Blog

Halloween Thanks-giving

Mob Rules — Wed, 31 Oct 2012 13:44:15 +0000

Happy Halloween!

I want to thank all of you for sticking with us and for all the kindness and support you've offered in the past few weeks. It's been just plain amazing.

We're figuring out the whole open source development thing - if you want to pop over and take a look at the project's site, it's here:

https://mrg-trac.sourcerepo.com/mrg_Haunts/wiki/WikiStart

As a token of our thanks and as a Halloween treat, Austin has put together some cool wallpapers based on Haunts - there's one for the denizens and one for the intruders, as well as some more understated backgrounds that are suitable for cell phones and tablets. Enjoy!

All The Way Open!

Mob Rules — Tue, 23 Oct 2012 18:12:37 +0000

We have a plan!

We’re going to finish developing Haunts: The Manse Macabre as an Open Source project. The source code has been open from the beginning, but now we’re going to fully embrace open development model and making the game entirely open source. We’ve had about thirty programmers from a variety of backgrounds, including many proficient in Go, who have stepped forward and offered to help finish the game. We’re still in the process of setting up the infrastructure for issue tracking, source control, documentation wikis, and other tools necessary before we can begin in earnest, but we hope to have that all up and running within the next week or two.

Today I sent out a survey to all the interested programmers who’ve contacted me to get a better idea of what people are interested in working on and how much time they’ll have. We’ll be appointing some interim release managers in the short run and then working together to elect those positions. If you’re interested in being included in the survey now, contact me through Kickstarter. But anyone will be able to help out once we get started, we'll need programmers with a variety of skills and interests, testers and more.

If you'd like to join the crew, just fill this survey out:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/viewform?formkey=dE1CVTVIOWJpSGZOX3plQURfV0ZzOVE6MQ

Blue Mammoth is still interested in the project, but their involvement will come once the game is much closer to finished, and will be to facilitate the retail release, get copies out to our backers, and help promote and distribute the final game. Someone from Blue Mammoth will probably have a finger in helping out on the development side, but getting this game finished will be up to the community of volunteers.

There are still a ton of details to be figured out about the licensing (we may end up adopting a slightly different open license if it needs to be more open), credit, business model, etc. Plus setting up the issues list, organize the priorities for what needs to get done, establishing a public knowledge base, and more. This is just the beginning, but I’m excited about where it’s going and enthusiastic as hell about the support we’re getting.

Art!

Austin is finishing up the inking on the caricatures and those should be out to backers this week.

Additionally, based on backer S.D.'s excellent suggestion, he's working up some cool Haunts themed wallpaper images for both desktops and mobile devices, which will be out for Halloween.

In The News

We've gotten a lot of press coverage, most of it in the general vein of, "Look, see, Kickstarter projects can go bad, so be careful!" I think that's a fair and useful point to make. But we're committed to being the follow-up story. You know, the underdog who comes back from the brink of collapse and proves a resounding success!

Here's one nice piece I wanted to share with you.

http://caffeineforge.com/2012/10/20/the-manse-macabre-only-mostly-dead/

I've also done a few interviews, including one for a radio show that podcasts their episodes. That should run next week, and I'll share the link with you when I get it.

Haunts The Kickstarter Cautionary Tale

Mob Rules — Fri, 19 Oct 2012 20:14:35 +0000

We have gotten a crazy amount of media coverage for our project. The tone of much of it seems to center around Haunts being the first notable Kickstarter video game project to fail. A dubious honor to be sure, and not entirely accurate.

We have not given up. This is not over. We are going to finish this game.

I’m more confident than I have been in many weeks, thanks entirely to the outpouring of support and offers of help that I’ve gotten from our supporters. I’ve done a number of interviews already, with some more to come. We’re renewed in our commitment to get this game out.

In case you’re curious - I know I was! - here’s a list of some of the stories about us. I’m sure I’ve missed a bunch, these are just the English language ones I’ve seen:

http://www.forbes.com/sites/erikkain/2012/10/18/fully-funded-kickstarter-game-goes-belly-up-haunts-the-manse-macabre-is-out-of-money-as-programmers-call-it-quits/

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-20003916

http://www.joystiq.com/2012/10/19/kickstarter-game-haunts-development-halted-programmers-quit/

http://www.theverge.com/gaming/2012/10/19/3525746/haunts-kickstarter-project-halted-after-money-depleted-and

http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2012/10/haunts-kickstarter-failure-highlights-the-risks-of-crowdfunding/

http://www.develop-online.net/news/42293/Backers-left-in-cold-as-devs-quit-Kickstarter-project

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/179789/Promising_Kickstarter_game_runs_out_of_money_programmers_steam.php#.UIGzs8XAdFt

http://www.mcvuk.com/news/read/successful-kickstarter-outing-haunts-the-manse-macabre-faces-uncertain-future/0104895

http://www.pocketgamer.co.uk/r/iPad/Haunts%3A+The+Manse+Macabre/news.asp?c=45921

http://venturebeat.com/2012/10/19/development-halts-on-successfully-funded-kickstarter-game-haunts/

http://dvice.com/archives/2012/10/what-happens-wh-2.php

http://www.pcgamer.com/2012/10/19/kickstarted-game-haunts-gives-up-the-ghost-sheds-devs-promises-refunds/

http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/tag/haunts-the-manse-macabre/

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/120238-Successful-Kickstarter-Faces-Collapse

Better Morning

Mob Rules — Fri, 19 Oct 2012 14:44:08 +0000

It’s been a heartwarming 14 hours or so, and I have to start by saying thank you to all the kind and supportive emails and comments I’ve been getting. I had been dreading today for the past week or so, as we worked up the details and I scrambled around to find some silver lining to our dark clouds. Turns out, I should have come to you all sooner in my search for support.

Updates

Which brings me to the first question I’ve been asked by both backers and media: why are we just hearing about this now? That is the fairest of questions, and I should have addressed it in my post yesterday. You’re only hearing about it now because I was scared to bring you bad news. I kept hoping things would work out, that we would find our way through to launch a beta this month and move forward from there towards release. I wasn’t really certain that wasn’t possible until close to the last minute, when everything failed to come together.

I should have been more forthcoming and regular with updates, but not sharing bad news was too easy and too much of a temptation for me. In retrospect, I and you and the game would have been much better served if I’d set up a strictly scheduled, regular update regimen. However we end up moving forward, that will be part of things from now on.

Money

I mentioned that we’ve spent all the money. That’s not strictly true, but as far as hiring new programmers to work for a regular salary, it is. We actually have a fair amount in the bank, but most of that is about to be sent to the IRS as part of payroll taxes. I also still need to pay for sound and have money set aside for licensing fees for FMOD once the game releases. We met our goal back in the beginning of July, raising $28,000, of which we got to keep about $25K after Kickstarter and Amazon Payments fees. With the addition of Josh in August, our burn rate went to about $1900 per week for salaries for Jonathan, Austin, and Josh. Eleven weeks of that cost a little over $20,000, plus another $1200 or so for printing and shipping t-shirts.

Programmers

I’ve had a lot of interested emails from programmers offering their help. Thank you all very much! There’s a lot to sift through and I’m not sure what the best way to proceed will be, but I am very encouraged by these offers and want to try and figure out the best way to take advantage of this opportunity. I’ve reached out to a good friend of mine who’s an expert in collaborative open source development, and he and I will talk soon. I also want to discuss this exciting development with Blue Mammoth and get their take on it.

Open Source

A lot of you have mentioned that we should open source everything if worse comes to worse. In fact, the code is already open, but if we cannot pull together to make this a retail product, we will absolutely fully open source everything, content and code and turn it over to the community. Actually, at some point we’d like to do that no matter what, even after a retail release (however many years later, when it makes fiscal sense). But right now the code is under the same modified BSD license as the Go programming language and the contents are all Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial Share-Alike.

Caricatures

Some of you have noticed that the caricatures for the high-level donors are in the game. Other of you have gotten your t-shirts. Austin has been driving hard to finish game content these last weeks, so he hasn’t had time to polish up and package the physical caricatures and the t-shirts for our highest-level donors. He’s on that now, and we should be shipping them out next week.

I’m doing an interview with a blogger from Forbes this afternoon, and I’m sure he’ll have some more tough questions for me, so look for that sometime soon. I’ll also be doing a chat with Bill Abner from No High Scores, who has run some successful Kickstarters of his own, so hopefully they will help keep me in line and ask the questions I’m not thinking of.

Thanks again.

Rick

Desperate Times

Mob Rules — Thu, 18 Oct 2012 21:49:43 +0000

Sorry for the long delay in updates, and special apologies to those who have emailed or commented in the last week and to whom I haven’t yet replied. As I’m sure many of you suspect, things haven’t been going well for Haunts and Mob Rules Games. I am still determined to get the game out, but I no longer have any way of knowing when and how that will happen.

The principal cause for our dire condition is that there are no longer any programmers working on the game. Our lead programmer, Jonathan, was always going to move on to something else after a year or so. We had hoped that he would be able to work on the game in his spare time, but now that he’s going back at Google, he has told us that his spare time will be very minimal and not enough to make progress on the game. Our second programmer, Josh, has quit the project entirely to take another job. He does not want to work on the game in his spare time.

The game as it stands has all the systems in place, but there are a lot of bugs. Knowing Jonathan would be leaving, the plan had been to get online play working and release the Beta, with Josh working to make the levels run in online play and scripting the AI for the single player versions of those levels.

Unfortunately, getting online play working took three times longer than estimated (instead of the twice as long as estimated I’d been counting on). It also required making adjustments to programming for all the levels, even when they’re not being played online. With no one left on the project who is capable of implementing those changes and debugging them during testing, the game is in a very patchwork state. In some cases, levels that once worked fine now have serious issues. Fixing those issues would require fixes both to the level programming and the core system programming, working in tandem.

But now it’s just me and Austin. Austin has finished up the art content for the initial release of the game, but he’s not a programmer. I’m not a programmer either. Although I know some small amount about how the level programming works, I’m not capable at this point of fixing the bugs I know about. This is further complicated by the fact that the game is written in the Go programming language, which is not widely used, limiting the pool of potential new programmers.

What then, to do? We are not giving up! I am currently in talks with another game company owned by some old friends and coworkers of mine, Blue Mammoth Games. They have expressed an interest in taking on Haunts. Austin and I would continue on in our roles, although we would both be doing so in our spare time. These new potential partners won't be able to make the decision for a few weeks at least and then after that it would be months before anything came out. Still, I think it's out best shot at this point.

This has been an emotionally rough couple of months for me, as I’ve invested almost all of my time for the past year or more in Haunts, along with my own money and reputation. It’s been terrible to watch it fail despite best efforts, but the failure is mine. There are scores of decisions I’d make differently if I had to do them over, and there were bets I made knowing the risks that haven’t paid off like we needed them to. I have failed to update because things were constantly going from bad to worse and then we started to see some rays of hope and I was hoping for something more concrete in the good news department. My obligation to all of you generous Kickstarter backers is foremost in my mind and I have not served you as well as I should have.

I will turn over my share of any future revenue from the game to whoever manages to get it finished, fun, and out to you. We have spent all the money we raised, but I will personally refund out of my own pocket anyone who wants to withdraw their support, no questions asked. We’re going to make this game, and if you can hang on for what looks to be a long road ahead, we will get it finished, but that’s not what I asked you to sign up for and it’s not what you gave us money for. email me directly through Kickstarter if you would like your pledge refunded.

Finally, although I’m very hopeful about the partnership deal I’m pursuing, that deal is not made yet and my friends at Blue Mammoth have said it’s fine if I look for other options. I haven’t found any yet, but now I’m throwing it open to you all. If any of you or someone you know is interested in and capable of taking on Haunts and doing right by it, I’d love to hear from you.

I have made an update to the Mob Rules Games web site that has descriptions and images of some of the work we’ve been doing. The attached video that Austin put together shows some of the gameplay from across a variety of different level, so you can see how close we are to finishing the game. All the systems are there, and when it works it’s fun to play. You can see how we spent your money, and that we weren’t just sitting around twiddling our thumbs, even if we have collapsed at the finish line.

http://www.mobrulesgames.com/haunts/2012/10/18/the-story-thus-far.html

Our Final Budget Revealed

Mob Rules — Wed, 08 Aug 2012 20:02:22 +0000

We got all your money, and we’re totally going to spend it!

Specifically, when all the fees were taken out by Amazon and Kickstarter, we received $26,495. Thanks again everyone, that is awesome! Combined with what we had left in the bank, that puts our current available funds at $30,508.

Getting there cost us some money along the way. Specifically, below are our costs for promoting the Kickstarter and fulfilling the t-shirt rewards. In addition, we’ve had to pay some costs of doing business during the past nine months. Not a lot, but some. And of course our biggest cost, which is ongoing, is salaries for Austin and Jonathan (who’re working way cheap against back-end profit sharing, while I’m working for salary-free against back-end profit-sharing). We’re also considering hiring a fourth person to do two months of work to help us make sure the game gets done on time.

These numbers are all accurate within 5% or so, as they’re based on my own quick calculations and rounding, not detailed accounting records.

Costs Already Paid:

Software and Services (Quickbooks, Survey Monkey, Sublime Text Editor): $550

Legal (State business reports): $450

T-Shirts (production and shipping): $1500

Advertising for Kickstarter (My Brother, My Brother, and Me, Web Ads, Facebook ads): $2500

Salaries $5500/ month January through July (including Federal and State taxes): $38,500

Total Spent Thus Far: $43,505

Costs to Pay Before Completion:

Salaries $5500/month August through October $16500

Possible Freelance/Temp Help: $4000

FMOD license (sound integration tools, don’t have to pay until we ship) $1500

Total Projected Costs: $22,000

That leaves us with $8,508 left over for advertising and unforeseen costs.

Total Projected Budget: $74,005

So, we should count all the money you fine supporters pledged as being like pre-sales of the game, which means we’ve earned $26,495 from the game already. That means we need to earn another $47,510 to break even.

What actually happens with that sales money when it (hopefully) starts rolling in is a little complicated, but cool. Up to the first $5000 will be used to pay Mark, who’s doing sound and music for the game. That’s his budget, based on his hourly rate. It’s looking like he might come in under budget, so this number might be lower, we’ll see.

After that the income will be split between Me, Jonathan, and Austin in proportion to the amount of salary that we deferred while working on the game. So, Jonathan and Austin both were working at less than half their full salary rate and I was working for nothing. I’ll be paid a little less than half of what comes in and the other two will be paid a split of the rest. For the record, my salary rate is the same as Austin’s, and Jonathan’s is a little higher than ours.

Once we’re all paid back our deferred salaries, then what comes in after that is split between us in proportion based on the amount that we were paid (our salary rate). Now the investor gets paid back too, at a rate based on the investment as if it were salary (i.e., as if the investor had been an employee who’d earned $42,000 or so in salary). A chunk also goes back to Mob Rules Games to cover costs and maybe fund another project.

Quick math (as opposed to detailed analysis), suggests that we need to sell about 15,000 more copies of the game to get make back our budget and then another 10,000 or so to pay off everyone’s deferred salaries. So, if we can sell more than 25,000 copies of the game, then we’ll start seeing those magical residuals/royalties/whatever.

25,000 copies would be great, great numbers for a first-time indie game, but not, I think, impossible. The better the game the better our chance of course, so that’s where all out focus needs to continue to be.

Back to work!

Success!

Mob Rules — Fri, 06 Jul 2012 14:08:58 +0000

Thank you, thank you, thank you, to all 1,214 of you who pledged your support for Haunts! Our Kickstarter Kicked and I just started the process of transferring $25,075 from Amazon Payments to the Mob Rules Games bank account. We raised $28,739 total, and that $25k is what's left after Kickstarter and Amazon take their piece of the action. A fair trade in my estimation.

Next week I'll write up a more detailed accounting of our budget, costs, and schedule as part of our commitment to transparency. On Monday I'll also be sending out surveys/questionnaires to all our backers, getting stuff like t-shirt sizes and requests for references for portraits and supporter messages. First I need to set up our back-end spreadsheet so I can keep track of all your responses!

Thanks again everyone. I can't wait for you to be able to play our game!

Winning Denizens And Stretch Goals!

Mob Rules — Wed, 27 Jun 2012 15:48:14 +0000

A few weeks back we asked supporters of our (recently successful!) Kickstarter to vote on monster designs. Now it's time to announce the winners and the runners up. Why the runners up? We'll get to that in a minute. First, the winners:

Winning Evil Genius

Runner Up Evil Genius

Winning Vampire

Runner Up Vampire

Winning Psychopath

Runner Up Psychopath

Winning Creepy Child

Runner Up Creepy Child

Winning Abomination (by a huge margin, no real runner up)

Ancient Ones - an Exact Tie, down to the vote. We'll do both, because...

Stretching Our Goals!

What to do with those Runners Up? Well, we want to make them too! At least the ones that are also popular. So, the winners in Abominations and Creepy Children were pretty clear. But the others were pretty close.

For Every $1000 we raise over the $25,000 original ask, we'll add in another of these Denizens. Since we're already over $26k, the obvious first Bonus Denizen is the exactly tied Ancient Ones. The rest will come online in the following order:

$27,000 Unlocks The Runner-Up Evil Genius

$28,000 Unlocks the Runner-Up Vampire

$29,000 Unlocks the Runner-Up Psychopath

$30,000 Unlocks the Alternate Creepy Child

$31,000 We'll look at other Abominations

And if we go beyond that, well, we've got more monster designs to show you, rest assured.

Thanks again everyone. Now let's see what other horrors we can bring into being!

Haunts Kickstarter Successful!

Mob Rules — Tue, 26 Jun 2012 19:23:05 +0000

Mob Rules Games is pleased as all get out to announce the success of our Kickstarter for Haunts: The Manse Macabre. On June 26th, we hit our target of $25,000 in pledges from nearly 1000 different backers, and we still have more than a week to go. There’s still time to back this project now and get a copy of the game for just $5.

Haunts: The Manse Macabre is a turn-based haunted house game where players can take on the role of either the Intruders exploring the horrifying house or the Denizens that are haunting it’s shadowy corridors. It will include both an in-depth solo campaign that tells the terrifying tale of Tyree Manse and a versus mode for endless variety and replayability. The game’s black and white art style draws its inspiration from famed macabre illustrators Harry Clarke and Edward Gorey.

Every $5 pledged through Kickstarter entitles backers to a download code for a copy of the game (planned for release this October). These codes are transferable and even re-sellable. In addition, higher pledge levels bring other rewards from your name in the credits to t-shirts to cameos in the game itself.

The Haunts: The Manse Macabre Kickstarter ends at midnight on July 5th.

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/2066438441/haunts-the-manse-macabre/posts/254925

The Winner Is...

Mob Rules — Mon, 18 Jun 2012 15:23:24 +0000

We have a winner!

The shirt below, nick-named "asymmetric" in the survey, is the big winner. Kind of fitting, with the whole asymmetric game play thing we've got going on in Haunts.

Speaking of fitting, as I've mentioned before, these are available in every size from S to XXXL, men's and women's styles. We'll ask you for your size in the final questionnaire that goes out to supporters once the Kickstarter ends.

The printer is using Alternative Apparel's "vintage" style shirts, which are the nicer, more light-weight option. Austin swears by them, and they do feel nice.

They are black with white and a little red on them.

This is the only time we will ever make shirts that look anything like this design. If we do a shirt for anyone to buy, the design will be very different and won't feature this house image. I have no idea what it will be, because right now we don't have any plans to make shirts besides these right here.

Thanks again to the hundreds who voted and to all of you who've pledged your support so far. We're almost there, and if you want of these cooooool shirts, you can help us get all the way to 25k.