For those that don't know, Barkley 2 was the sequel to Barkley's Shut up and Jam: Gaiden that ran a successful kickstarter campaign back in 2013.
UPDATE:
The official twitter account has responded.
See threadmarks for more.
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/talesofgames/barkley-2-an-rpg-sequel-to-barkley-shut-up-and-jam
One of the former developers has now said that there's not really anyone working on it anymoreChef [Boyardee] vanished from the project 2 1/2 years ago. I've tried contacting him multiple times and haven't received a response. Bort left around the same time to be a family man.
The Kickstarter was not necessary, especially in hindsight. The majority of work on this game was unpaid. Myself, Bort, and Chef are the original Barkley 1 creators. I did not join the Kickstarter with them because I was aware of the many problems that could (and did) arise.
I was asked to join the project 3 years after the KS when the project had little money and was in shambles. I was committed to trying to finish the game but it was consistently set back by horrible management and I ended up quitting. The person who owns ToG and is running it now had nothing to do with Barkley 1 and has zero game dev experience. He is the ToG PR guy.
When I quit, Lazrool also quit. We were the only two remaining who understood the technical inner workings of this game. Laz worked on this project nearly from the start, pro bono, and was tired of the nonsense as well.
There is no incentive for "ToG" or anyone attached to the KS to talk about this debacle.
The development of Barkley 2 is extremely complicated and unnecessarily dramatic. So it's very difficult to explain things without walls of text. I'll do my best to keep things short and sweet.
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People were paid, the point that I was trying to make in the original post is that the majority of work on this project was done for "percentage" / good faith. This could have been done without a KS. I didn't have direct access to financial info, but from what I gathered in my time on the project, about 2/3rds of the money went towards wages and the other 1/3rd went to other expenses (conventions, etc.)
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Gortarius is Lazrool. He was too crestfallen / embarassed to post.Aww. What about Gotarius? He was posting in here for a while but stopped.
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So what's the deal with frankie continuing to work on graphics for so long? Was he paid up front?
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Frankie did get paid, of all people who worked on the game he contributed the most work and was also paid the most. However, as Hentai Jihadist mentions, the money eventually dries up when split between so many people and over many years.Very sad to hear this. What was Frankie doing them up until a few months ago? He must have just been helping out, what a great guy I wonder how far done the game was?
I can't speak for Frankie, but when I quit is around the same time Frankie stopped his work. In my mind, Frankie did more than what was expected of him and he did not need to do as much as he did. However, it seems that Frankie was told otherwise by ToG management.
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Nope. Despite him admitting to me directly the game will die without me working on it, when I finally got tired and said I'll quit unless changes happen, he accepted my resignation and as far as I know is trying to keep the project alive by finding new "hires".I'm assuming the person who is "running" ToG now has bailed too?
The game was pitched to companies / people for funding from what I was told, no one was interested. I'm not surprised. Thank the lord.
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I'm actually the one who voiced that quote, back when I had some level of hope in this project and thought that ToG wanted to see this game come out. The promise has taken a sour turn.It seems to me like some of you forgot that the promise has been made...
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An entire book could be written on the problems this game had. To name a choice few:
- There was a revolving door of workers on the game. Many were lured in with "percentages". You can only promise so many points. One of the reasons I quit is because I could not see this circle being squared.
- Divide and conquer. The team was split and there were 50 back channels where everyone had their own way of understanding this game.
- Goldfish attention span. A large amount of work was only done at most half way, then abandoned to work on some other "cool" thing.
- Unwillingness to cut or simplify anything despite not having the manpower and the game dragging for years on end.
- Management dictating how work should be done despite not understanding how it actually works. Leading to needlessly complicated systems, obsolete systems, and totally broken systems.
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The game has perpetually been 2 years away from completion for as long as I can remember, and there has been no will to fix this.Was it anywhere near completion? Or just a complete lost cause.
This is very disappointing, but not surprising by this point. If the programmers and lead artist have quit, there's not a lot of hope that the project will ever get completed unless they somehow revamp the entire game with a new team.quote:
I'm in this camp as well but I can say in my experience the design simply could not be changed in any simple manner. The reason I even agreed to commit to this project was because I was told I would be able to make executive decisions if necessary. Any time I brought up any issue it was immediately turned into some hour long meeting or justification of why it's "needed".These points are the most baffling to me. Did people there not understand the whole reason any of us are interested in the first place is because Barkley 1 was funny? Who gives a poo poo about the systems or millions of guns or whatever, all we ever wanted was a funny game.
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I would only give credit to B2 if one of the core people of this project would have said something earlier. From what I have seen, most were fine with the idea of this project fading into obscurity.i guess on the bright side barkley 2 isn't the worst about this (that'd be omori).
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Welcome to the legendary ToG work ethic, incapable of removing a single link / page.Also, the ToG site still offers preorders promising the game for early 2014.
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This project was started by Chef, Bort, and Bort's brother. I don't know why things were done the way they were, but Bort's brother registered the ToG corporation and is the sole owner of it. All work done on contract is owned by ToG, which I'd say is about 35% of the total work. The remaining work was to be negotiated for percentages, etc.I'm curious who this person holding the reigns of barkley 2 is, since it apparently isn't any of the obvious names, i.e. cboy, bort, lazrool.
It was always presented that myself, Bort, and Chef had some kind of control of the company. However, when things started going very badly on this project and I pressed Bort's brother, it was essentially admitted that we have no control and we're stuck with him. No one ever agreed to this, but on paper he does own the company.
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When I reference such systems, I mostly refer to a totally broken scripting and cinema system (when I joined the game only had 1 cutscene), the game taking 15 minutes to compile, and massive amount of bugs. About 80% of the work I did on this game was simply fixing broken, unfinished, or thought to be functional things.To be fair, "needlessly complicated systems, obsolete systems, and totally broken systems" are exactly what I thought they were going for, intentionally.
If anyone has any information to contradict what I'm saying, they have been free to post for all these years to clear the record, and can even post in this thread now.
UPDATE:
The official twitter account has responded.
See threadmarks for more.
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