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Beast's Fury is dead, and I'm an idiot.
10 years ago
Yesterday, Ryhan Stevens, project lead of the indie fighting game Beast's Fury, announced via the game's FA page that production on the game was shutting down permanently. And then shut down the FA page a couple of hours later. In the previous weeks, it had become obvious that the end was near, but I really should have paid attention to the warning signs way before that.
I was aware that a successful crowdfunding campaign does not guarantee that an indie game project will be completed--far from it. I was aware that much more high-profile projects, like Yogventures, had failed. And I knew that in its search to find a publisher, Beast's Fury had an extra hurdle to get over, which is the stigma that all things furry bear in the eyes of mainstream observers.
Perhaps the biggest red flag I ignored was the fact that it took *several* Kickstarter and Indiegogo campaigns just to get a demo out. Each time we were essentially told, "We're sorry, we made some mistakes with the money you gave us before, but we'll do better this time!" I forgot one of the basic principles of life: If someone is bad at managing money, DON'T GIVE THEM MORE MONEY. And yet I did. Over the course of the various crowdfunding campaigns, I donated an embarrassingly large amount of money to the project. I won't disclose that total here, but needless to say I am never, ever going to give any Kickstarter that much money again, no matter how much I like the idea.
Why did I give so much? I was yearning for a good furry fighting game, the character designs looked pretty cool, and I trusted the artists, animators, musicians, and voice actors who were part of the team. And I still trust *them*--they did a lot of good work while the project was still active. It turns out Ryhan himself was the problem. Here was a guy who had zero experience in the game development industry, with no proof that he could set a realistic budget or use resources efficiently. And he couldn't. Perhaps the most egregious example of this was the game's cinematic finishing moves. Don: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ixBR5GTWr-8 Vincent: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eDoI1RpoA2k Yeah, they look great. But they required a *massive* amount of animation, and given how challenging they would have been to pull off, they would only have been seen in a tiny fraction of actual matches. Not only that, they also required each possible victim to be individually animated into each finishing move, which would have created exponentially more work if they had gotten to the point where more characters would have been added to the game.
People did express their concerns about the direction the game (and its funding model) was taking, but Ryhan was so thin-skinned that he took any criticism as a personal insult. He cited the criticism as one of the reasons he was shutting down the game. He had a short temper too--on at least a couple of occasions, I personally witnessed him in stream chats getting into arguments with fans of the game over pretty minor things. Ryhan's abrasive personality caused significant PR problems for Beast's Fury, not the least of which was his feud with the Skullgirls team and fan base. He even once admitted in a stream that he isn't terribly fond of the furry community. Publicly stating that you don't like the core of your potential fan base? Not smart.
I'm normally fairly responsible with my money. So in retrospect, it's hard to believe how financially reckless I got with Beast's Fury. It's depressing to think about how much money I sunk into this project. And what do I have to show for it? A bare-bones demo, a poster I'm now ashamed to put up, and a couple of T-shirts I'm ashamed to wear. You know what else is depressing? All the beautiful animation that LordDirk and Juco put so many hours into was all for naught, not to mention all the contributions made by people like SorcererLance, ChaosDraco, and Fox Amoore.
On the bright side though, I've been enjoying the heck out of an indie game that *did* make it to completion (and I'm pretty sure didn't rely on crowdfunding), and that's Action Henk. http://store.steampowered.com/app/285820 If you can imagine the original Sonic the Hedgehog as a racing game, that's kind of what it's like. But what really sold the game for me is the nostalgia factor. Henk is a living action figure who runs on tracks built from toys in the kind of rooms I wish I'd had when I was a kid. Brings back the childhood feels! And trying to shave milliseconds off your time to get the best medal on every track is pretty addictive. It gets the LQCTim seal of approval!
I was aware that a successful crowdfunding campaign does not guarantee that an indie game project will be completed--far from it. I was aware that much more high-profile projects, like Yogventures, had failed. And I knew that in its search to find a publisher, Beast's Fury had an extra hurdle to get over, which is the stigma that all things furry bear in the eyes of mainstream observers.
Perhaps the biggest red flag I ignored was the fact that it took *several* Kickstarter and Indiegogo campaigns just to get a demo out. Each time we were essentially told, "We're sorry, we made some mistakes with the money you gave us before, but we'll do better this time!" I forgot one of the basic principles of life: If someone is bad at managing money, DON'T GIVE THEM MORE MONEY. And yet I did. Over the course of the various crowdfunding campaigns, I donated an embarrassingly large amount of money to the project. I won't disclose that total here, but needless to say I am never, ever going to give any Kickstarter that much money again, no matter how much I like the idea.
Why did I give so much? I was yearning for a good furry fighting game, the character designs looked pretty cool, and I trusted the artists, animators, musicians, and voice actors who were part of the team. And I still trust *them*--they did a lot of good work while the project was still active. It turns out Ryhan himself was the problem. Here was a guy who had zero experience in the game development industry, with no proof that he could set a realistic budget or use resources efficiently. And he couldn't. Perhaps the most egregious example of this was the game's cinematic finishing moves. Don: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ixBR5GTWr-8 Vincent: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eDoI1RpoA2k Yeah, they look great. But they required a *massive* amount of animation, and given how challenging they would have been to pull off, they would only have been seen in a tiny fraction of actual matches. Not only that, they also required each possible victim to be individually animated into each finishing move, which would have created exponentially more work if they had gotten to the point where more characters would have been added to the game.
People did express their concerns about the direction the game (and its funding model) was taking, but Ryhan was so thin-skinned that he took any criticism as a personal insult. He cited the criticism as one of the reasons he was shutting down the game. He had a short temper too--on at least a couple of occasions, I personally witnessed him in stream chats getting into arguments with fans of the game over pretty minor things. Ryhan's abrasive personality caused significant PR problems for Beast's Fury, not the least of which was his feud with the Skullgirls team and fan base. He even once admitted in a stream that he isn't terribly fond of the furry community. Publicly stating that you don't like the core of your potential fan base? Not smart.
I'm normally fairly responsible with my money. So in retrospect, it's hard to believe how financially reckless I got with Beast's Fury. It's depressing to think about how much money I sunk into this project. And what do I have to show for it? A bare-bones demo, a poster I'm now ashamed to put up, and a couple of T-shirts I'm ashamed to wear. You know what else is depressing? All the beautiful animation that LordDirk and Juco put so many hours into was all for naught, not to mention all the contributions made by people like SorcererLance, ChaosDraco, and Fox Amoore.
On the bright side though, I've been enjoying the heck out of an indie game that *did* make it to completion (and I'm pretty sure didn't rely on crowdfunding), and that's Action Henk. http://store.steampowered.com/app/285820 If you can imagine the original Sonic the Hedgehog as a racing game, that's kind of what it's like. But what really sold the game for me is the nostalgia factor. Henk is a living action figure who runs on tracks built from toys in the kind of rooms I wish I'd had when I was a kid. Brings back the childhood feels! And trying to shave milliseconds off your time to get the best medal on every track is pretty addictive. It gets the LQCTim seal of approval!
He may find himself with legal action as well.