got it for free as a kickstarter backer, but i recall being very angry with the hiveswap team and hussie around the time it was released. for a few different reasons. so i decided not to play

despite loving act 1 with all my heart

in hindsight it's really fucking funny how much i blorbofied mallek adalov at the time, and then proceeded to not even play the chapter he debuted in lmfao

friendsim was way better for that anyway so it's whatever

anyways i do not think act 2 was as good as act 1 and i really felt the difference with the head writer of act 1 not being on board anymore

and i have extremely low confidence that we will ever see an act 3, which i am all kinds of conflicted about

so why did i change my mind?? man i dunno. i guess it just still felt like an unresolved thing, in my brain. i wanted some kinda closure on it maybe??

it felt weird having never found out how all that actually panned out

considering how excited i had been about it, once upon a time

if act 2 was bad then i could just forget about all this and stop caring about hiveswap. and if it were good, then... well. i dunno. i assumed i'd work out how i felt about it when the time came

unfortunately act 2 was not bad and i'm still working out how i feel about it

it was... scuffed, a bit buggy, some of the early dialogue felt a bit stilted, i'm a bit annoyed about how they kinda damsel-fied joey in a couple scenes, they massively cut down on all the incidental flavor text i found so charming in act 1 (in exchange for volumes upon volumes of dialogue, which act 1 almost entirely lacked)

but it does a lot of things right too

i didn't hate it. i want to know what happens next and i'm a little sad that that's probably not going to happen

i was one of the rubes who backed the kickstarter back in 20 fuckin 12, so all the money i was ever gonna spend on hiveswap was already spent well before i started hating andrew hussie

if act 3 ever happens then odds are good i will also be receiving that for free

withholding my business is not a lever that is available to me to pull

not playing act 2 back in 2020 was the closest to a moral stance i was able to take, and it was never going to accomplish much more than make me feel a little better about myself

and it's debatable if i even achieved that much

i didn't mean for this plurk to be so navel-gazey, i'm just in a weird frame of mind right now i guess!!

asking mostly for clarification, why did the Fandom generally turn their backs on Andrew Hussie? what I remember is that he took the Kickstarter money and didn't use it for the things he said he would.

and if answering this question opens up a can of worms, I apologize in advance and you can completely ignore the question.

my recollection of the particulars is a little fuzzy, and my impression may not accurately reflect the overall fandom's, but.

misappropriation of the kickstarter funds, possibly trumped-up accusations toward The Odd Gentlemen to shift the blame for said misappropriation,

and, the thing that's my main bone to pick, severe mistreatment of the What Pumpkin new york team who were developing the originally-planned 3D version of Hiveswap, firing them all without warning or explanation and scrapping all their work, but then surreptitiously using some of their scrapped designs and assets in the final game without credit

i found out later that an old friend of mine was on that team and had some severe trauma about it, so finding that out was the turning point for me

most of this was happening way behind the scenes so most people did not know anything about it until years after the fact

and i seem to recall there being a thing with the initial release of act 2 where... the game contained no credits?? or something like that??? and given the above, that was what tipped me all the way over into not wanting to play it

i went looking for my old tweets about it but they're so far back in the timeline twitter won't even load them anymore. so i can't dig up the specific details unfortunately

i remember them giving some perfunctory reason, maybe about devs being targets for harassment or something like that?? which, no, that's no excuse for not crediting people who made your game. being in the credits is crucial in the game dev industry, by all accounts, so to me it just felt like devs and artists being shortchanged again

fwiw the credits are in the game now, so if that was the issue, then they did resolve it

well i guess i remembered more or less correctly

i remember being incredibly skeptical about this response, so i guess i took a kind of "once bitten" sort of attitude toward the notion of artists not being credited for their work on hiveswap and dumped them out of anger at that stage

i feel like i've memory holed a lot of the specific things that really soured me on hussie specifically as a person because i know it was more than the TOG situation and i'm still unsure how much of the blame for the WPNY situation falls on hussie specifically versus whoever the fuck else might have been in charge of those decisions

i might need to rewatch those old sarah z videos just to refresh my memory lmfao

A Brief History of HomestuckHomestuck Sent Me A Legal Threat, And Then It Got Wo...god what an insane moment in history this all was