: I’ll probably just keep making things.

He has not. He has not made “next” things “after the adventure game”. He has not even finished the adventure game.

Update 2021: Andrew has, in fact, made another thing: Psycholonials, which I’ll discuss later. He did not finish Hiveswap or Hauntswitch before abandoning them, though, which might be worse.

What Pumpkin puts Hiveswap on formal hiatus

On April 3, 2018, What Pumpkin posted an announcement on their Tumblr page that they were dramatically changing their business plans:

What Pumpkin Games is going through a transition period, which has involved restructuring the company, the way we develop games, and the types of projects we focus on. First, the most important thing to address is, Hiveswap’s development absolutely will continue. The approach to its development will evolve as this transition goes forward, but ensuring the release of the full Hiveswap series remains our priority. We should have more specific information about what exactly this means for Hiveswap in coming weeks.

In the more immediate future, WPG is shifting focus to making smaller, fun, lightweight games that can be produced more quickly. The type of content we can release along the way between acts, continuing to build upon the Hiveswap world, and give fans things they can enjoy while they wait. These games are somewhat in the vein of what we did with the Troll Call, but more engaging, providing more depth and background to the characters that were previewed.

Now, I do have to immediately interject here. In the first paragraph, the announcement reads “ensuring the release of the full Hiveswap series remains our priority”, but now they’ve just said that they are not “focusing” on the mainline Hiveswap series, and are “shifting focus” to other games. This is, in fact, the opposite of prioritizing the mainline Hiveswap series — What Pumpkin is making the decision here to stop working on Hiveswap and instead start a new series of games.

In September, James Roach mentioned that Hiveswap Act 2 was officially on hiatus, confirming this interpretation of the announcement: Hiveswap is out.

The post continues

The first such game will be available very soon. The format is a “Friendship Simulator”, much like dating sims or visual novels you may have played before. The idea is, instead of trying to date a character, you just try to befriend them, and in the process, you get to know them better, and ridiculous things happen along the way. The first volume features two trolls from the Troll Call, and was written by Andrew Hussie.

We hope you enjoy this type of game! If it’s well received by the fans, then there should be more of these to play in the future. We appreciate your patience and support as WPG makes this transition.

What Pumpkin doesn’t officially announce why they’re making the “transition”, but given that we know they’ve used the allocated funding, it seems reasonable to assume that What Pumpkin wants a profitable game so that Hiveswap doesn’t eat into potential comic profits. A spinoff series also gives What Pumpkin an excuse to charge Kickstarter backers for Hiveswap again, as it will turn out that they won’t be giving backers any of these new games. This seems exactly like, as Jess put it, “Oh crap, we only have money to make a quarter of the game! Let’s raise some more!”

They don’t say if this shift is going to involve restructuring and, say, firing anyone. The tone here is very positive and optimistic, though, so there’s probably nothing to worry about.

What Pumpkin Fires Everyone

In April 2018, John Michonski from Video Game Choo Choo published the article “WhatPumpkin Layoffs Due to VIZ Media Purchase”, reporting recent sweeping layoffs at WhatPumpkin, and that they were due to VIZ Media:

Recently, WhatPumpkin, the primary force behind the webcomic Homestuck as well as video game spinoff Hiveswap, had a round of layoffs. Specifically, a large amount of the primary development team behind Hiveswap was let go. Due to NDAs, those who were ready to speak to us were cautious about what they could say, and didn’t want to be named, but many of them pointed to the new owner of the Homestuck IP, VIZ Media, as the reason behind the layoffs, instead of WhatPumpkin itself.

An anonymous source claimed the layoffs were purely due to VIZ restructuring, and they didn’t take the needs of WhatPumpkin staff into account. Upper management at the company stood by those in the crosshairs, and fought to keep their jobs.

VIZ has recently announced that, while development of Hiveswap is continuing, they will be shifting focus for the time being to the smaller “Friendship Simulators” called Friendsims, where you befriend characters that were previously announced for the next episode of Hiveswap. According to other public posts by the former development team, a good chunk of their work will still be used in the final version of Hiveswap’s Act Two.

…

The scope of the layoffs was massive. Seemingly everyone who was involved with the project was fired, including the core team. Most of the people involved in Hiveswap posted something about having worked on Hiveswap in the past tense, being newly unemployed, or needing new work, including James Roach, Cohen Edenfield, Shelby Cragg, Hillary Esdaile (rah-bop), and John Warren.

James Roach wrote:

I.. enjoyed much of my time at WP, even the late nights and ever-shifting needs of a project that never felt like it would be done. I am the sort of person who finds themselves very lost without work to do. When you work at a small company like WP, you end up doing a lot more than is in your job description. There were so many times where i’d be like filling out a spreadsheet at 3 AM thinking like “man if all those people that thought they wanted this job could see what it was actually like”

The few of us that have been around since the beginning- before the studio changes, before the controversies and hurdles of development.. shit before even the shift in leadership- those few of us.. have been through a lot. There is so much I wish I could have shared with you guys. A lot of little triumphs and celebrations but also a lot of disappointment and frustrations. My constant worry is that I would be letting the fans down, because that was me.

The reason I cite the Michonski article above is that he was able to interview members of the Hiveswap development team and confirm that the layoffs were directly due to VIZ Media’s involvement. The fact that VIZ Media has the authority to prompt this at all speaks to it having an outsized influence in the internals of What Pumpkin far beyond just publishing and the comic’s IP. Again, the exact details are unknown, and there has been no transparency as to this, even to the Kickstarter underwriters.

A few of the fired developers, including James Roach, were re-hired a few months later to do work on the new games that What Pumpkin was making instead of Hiveswap.

Hiveswap Friendsim Ends

What Pumpkin releases the last update of Hiveswap Friendsim

Of the thirty-seven stories in the game, Andrew Hussie wrote two. The most prolific writer by far was Aysha Farah, who wrote twelve routes.

Skaianet Systems

In late December 2018, What Pumpkin deleted their Tumblr blog and wiped their Twitter account. This was may have been part of an ultimately misguided ARG, although it’s unclear how destroying years of records was meant to be related, if at all, to the ARG, or anything else. None of these accounts have been restored, despite the ARG fading into obscurity and embarrassment. The only thing erasing the records has accomplished is slightly obscuring What Pumpkin’s many failures, and further miscrediting the WP NYC team by hiding evidence of their contributions.

Weeks prior, What Pumpkin mentioned in a footnote that they would be “retiring” the Tumblr account, citing “maintenance.” “Retiring” here apparently meant erasing the blog and all the content. No explanation was given.

Epilogues Fact Sheet

The epilogues also had a fact sheet for publishers like the mainline books did, this time reading:

• Homestuck is one of the biggest pop culture phenomena of the past decade, a unique and massive internet-based hybrid work consisting of webcomics, chat logs, gifs, video games, animation, and music.
• 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.
• Direct-to-consumer merchandise sales have generated over $10,000,000 in revenue.
• Ten official soundtrack albums have been released on Bandcamp.
• The first episode of Hiveswap, an independent video game series set in the Homestuck universe, released in September 2017 for PC and Mac and immediately became a top ten best-selling game on Steam.
• Homestuck has spawned innumerable fanworks in all genres—art, fiction, music, videos, crafts, cosplay—along with fan events all over the world.

Again, this seems to have been for internal use only, but some stores still listed it as-is.

The ad claims Hiveswap “immediately became a top ten best-selling game on Steam”, which is remarkable, because — as far as I can tell — it’s a blatant lie. Steam actually publishes top 100 lists for best-selling new games by year, and Hiveswap didn’t make it, even if we narrow the domain down to the month. I looked up the data for Steam 2017 — even if we (generously) assume they mean it was in the top ten best-sellers of 2017 — by the end of 2017 200,000 people owned Hiveswap at maximum, including people with free review copies. That puts them somewhere below rank 200. It seems like What Pumpkin literally just claimed they were a bestseller and hoped nobody would check.

We also get this internal figure that “Direct-to-consumer merchandise sales have generated over $10,000,000 in revenue”, which was definitely not meant to be publicized. This is yet another confirmation that Homestuck is still a multi-million dollar brand, and should not be hurting for money.

Hiveswap: Act 2 Steam Page

On October 2019, the @whatpumpkin twitter account posted an announcement:

What Pumpkin Games@whatpumpkin

Hiveswap: Act 2 Steam page is up! - store.steampowered.com/app/1181840/HI…

Thu Oct 31 14:08:09 +0000 2019

The Steam page for Hiveswap: Act 2 was available, and there was a trailer featuring the Troll Call characters. There were a few gameplay screenshots, but the store page mostly consists of the trailer video and character animations.

The game is listed as being developed by What Pumpkin Games, and published by Fellow Traveller.

The steam page also promises that “Hiveswap: Act 2 is the anticipated second entry in the four-part series of narrative adventure games from the universe of Andrew Hussie’s smash hit webcomic Homestuck.” and “James Roach and Toby Fox (creator of Undertale) return for another genre-spanning original soundtrack.”

The release date on steam is listed as “tickets available soon.”, which was probably supposed to be funny.

Bandcamp Changes

Without any sort of announcement, What Pumpkin (possibly in cooperation with Viz Media) “reorganized” the official Homestuck bandcamp page, making several major changes:

• Deleting all the track art
• Deleting many albums
• Grouping albums into less-expensive bundles
• Exclusively selling bundles and not albums

Originally they promised that any removed albums were temporary and would be restored soon, but the removed albums were never restored. Some of the original artists re-uploaded their Homestuck work on their own channels, but some albums were permanently lost. This seems to go somewhat against What Pumpkin’s directive of preservation, but they’ve made no comment about it.

The track art and original album organization would have been permanently lost as well, if not for a hero’s complete track archive.

Currently, the tracks from the Grubbles album are only available as part of the Hiveswap: Act 1 OST, and they come with every copy. That album is $4.13 (reduced from $7.99 by), price significantly reduced from the original cost of $12.99.

Homestuck^2

Kate Mitchell and Aysha Farah, as Snake Sollutions Studio LLP, launch “Homestuck^2”. It’s to be an experimental, semi-official,¹ “dubiously canon” fan-adventure-slash-story-continuation in the vein of other fan continuations like Act 8 and Act Omega, only with Andrew involved. It’s produced jointly with What Pumpkin, but the writing and production is done by Snake Solutions and their team.

According to their introduction, the comic is supported by Patreon, with exclusive content available for Patreon backers:

This update comprises the “main” update for the month of October. The next update posted to this site will be the main update for the month of November. Additional *~*bonus updates*~* will also begin in November.

What’s this about bonus updates, we hear you ask? To find out more, please make sure to check out our Patreon page! Pledging to the official Homestuck Patreon is a great way to support the independent creators behind the comic, and to get your grubby little hands on some bonus Homestuck content that you won’t find anywhere else!

The Patreon label reads “Homestuck is creating Homestuck^2: Beyond Canon”.

This wouldn’t be relevant to Hiveswap at all until a later Patreon update:

Okay, I’m with you, what else?

Fellow Traveller committed to “managing all of the business bits” (marketing, branding, production support) so What Pumpkin can focus on game development. But Fellow Traveller didn’t get a chance to do any of that before they bowed out, leaving Hiveswap once again self-published.

Viz does have publication rights for the original comic, and the Kickstarter project owes people full copies of Homestuck, and I haven’t seen those two facts reconciled anywhere. I sent them an inquiry about this for the article but Viz declined to reply. Viz’ involvement is especially dangerous because they haven’t ever formally taken responsibility for the Hiveswap project or provided Hiveswap with any resources or support, but instead directly interfered with its production.

Andrew Hussie, What Pumpkin, Viz Media, Snake Solutions and the rest of the Homestuck team were all working on new projects: the Homestuck books, multiple visual novels, Homestuck^2, new music albums, and more. Burning through a laundry list of new legal entities doesn’t change that all of these new Homestuck projects were greenlit by Andrew, were launched after Hiveswap, and are being worked on instead of Hiveswap, which is the only project that actively owes people content that’s already been paid for.

It’s like if you had pre-ordered Half Life 3 for several hundred dollars in 2008 along with thousands of other people, and Valve just kept the money and worked on other projects instead. In fact, dare I say it, it’s like taking money set aside for one game and spending it on another, leaving the funders with scraps and a bunch of guarantees you don’t intend to deliver on. Transparent misconduct that at least borders on fraud.

And then, of course, they weren’t anymore. Andrew buggered off entirely to make his own clown thing, Homestuck^2 was suddenly frozen, and it doesn’t look like the Viz book series is going to be finished, either. Hiveswap falls neatly in line with a whole history of projects that were started and abandoned — the only difference is the unshakable obligations still tied to the Kickstarter project.

Of course, Kickstarter projects fail all the time, but a lot of things make this different. The Kickstarter campaign was a massive success: it got overwhelming support and raised more than $2.5 million, which is more than you need to make a medium-sized indie game. The project had a modest goal: a point-and-click adventure game. They weren’t trying to develop anything new or even a little bit risky. What Pumpkin didn’t go into bankruptcy. They continue to produce successful games and continue to make money off Homestuck merchandise, games, and book residuals.² They were even picked up by VIZ, a media publishing empire. And Hiveswap hasn’t been cancelled, it’s just quietly been de-prioritized in favour of other, more profitable projects — in complete defiance of What Pumpkin’s actual obligations.

With the very first delay, Andrew promised “we’ll be working things out to stay favorable to backers”, which he didn’t do. Later, when the project switched to 2D, he said “the most important thing to me is that the project is still alive, and is looking as promising as ever” which, given what we know now, was another lie.

Andrew, MSPA, What Pumpkin, Homestuck, and Viz Media haven’t been transparent about any of this. Despite being crowdfunded and community supported, they haven’t communicated with the game’s underwriters, opting instead to ignore backers and fans and produce nothing but radio silence for stretches of months at a time. What Pumpkin is not at all willing to open up or show any accountability to the game’s fans and stakeholders; I had to painstakingly compile all of this myself over the course of months.

Hell, they never even disclosed how much money they raised from the original crowdfunding campaign. They’re silent for months at a time, regularly purge their records whenever there’s a possibility for embarrassment, and shackle everyone involved in the game with NDAs. This overt opacity about the project gives the whole thing an air of shadiness: everything we do hear about the project makes them look bad — maybe even to the point of being vulnerable to legal liability for misconduct — which is why they’re bent on hiding as much as they can. This exacerbates all the other development issues, in addition to being wrong per se.

Despite no longer being bankrupt — and, in fact, having major investment in the form of Viz Media — What Pumpkin refuses to produce Hiveswap, or — significantly — give refunds to backers who request them. (See comments) The Hiveswap project isn’t even an eighth of the way complete. Fans and backers are stuck in a state of limbo, and What Pumpkin is content to leave them that way.

It’s very disheartening, given all this, to see questions and concerns about Hiveswap treated like spam. In some extreme cases, even official Homestuck staff are willing to talk about Hiveswap fans with open disdain. Light criticism of the project — even just pointing out incontrovertible facts — is met with… something less than reservation. The actual obligations What Pumpkin has to the Kickstarter backers is being ignored, and complaints are treated as coming from “whiny fans” instead of as the legitimate grievances they are.

People sometimes ask me what I think about Andrew Hussie. After everything, do I think he was pulling a con? Was he as bad as all that? Honestly, I don’t know. A lot of the information I’d need to make a judgment on something like that isn’t available, largely because Andrew chose to deliberately hide it.

At the end of the day, Andrew Hussie raised a comical amount of money to make a game and frittered it away to nothing. $2.5 million is a mind-boggling amount of money to lose on a crowdfunding project, and — due to What Pumpkin’s deliberate opacity about everything — it’s all completely unaccounted for. The project is orders of magnitude behind schedule, and no effort is being made to get it finished or have any accountability about it. It is hideous behaviour, especially coming from a comic like Homestuck which has always relied on community support and reader involvement.