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[nenjin]

I still maintain that's malarkey. You don't go and push out a modding tool set and map editor to keep up the ruse that you have a game you really don't. All the game art? Found it anywhere else on the internet, obviously stolen? The Youtube videos we got, complete forgeries?

He may not have been "almost done" but saying there was never any game, ever, just seems spiteful to me.

[Cthulhu]

I guess I didn't put what I meant very well.  I think he had what he's had the whole time.  A prototype that resembles the finished product but doesn't actually do anything, and can't pass a turn without crashing because there's little to nothing under the hood.

And then what I said.  Making it look like more than it is, Lying for Jesus and all, figuring he's good on it if he can just get the money to finish it.

[Innsmothe]

I really don't buy it. Though since you have been the one always being a downer, skipping from one negative to the next. I am really not surprised. 
Frankly those who act  like you shpuld be blamed for the guy's breakdown and the split; you shouldn't yell fire in a theater, yell 'sell!' on a stock trading floor and you shouldn't tell cynical gamers that an indie producer is a fraud before anything happens...which was done repeatedly, pretty much since the beginning.
Cynicism is one thing, frankly the whole thing was sabotaged.

[lordcooper]

The truth is almost certainly somewhere right in the middle of those two outlooks.

Any chance we can let this thread sleep?

[ThtblovesDF]

I can't even get my money back, so there is that.

[ChairmanPoo]

An interesting post by a superbacker, as seen in Kickstarter:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Kai Barnard Superbacker  Diciembre 19

Fenricks has posted on the forums!
Just gonna copy paste for once - with no comment

'I can't really log on here or I will just fucking yell all the time and be an asshole and lost any semblance of professionalism that I had. I'm done with the project - I lost a lot of money and people are going to associate my name to this shitshow forever, I don't know if I will ever really recover from that. I don't have the KDG email anymore, only my personal one - but if you direct message me here I'll get it. I don't really know what I can do for you now except commserate. I thought of a lot of ways for people to get Joshs attention unfortunately all of them border stalking and/or include innocent folks in his life that shouldn't have to be engaged due to his fuckups.
i don't know where that leaves us. A strongly worded letter to his home? Someone posted the address a while ago *(its not the same as the KDG address)'

....and this quote from a post he may have deleted?

'I should be more angry but mostly I'm just numb. If his plan was to scam everyone for so long I don't really understand why I had to be a part of it at all, or why did I need to spend so much energy on it for 6 months +
I assume he thought he could do it but ultimately it got hard and now instead of putting work in on the hard stuff he is just diddling with maps over and over and pretending the community doesn't exist.'

So as expected dont expect much from Josh and he is in a hole and doesn't know a way out...
Joy joy happy joy
He comes back later - as I posted this on the update not the main thread to say
I do not condone Englishman's tone (Joe you need to pull Josh's head out of his own ass) but... He is right.
The only way for this to get worse would be for Josh to make an update claiming he talked to the sun.
Edit: Also, that actually happened to another Kickstarter developer. (linke for the interested - http://kickfailure.com/2013/04/17/the-sad-story-of-katalyka)
So there you have it folks

[nenjin]

To me there's a big gap between fraud and failure. I see the game as the latter, not the former.

[ZeroGravitas]

To me there's a big gap between fraud and failure. I see the game as the latter, not the former.

No, it's a very small gap. Did you make material representations that backers relied on in backing the project? If no, then it's not fraud. If yes, then it's fraud.

[ThtblovesDF]

There is a lot of very doubtful stuff going on.

I.e. I invested since they already had a early build they showed off in the first videos and I wanted to play that. 3 years later, they now have LESS then that.

[ChairmanPoo]

My point exactly. I think Cthulhu is right on target. They had a very early stage prototype, and it never went beyond that.

I really don't buy it. Though since you have been the one always being a downer, skipping from one negative to the next. I am really not surprised. 

Nope. Cthulhu was a real believer from minute one. In fact, he used to defend the game until shortly ago. It's just that the way things have gone it's a bit too hard to swallow the story anymore. For the look of things, even former developers doubt it.

Frankly those who act  like you shpuld be blamed for the guy's breakdown and the split; you shouldn't yell fire in a theater, yell 'sell!' on a stock trading floor and you shouldn't tell cynical gamers that an indie producer is a fraud before anything happens...which was done repeatedly, pretty much since the beginning.
Cynicism is one thing, frankly the whole thing was sabotaged.

Ehh, no. This Josh guy is responsible for his own acts. Period. This was not sabotaged. This was bad planning and misleading advertising. At best, and being generous.

[nenjin]

No, it's a very small gap. Did you make material representations that backers relied on in backing the project? If no, then it's not fraud. If yes, then it's fraud.

I didn't take the Kickstarter presentation as "the game". Why would I? There was little UI to speak of and the entire map got redone. The game vastly balooned due to stretch goals. IIRC, the infamous "basically done" line is the only one we have that everyone points to as a demonstration of fraud. I think the guy could be guilty of a lot of stuff (hubris, overestimating his own skills, piss poor community management) but fraud is not any of those things. Saying from the outset he intended to defraud backers is beyond the pale. Legitimately trying to make a game funded by Kickstarter and failing happens all the time.

My guess is the game managed to pass turns early on, before much of anything was hooked up. And as he started building systems it became totally unstable. I still don't consider that fraud.

[ZeroGravitas]

No, it's a very small gap. Did you make material representations that backers relied on in backing the project? If no, then it's not fraud. If yes, then it's fraud.

I didn't take the Kickstarter presentation as "the game". Why would I? There was little UI to speak of and the entire map got redone. The game vastly balooned due to stretch goals. IIRC, the infamous "basically done" line is the only one we have that everyone points to as a demonstration of fraud. I think the guy could be guilty of a lot of stuff (hubris, overestimating his own skills, piss poor community management) but fraud is not any of those things. Saying from the outset he intended to defraud backers is beyond the pale. Legitimately trying to make a game funded by Kickstarter and failing happens all the time.

My guess is the game managed to pass turns early on, before much of anything was hooked up. And as he started building systems it became totally unstable. I still don't consider that fraud.

Again, from the Kickstarter page:

By waiting until we have a fully functional and working game engine we feel like we successfully mitigated the most common risks that many games on Kickstarter face. We have a working game that we will complete and deliver in a timely fashion.

They've never shown that they had a working game at any point, let alone in September 2014.

[nenjin]

I took the videos released in....2015 was it? To be showing something. Are you saying that's also just cobble together footage done in illustrator?

[ChairmanPoo]

I don't think those videos were showing very much. At least not enough to say it was functional

[E. Albright]

I.e. I invested since they already had a early build they showed off in the first videos and I wanted to play that. 3 years later, they now have LESS then that.

This actually isn't surprising. It was, I'd assume, a partial engine missing key functionality that could do some stuff. If they refactored or substantially modified the system after that, the early game - which again, was presumably not a complete game - would not include any of the subsequent work. If they had poor version management - and I'm not exactly impressed with their software engineering/project management chops from what I've (peripherally) read - they may not even have the early version any more.

This entirely sets aside a whole raft of potential psychological issues involving an inability to "throw away" three years of work and face failure (even if it might scale complete failure back to partial failure). Discussing what would be the most rational course of action doesn't really seem relevant here.

From an uninvolved outsider's standpoint with knowledge of SE and some exposure to situations possibly involving similar psychological issues, this looks like excessive ambition, unrealistic assessment, poor planning, poor execution, and a mental breakdown directly following from those. That's a lot of speculation on my part. But it's certainly no more speculation than explicit accusations of fraud.