When I wrote the Hiveswap article, I left a note asking for people to contact me if there were any facts I got wrong or major events I missed. A number of people took me up on that, which I am thankful for.

However, there was one big report I got that was too significant to just edit into the article. Because these allegations were new, and from a credible source, I thought they warranted their own article and research.

For the rest of the story about Hiveswap, see The Hiveswap Fiasco, to which this is a kind of sequel.

By the request of the source (because Andrew is known to be aggressively litigious), I have edited our conversation into a synthetic document. This is a summary of the claims from the source to preserve their anonymity and ensure clarity. I am not yet asserting anything, just stating what the source said; I’ll hold my personal comments until after the whole thing. Here is that report:

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What actually happened with The Odd Gentlemen

The biggest reason there’s an NDA in place about The Odd Gentlemen’s involvement is that Andrew wanted to cover up the fact that much of the blame is on Andrew’s failure to deliver a workable plan to the studio in the agreed-upon schedule.

While parts of the ipgd post are true, the post distorts what happened into a story designed to make Andrew look like he did no wrong. What actually happened is this:

The real story of Hiveswap isn’t about the game or the universe. Rather, the conversation “about Hiveswap” is dominated by stories about the development and history of the game as a project — starting as a Kickstarter success story but then bouncing from scandal to scandal for years. The story of how Andrew Hussie burned through a $2.5 million dollar investment over eight years to produce almost nothing is fascinating, convoluted, and poorly understood even among Homestuck fans.

Right now, this meta-story mostly exists in the form of oral history. This is probably due to the fact that a lot of the key sources are ephemeral — and most of them have been deleted — but it’s also because it feels premature to write up a “postmortem” on a game’s development before it’s even an eighth of the way finished.

I’m documenting the story so far so that the Hiveswap Story isn’t lost to time, and so there’s a decent summary of events so far, and maybe even so new Hiveswap fans can catch up. I dug through every page, announcement, interview, blog post, FAQ, and tweet I could find, and the culmination is this the most comprehensive — as far as I can tell — explanation of Hiveswap to date.