The real āstoryā of Hiveswap isnāt found in the universe of the game. Instead, when people talk about Hiveswap, the conversation is dominated by stories about the development and history of the game as a project, which started as a Kickstarter success story but then bounced 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 especially among newer 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 have now been deleted, but I think itās also because it feels premature to write up a āpostmortemā on a gameās development before itās even an eighth of the way finished. Not canceled, just⦠in limbo. There is also significant pressure on people in the know ā even fans who just lived through backing the project ā to keep quiet about all this, for reasons Iāll get into.
Iām documenting the story so far so that the Hiveswap Story isnāt lost to time, and so thereās 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 ā as far as I can tell ā explanation of Hiveswap to date.