s-purple:
DISCLAIMER: (I apologize for there being any squashed text or pictures due to formatting)
I promised everyone a more detailed description of what was going on (http://s-purple.tumblr.com/post/147403501461/im-currently-putting-together-a-point-by-point) and this is it. I’m sorry it took so long to get this out, but I wanted to be absolutely sure that I was giving as unbiased an account as possible. I didn’t want my frustration and personal feelings for HBomb to interfere or color my version of events, and so this has gone through a few revisions. I also wanted to make sure I could give as much evidence as I could when I rebutted HBomb’s claims. Finally, it’s a lot of information, and I wanted to make it as comprehensible as possible. Thank you for your patience in waiting for my side of the story.
And by now you have no doubt read his original accusatory blog post(http://breedingseasongame.blogspot.com/2016/07/breeding-season-is-over-s-purple-has.html)
Something that must be pointed out. This is written as if it represents the entire Breeding Season Team. As if it includes all 4 members besides, myself, who were involved in it’s development. It does not. This is purely HBomb writing it, as he is the last person remaining on the team, and two of the other members were either already in the process of leaving the game, or had left it already.
I also feel that it’s important that I refute his various claims, which run the range from outright lies to deliberate deceptions misleading others to poison them against me. I will address his statements each in turn as they become relevant. I’ve broken this document down into three basic sections. What went wrong with the project, why I decided to start another project, and the matter of the money I supposedly stole.
This whole affair started long before the month I began to work on Cloud Meadow, and team members were already planning on leaving. HBomb claimed that the team members left because of my decision, but as many of you know, our lead animator was already on her way out. Further, the other members of the project were already planning to walk at the same time I originally intended to leave, which would have been just before the end of this month. My actions had little to no bearing on their decision to walk. As will become evident as you read this, HBomb is fully responsible for the team disintegrating.
I feel it’s important you guys see the exact resignation message Vanilly sent to HBomb by skype.
http://vanillycheesecake.tumblr.com/post/147388687000/regarding-breeding-season
I will leave it at that. She has stated that she doesn’t want to be involved in this any longer, and I have no intention of dragging her in any further than this. You can make of her post what you will, but her resignation was part of the catalyst that lead me to making Cloud Meadow.
While HBomb claims that the worst decision he did was sign me up for this project he fails to mention that before I came onboard, Breeding Season was dead in the water. The project was barely active for longer than two months with minimal updates on its status, causing some of the earlier donors to even ask for refunds. I was brought into the project to revitalize it with better art and actual consistent updates. The contract I’ve signed was to make me a joint partner in this venture, however I later realized that this was not how I would actually be treated, as I describe later. I am informed by a legal expert that what is beyond question is that this contract merely reinforces applicable copyright law by recognizing my ownership of my art assets as being retained by its creator and artist.
Below I’ve posted the agreement for you to read.
(I have blocked any identifying information such as passport numbers, addresses, and HBomb’s last name, as well as everything but the first letters of both our signatures so that none of this can be used against either of us)
As my ex-partner HBomb has claimed, I do have limited knowledge of running big projects therefore some of the decisions I’ve made were obviously wrong, however, the majority of control was still on HBomb’s shoulders as he was the one controlling all the income since the beginning of this project, and therefore the final decision was always his. The very responsibility of the project lead comes with also being its manager. Because of HBomb’s minimal and consistently late work in terms of coding, with Fleet, our contracted (not employed) secondary coder, forced to work on majority of large features and bug fixes, the least he could have done is fulfill his role as a project manager himself, which he didn’t.
Even though I was made a partner in this project I was given no respect, and most of the time the majority of important questions I’ve sent to HBomb were left unanswered or ignored. All while he was inflating his own self importance (pictured below) by constantly claiming that he would take responsibility as the project lead and begin supervising the project properly. A major reason for the popular development of the game I believe is directly attributed to the months of HBomb’s disappearances, throwing the team onto its own resources, forced to do our own creative development and direction. I’ve always measured carefully how much work can be done per month, talking and negotiating with team members on their availability. HBomb himself refused to fully employ what animators we did have, a state of affairs I was not informed of until Vanilly announced her resignation.
Promises like the last one were incredibly common, but he always had a new excuse ready for why he couldn’t act on them this time. For the past half year the majority of updates to the game were not actually major game changes but mere bug fixes, and these routine changes were not even done by HBomb, but by our hired coder, Fleet. The other part of the updates were always animations created by the art department, which the majority of our stream viewers could see live in development for months, 8+ hours a day, 5 days a week. HBomb repeatedly violated the trust of the patrons by giving fake deadlines due to the fact that he was incapable of actually coding things on time, an issue resulting from the aforementioned constant absence from the project and taking weeks long breaks every beginning of the month, sometimes even two or three week plus long breaks. The work done by HBomb was basically taking half a month long vacation, appearing at the end of the month and coding for a minimal amount of time after compiling all the content and bug fixes developed by other people, this is why the game’s actual story and mechanics progress was almost nonexistent. Below I’ve put in the capstone the longest and most egregious period of time during which HBomb was absent. The skype conversation you’re about to read is the excuse he gave on the 25th of June, 2016, for an extended absence beginning in August 2015 (Almost an entire year). During this period he only came in for a few days each month near the end of each month, only to update us on the situation described below. update the game with what the rest of us had made, contributing minimally of his own work, and collect the patreon money for himself. Further, for these 11 months, he had to be forced to pay our contractual obligations, and even when he did so it was almost always late.
HBomb’s lack of productivity and emotional instability is no myth to others who often would visit my streams asking what and when is coding being done or if anything is being written for quests that have been laid out for months, only to see his 6 hours streams of video games or movies and then calling it a day. The entire team had to do enormous amounts of PR to cover for his absence and lack of progress and even covering this up for him to the fans. Below is an example of his usual behavior during his ‘work’ streams.
In addition HBomb has decided to ignore the terms of our contract, and instead threaten to ignore the legal obligations he has agreed to, and to hold over me the fact that he holds all the funds he needs and that it would be financially unsound for me to actually take legal action against him. He then stated that I has no choice but to comply to his demands and sell him the artwork. Realizing that his money cannot bend the law to his will, he decided to threaten and dox me via his latest call out post. As I have said previously, my family has been put in fear due to angry fans of Breeding Season taking this as a license to pursue my real life location and exact whatever vengeance they feel necessary. While I find it unlikely that any of them will be capable of acting on his hate speech, the stress it has put on my family is real.
I’ll be honest, I never expected him to go this far, and to try to have people make my life hell IRL by releasing my contact information.
I’m not going to dwell long on this point, except to state that whatever moral highground HBomb might have been able to claim is ceded by the fact he has gone out of his way to break our contract and attempt this underhanded method of attacking me.
Instead of taking peaceful solution, complying with the agreement we signed at the very beginning and being professional about this (hiring new artists, animators and general staff members), public slander was HBomb’s solution, and while I was unsurprised that he did not take the sensible route, I am shocked at the degree he has decided to lash out against me when he had more than enough resources to rebuild and prove me wrong with his own work instead.
In the end, it was HBomb’s unprofessionalism, absence and lack of productivity that drove away the team members, and ran this project to its current state. Despite my best efforts to salvage it with constant PR and multi-hour week long streams, I was unable to continue working on a project where where I felt the money was wrongfully being wasted.
I want to say I never intended for it to play out this way. When the rest of the team decided it was time to bail on the project, that was when I decided to begin work on Cloud Meadow, and withdraw my contributions from Breeding Season when I did. I always knew that HBomb would take it badly, and if I had announced even earlier that I intended to leave, he would have done everything in his power to sabotage me, and I’d have had even less evidence of my intentions than I do now. The original plan was to announce the game, give him my resignation, and confirm that I wasn’t taking my payment for the months I used to set up Cloud Meadow, but HBomb somehow found out earlier, and went ballistic on me, leading up to the current state of events. In an ideal world, you guys would have heard about my releasing Cloud Meadow, my resignation from the Breeding Season team (likely at exactly the same time as the other members who intended to leave), and my reasons for both actions, all at the same time.
The reason I left Breeding Season team is that all the extra hours and additional work streams could not fix what was fundamentally wrong with the project. The slow programming, lack of supervision from HBomb, as well as his constant absence, pretty much doomed this project. I knew something had to give to make good on the spirit of promises made. I knew I couldn’t change HBomb as a human being to make him actually do his works hours. I have no rights to Breeding Season’s name or programming elements, only its art, my only realistic and legal option, the only choice available to me, was to cut him out of the equation and correct the situation, by leaving. I knew I could not leave the art in his hands, or the project would have simply died a slow death, taking a good chunk of our patron’s money with it. HBomb has all the programming, all the animation skeletons, and more than enough money to establish a professional development studio, and including the hiring of an entire team of artists full time, if he so chose, once I left. That he has not done so should be full evidence that my pulling the art was the right decision, as I highly doubt my leaving it under his supervision would have allowed development to continue at any pace above a stand still. Further, instead of putting patron money into development, HBomb chose to do nothing toward development, quite the contrary. HBomb chose to publicly destroy the project, and leads one to question just what use will be made of the remaining development funds under his unfettered control? One can only surmise that that it will probably involve vacation travel, in keeping with HBomb’s serial disappearances since August, 2015.
Yes that is true, I’ve been absent from meetings and streams because for the past month I’ve dedicated myself to working 7 days a week on the new project titled Cloud Meadow. This was because I knew the team was losing cohesion and falling apart, and I predicted a severe loss of patrons to the point where we would no longer be able to afford secondary help, which had become essential to further development. My initial plan before the leak of the patreon page was to make good on the promises to the patrons that had sunk their time and money into Breeding Season by developing this new project, with a more competent management at its helm, and a way more streamlined development process. If I still had access to the list of present and past supporters I would have offered free download and the unlock codes to all those involved, regardless of their future patronage.
I was not under a noncompete clause, I continued to work on Breeding Season, producing work for it and working on it for as long as I was able, and, as usual, I performed far more work on Breeding Season than HBomb ever undertook on the project at any time. My work at this stage d was an attempt to deliver on the spirit of our promises to our patrons, to produce a game that was basically a pornographic harvest moon, where you could bang hot monster girls and boys and breed them. Unlike HBomb, who has seemingly destroyed the project out of spite, or maybe just the sitting on the money, I was rather trying to salvage what was actually capable of being salvaged.
The reason I did not face HBomb directly regarding change of leadership was that at the end of the day he held the legal license, the name and the property that is Breeding Season. The name itself was already tainted with rumors of lazy progress and non-existent updates, I intended to leave the team peacefully and start a project that could deliver what Breeding Season couldn’t. But the only person I ‘tricked’, the only person I went behind the back of was HBomb. Vanilly and Subtank knew what was going on, and only Fleet was left out of the loop, though Vanilly had already left, Subtank was already planning on leaving the project, as I have previously said.
Further, I never took the money for my last month’s work, nor do I intend to seek payment.
That said, before the blowout, I did ask him to pay me what was owed, and perhaps that is what he meant when he claimed I stole anything. Given that I was preparing to pull out, and I wasn’t expecting things to get as heated as they were, I used a poor choice of words. All I’m concerned about is that my other coworkers get the share they’re owed from last month’s earnings. The $13,800 is unrelated to the patreon funds in any direct manner, and I go into more detail about them later.
I could have sold those assets to HBomb, but if I had left the art assets in, all my experience with HBomb up to this point leads me to believe that he would have simply sat on the art assets, continued to collect money from the Patreon, and not made any actual updates to the game. People would have been throwing money down a hole, and I refused to allow my work to enable that. All of HBomb’s actions in the months leading up to this decision only convinced me that leaving these assets in his hands would have merely resulted in stagnation, with his sitting on the project until he had lost all followers, and the project decline beneath the patreon quality standards, and be shut down into obscurity. It should be noted that despite the 3 year development cycle of Breeding Season, the virtually all of the developmental progress was achieved in the art and animation department, while the coding and plot development, which was Hbombs obligation, remained barebones and barren.
There are going to be those who say that the right thing for me to do would have been to release the assets to HBomb so that he could have continued the work. I’ve already explained why I felt that wasn’t the right decision. Others still will claim that I should at least have released the latest version of the game. That would have been impossible because only the art assets and designs, but not the animations, belonged to me, everything else was HBomb’s. It would have been just as wrong for me to release his game in his place as it was for him to enable others to steal my art from the old development dropbox. Most importantly however, I didn’t need to. The latest version of the game was already out, it was already available for anyone to download. We never stopped our patrons from redistributing Breeding Season, which is why you’ll find a bunch of the older versions of it on e621.net. It was nice when they didn’t do so, waiting until the next version release, but it was by no means compulsory on their part. Given that the development dropbox has already been hacked and uploaded to various sources, you now have even fewer barriers to accessing the latest version of the game.
HBomb claims that I will face real life consequences when he himself has showcased that he does not know how to act professionally, and rather than maintain the inner privacy of the team’s development cycle, he strikes out publicly and destructively whenever something goes awry and not in his favor. This last ugly rant by HBomb is merely the tombstone of his intentional liquidation of this project, which was long in the making and entirely due to his actions, and more importantly, his inactions. As I mentioned, all the team members aside from him were eagerly pulling their weight, working hard day by day to make their deadlines; and the team was fed up like myself and either leaving or preparing to leave at the same time as me.
HBomb also goes on to mention that I went behind his back and stole an entire months of work, and then half of the company savings. The aforementioned funds are actually were not company funds (as had been implied), but a jointly owned account where both of us had been saving up to purchase an actual studio eventually. It should also be noted, that since I had been locked out of the savings account before I could withdraw my own cut of last month’s income, I’m not sure where he gets the idea that I walked away with anything. If money has vanished from those accounts, it is not I who took it. The other day however, I was paid $9000, in addition to outstanding debts mentioned elsewhere in this document. I don’t intend to keep those funds, and I am contacting Patreon to see if it is at all possible to return those funds to the patrons of Breeding Season. Failing that as a possibility, then I intend to give them to our secondary coder Fleet, as both Vanilly and Subtank have turned down payment.
My current savings are not even half of that his quoted sum of $190,000, and was even less so at the time HBomb wrote the above, as a result of HBomb paying his personal taxes with my portion of the patreon funds from the shared bank account, as I mentioned previously.
The Studio Savings account is a recent thing, created a few months ago, and before that, all financial transactions were purely within HBomb’s control. The Studio Savings was initially my idea created in order as an accounting control mechanism. Then a few months ago HBomb extracted $32,000 from the studio’s bank account to pay for his personal taxes, without informing me. Due to my tax advisor constantly checking up on the account I was able to immediately act and call him out, forcing him to pay me back the money he took from me in a series of instalments over several months. In complete fairness Hbomb repaid me the remainder of that debt, $13,800, only the other day (after the massive callout blog post that triggered this response), in addition to giving me the $9000 I mentioned earlier.
Point is, I was unable to trust a man who withdrew nearly all the existing funds at the time to be used for his own expenses and then feigned ignorance as an excuse.
Finally, I want to address some things HBomb may try to dredge up from the past to accuse me of being the one in the wrong here. I feel it is better to clear the air immediately of these issues, so please bear with me. I also want to address some claims being made both in posts at me and in various forums about me.
People are saying I left the whole team in a lurch. This is nonsense. The whole team at the point of me leaving was literally just HBomb. Almost everyone else was either in the process of quietly leaving, had already left, or was planning to leave at the point in time I was going to announce my resignation and Cloud Meadow: at the end of July.
Others are claiming that I was an ideas guy that kept pushing out new content before it could be programmed, and that I expanded the scope over and over again. I’m not entirely sure how anyone got the idea that I was actually setting design goals for the mechanical portions of this game, but that wasn’t my job. That was HBomb’s responsibility. I just made the art and character designs. I worked on some world building. Anything else was a team decision by everyone except HBomb, operating without his input due to his absences. Also, as I have been told repeatedly by friends, and as has been pointed out by programmers looking into the pirated files, even if I had been pushing out more things than could have been done, the programming of the files of the game do not show this. There are not unimplemented systems, or even placeholders for them. The game is in a state that could have been programmed in under a month or two by any dedicated programmer. Animations, graphics, all of these things were created using other systems and placed in directly. They did not require any major, and only a few minor cases of, reprogramming of the game’s systems.
In his posts, HBomb calls me greedy, but my so called greed stems from only concern for the team’s shaky and ever changing budget. Because of the way patreon is designed and because of the inconsistency of pledges each month, I had to take the safe choice with each purchase, contract, and hire we’ve made. Yes, I may have been hysterical when money was spent improperly and demanded immediate termination of contracts in order to cut losses; but that was only because at the time the only one actually overseeing our budget was me, not HBomb who was absent for the duration of the process.
Yes there were times when I chose to act upon an option that was directly against HBomb’s will, such as the fluffdragon case, but that is only because he himself had not possessed the cognition to understand how adding even more monsters to the roster would only harm us in the long run. I’ve refunded money out of my own pocket, fully knowing the repercussions it would cause, and taking the blame upon myself, knowing it was the right choice.
Some people are saying that this was intentionally planned right from the start. Nothing could be more absurd. Patreon projects are a massive risk, it is impossible to guess how successful any singular one will be. If I had actually planned this from the start, somehow foreseeing Breeding Season’s explosive success on a market known for its volatility and risk, then why would I even bother to make my own project to try and deliver on the promises made? (And why aren’t I working in the stock trade?) If even that was somehow part of the plan, why isn’t Cloud Meadow in a far more complete state? Surely with all of the money I’ve been making I could have hired an entire development team on the side months ago, and pushed out a fully functional prototype immediately, instead of having to scramble and pull together what I have as quickly as possible to prove my sincerity?
At the end of the day, I will not say I was not at least in part responsible for this affair. I enabled HBomb’s problems, refused to address them, or taken earlier leave of the project so it wouldn’t ever have come to this point. The contract gave me far more power over the game than I allowed myself to use until this point, because I thought the situation was salvageable. Two years, going on three, the exiting from the project of my fellow team members, and the self-serving behavior of HBomb all lead to my decision to quit, and prevent him from further capitalizing on my assets while giving no work, no effort, no working code, no story direction, nor any management to Breeding Season. Cloud Meadow is not Breeding Season, but it will hopefully be the spiritual successor to what could have been if bad management and incredible laziness had not interfered with production at the highest levels of our development team.