Don't know if a post has been made about this yet but someone made a long post trying to detail all the bs surrounding hiveswap, its release, and then it's failure to release anything afterwards, and still has plans on updating it over time.
Figured it either goes here or Zig Forums since it revolves around/is based on the comic homestuck and andrew hussie.
Homestuck/Hiveswap Fiasco
Jace Myers
Cameron Wilson
>summary
>In 2012, Andrew Hussie launched a Kickstarter for an adventure game based on his hit webcomic Homestuck. (x) The Kickstarter campaign was a massive success and raised $2.5 million. According to the original plans, the game (called Hiveswap) would be designed by What Pumpkin (Andrew’s company) and developed by a third party development studio (The Odd Gentlemen) and launched in 2014. (x) After repeated delays, What Pumpkin ditched The Odd Gentlemen (possibly due to some shady business (x)) and moved to in-house development, setting up an office (“What Pumpkin NYC”) in New York City. (x) What Pumpkin NYC continued development during most of 2015, until they were dissolved in favour of a completely different team doing exclusively remote work. The new team worked on a version of the game with a completely different art style, meaning years of work had to be discarded. (x)
>Hiveswap was released in 2017, committing egregious art theft. (x) Andrew Hussie sold Homestuck to Viz Media, a publishing giant with the resources to finish Hiveswap. (x) Viz Media sabotaged Hiveswap instead. (x) What Pumpkin continued to work on other for-profit games — instead of Hiveswap — that didn’t go towards fulfilling Kickstarter obligations. (x) Some of the new games cannibalized work that was meant for Act 2. (x) In 2019, What Pumpkin released a brief trailer for Act 2. (x) What Pumpkin is currently siphoning money away from a Patreon account for an indie comic to spend on Hiveswap development. (x)
>At present, What Pumpkin continues to work on for-profit projects while neglecting their obligations on Hiveswap. Despite not being bankrupt and having major investment, they refuse to produce Hiveswap OR give refunds to backers. It is hideous behaviour.
Christopher Torres
I WILL HUNT DOWN THE DEFILERS!!!!
Connor Barnes
Homestuck is like graduating from culinary school and in your absence deep in your studies people have decided the fast food culinary philosophy is the thing to do instead of laughing at it. It resembles a man showing up at a job interview and just standing still through the whole thing except for a couple statements because he's done calculations that he's sure to get the job, for some reason. It is like teenagers trying to run a whole state of a country and due to the infancy of the country (The Internet) they just let them have it to mess everything that they do up without experience or knowledge.
Nicholas Young
what's the tl;dr on why this is relevant now? hasn't this been a shitshow for years?
Owen Cooper
So, in short, it's disappointing trash. Yeah, we all knew that already.
James Gutierrez
>we
Kayden Sullivan
it keeps hapening
Parker Sullivan
His only good plan for something decent.
Angel Lopez
Wow Hussie is a fucking asshole.
Jacob Hall
>After repeated delays, What Pumpkin ditched The Odd Gentlemen (possibly due to some shady business (x))
I will complete this information: Odd gentlemen is 100% at fault (unles you consider it's Hussie's fault to have picked the wrong company to begin with). When they were starting to develop Hussie's game, they got an opportunity to develop for a popular license (the King quest series) and just give up on Hussie's game while keeping the money Hussie had already provided to them for development. After negotiation, and to prevent long law-suits, they settled for an agreement that only made them give back a fraction of the money already provided.
Hussie hadn't provided them the 2.5 millions upfront, and got some of what he had provided to the dev studio back, but he still lost for nothing a chunk of his funds while being back at square zero.
Jonathan Reyes
I dropped it around act 5, I don't like the troll characters. I wish hussie would do a new project sometime, problem slueth and early homestuck were great, I also liked the clown comic that he never finished.
Isaac Thompson
>The new team worked on a version of the game with a completely different art style, meaning years of work had to be discarded. (x)
I think you are incorrect. It's not so much a "different art style", it's that they decided to switch the game from 3D to 2D.
Cameron Roberts
I just wanted the beta kids to be happy.
Justin Cruz
The problem with trolls was that there were too many of them. Half of them didn't even matter in the long run so they were basically just noise.
Aaron Bell
Nothing mattered in Act 6.
Ryder Ramirez
I think it's just a combination of more people being tired of Hussie and HS2 and the author finally compiling it in a way that's relatively easy to read ar tour own time.
Jacob Fisher
Thats a whole diffrent issue and hs has a lot of those
Ryan Price
Fuck this perpetual cycle of bullshit
Christopher Perry
Roxy!
Colton Walker
Gabriel Phillips
Ryan Ortiz
9/16 is my father's birthday, so every day that Homestuck (2009-2016) continues to fail is an insult to my father and my house.
Joseph Howard
Evan Ramirez
James Morgan
>At any rate, 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.
Juan Thomas
Look at her. So innocent. So naive. Unaware of the horrors yet to come.
Alexander Wright
i could probably muscle out better & cheaper content for the infamous Homestuck franchise in a couple of weekends, so long as i had a coffee budget to get me through long days.
Jackson Gray
>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 emails8 linked by /r/homestuck moderator Drew (no relation to Andrew) in which 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 energy7…
>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
Xavier Fisher
Old news. I bet the renewed interest on this is issue is because of recent popularity of youtube videos on this subject making this is a low hanging fruit in terms of content. We known it was shit for years and followed the story.
It's messy for sure and some details get overlooked. Such as how Hussie's dad died in the middle of this shitfest.
Alexander Adams
>Hiveswap was released in 2017, committing egregious art theft.
What's this about?
Gavin Reyes
I’m just grateful I was too lazy to get into Homestuck back when I was popular so I don’t have to understand what this crushing disappointment feels like.
Carter Anderson
>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. 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
Jace Peterson
Sounds like a convenient excuse from a man who'd rather pretend the past never happened, I guess. It's not as if anyone wants access to the MSPA Forum archives because of Hussie himself, after all. It's weird to me how Hussie has this reoccurent trend of claiming ownership over any and all aspects of fan culture, including that he himself did not personally have any real involvement in developing.
Gabriel Torres
>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:
>i'm not captioning this, it's a lot
>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 most of that work still exists in 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.