Beast’s Fury: Its inception, failure and why there were no shockwaves.
It is April 10th, 2012, and a new game from the indie scene is released…
Skullgirls had technically started development in the mid 2000s, conceived as several stray character designs that illustrator Alex “o_8" Ahad drew in high school.
During his academic years in college, he would construct the hypothetical idea of utilising the character concepts for a fighting game roster. The idea would remain pretty much static until… he came.
Mike “Z” Zaimont. Then, a Fighting game enthusiast and tournament goer who also happened to had been working a fighting game engine during his own spare time. Today? He is all of the above, plus a new title: Connoisseur
Anyway, Alex and Mike ended up teaming up, thus officially starting the project’s development, with the early work phase beginning in 2008, and with the engine work and pre-production phase starting off the following year. The duo pitched the project to several companies, eventually teaming up with Reverge Labs, a recently founded independent studio, in 2010. They later went on to sign with publisher Autumn games.
In April of 2011, Reverge Labs licensed a user interface by the name of OtterUI as the solution for the game’s development. At the E3 Expo of the same year where the game was teased, Konami, yes, Konami announced that they would help with the distribution of Skullgirls.
And then, in the 10th of April of 2012, Skullgirls was released.
The game received generally positive reviews, with reviewers and players alike singing praises about the Gameplay and mechanics and especially… The art style.
Alex Ahad, drew the game’s art style and character designs based on a wide variety of his influences and inspirations, such as, the works of Mike Mignola (e.g. the Hellboy comics) and Bruce Timm, Gainax’s FLCL (Pronounced Fooly Cooly) Tex Avery’s Red Hot Riding Hood, Capcom’s Darkstalkers, and artists George Kamitani and Daisuke Ishiwatari (Daisuke is mostly known as the creator of the Guilty Gear fighting game series, while George is known for pretty much for a decent amount of games, founder of the company that made these “decent amount of games” with his first work being the director of Princess Crown in 1997).
The end result of Ahad’s inspirations was also,Nearly- Silky-smooth animation, reaching 11,515 total frames for its initial eight characters, with each one of them topping at 1,439 frames.
Such feat well, couldn’t go unnoticed, which is why it rightfully received a nomination for Best Animated Video Game at the 40th Annual Annie Awards and recognition in the 2013 Guinness World Records Gamer’s Edition.
Following the game’s release, the Skullgirls team began teasing future content for the game, including new voice packs, color palettes(different colors for characters) and downloadable characters. Everything was going well until…
Corporate bullshit happened.
Autumn Games was hit with a series of lawsuits regarding a game called Def Jam Rapstar, which “Gummed up everything related to Autumn’s funding.” This led to the entire Skullgirls development team being laid off by Reverge Labs in June of 2012, after Autumn and Reverge Labs allowed their contract to expire without agreeing upon a new one. (In the end, the Autumn and Konami ended up getting sued 15 million US Dollars for fraud by the City National Bank in Los Angeles, since, apparently a loan was taken for Rapstar’s development and wasn’t paid back.)
After that, the Skullgirls development had team formed under the new moniker of Lab Zero Games. From January to February of 2013, fighting game website Shoryuken hosted a charity donation drive to determine the final game to be featured in the 2013 EVO lineup, with all proceeds sent to the Breast Cancer Research Foundation.
The Skullgirls Community raised over 78,000 US Dollars, placing second to the eventual winner Super Smash Bros. Melee, which raised 94,000 Dollars. Despite the fact that the game did not win, Shoryuken announced that EVO 2013 event organisers would support the Skullgirls side tournament by providing prize money and exhibition support due to their effort in the fundraiser. Overall, this series of events helped the game’s popularity stay afloat and even boosted it.
Back at the development team, despite Autumn Games open support for the game, they had their hands tied and due to the previously mentioned Corporate entanglement, any financial support was impossibleto funnel. So, the development team looked to its fan base and asked for help once more.
On February 25th, 2013, Lab Zero Games launched and indiegogo campaign in an effort to raise 150,000 US Dollars for the development of the game’s very first DLC character, named Squiggly. Long story short, the campaign ended up raising up to 830,000 American Quid, securing funding for not only the first DLC character, but also the second and third character, a stretch goal for providing a free license of the game’s “Z-Engine” to the developers of a game called “Them’s Fightin’ Herds” and several alternate character and announcer voice packs. And a fourth DLC character into the mix.
That show of dedication and support is what saved the game and developers from certain doom. At the same, it boosted and spread the game’s popularity and success far and wide, leaving people in a moment of silent admiration, followed by waves of applause…
Meanwhile, in the Land Down Under…
It is 2011, and an Aussie is inspired with the idea of creating something of his own, that would over the course of five years would only lead to catastrophe, because of his own Incompetence and arrogance that he couldn’t see…
Beast's Fury was an indie 2-D fighting game created, owned, and led by Australian game developer Ryhan Stevens. Announced in 2013, the game featured a cast of anthropomorphic characters and a hand drawn-animated art style. It was planned to launch on the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, Ouya, Android, and iOS platforms.
Stevens collaborated on the project with several animators, voice actors, musicians, programmers, and Montreal-based game developer Evil Dog Productions. The team sought crowdfunding to raise money for development, but despite running several campaigns and touting guest characters as stretch goals, the project struggled due to ambitious goals, poor budgeting, and a lack of developer interest. Stevens and Evil Dog programmer Marco Arsenault’s negative reactions to criticism also sparked controversy.
After a failed last-ditch IndieGoGo campaign, Beast's Fury was cancelled in January 2016. Several ex-employees would later allege Stevens of incompetence, verbal abuse, and failing to pay them
That was the short, insufficient and sanitised version of the story that is available on WikiFur, which provides in the link section two archived articles that each provide their own respective piece of information on the whole story.
Here, is the whole story (not guaranteed but at least it is much much more than what wikifur can provide).
The project’s development began all the way back 2011, where the original vision was all the way up to the stratosphere, and yet despite Ryhan’s efforts to tone down the project’s scale, it ended up being a lazy and fruitless effort, since by the end of his “attempt” the game’s scope, scale and ambition were still up on the stratosphere.
JasonAFex, a widely known furry artist in the furry community, notorious for his…”suggestive illustrations” and at the same time controversial figure, (in which I didn’t get a clear answer to why he was controversial) was one of the first individuals to notice the titanic-in-scale project that was Beast’s Fury.
After the game’s cancellation was announced, Jason made a journal post on his Fur Affinity page, detailing his experience with Ryhan Stevens and how he ended up seeing through his bullshit.
“I have been closely monitoring Beast’s Fury as I was one of (If not the first) individuals the director contacted with plans of creating the game. His original dreams for the game were to create a 20+ character 3D fighting game with an $8,000 budget. He wanted it to have the fighting complexity of Tekken, transformations of Bloody Roar and fully voice-acted cut-scenes with multiple endings. In addition to the 20 character roster, it would also have 3 bosses that have multiple forms that are encountered in the games story mode.”
“The main protagonist and poster boy of the series was ofcourse his fursona, with the rest of the cast being secondary characters or the sonas of friends. He offered that if I promote the game due to my popularity on FA, that I would get a character roster slot for Vergence. The director didn’t know basic concepts such as hitboxes, attack priority, hitstun, footsies (in layman’s terms, distance between the players in fighting games) , iframes (individual frames) or any other terminology. I let him know that such a game is impossible, and that games of that calibre can take hundreds of thousands, if not millions to develop. Regardless, I said that if he did end up getting a demo released, I would plug the project.
“A couple of months later I was contacted again. He informed me that his $8,000 budget wasn’t getting very far, with a fair percentage already spent on a 3D render of his sona. He had then said he would raise the budget to $10,000.”
“A couple months after that. The director contacted me again saying he has blown his budget and was turning to crowd funding to complete the project. He requested that I plug the game now so it can get it can hit it’s milestone on the first Indigogo campaign. I told him that it’s not a good idea to ask for any financial support from the community until you at-least have a playable demo available. I declined to advertise the game.”
“Some months later, he informed me he’s switching to 2D. Asking if I could do some animations for the main menu and cut-scenes. Kabier (Jason’s GF) was even contacted to do promo artwork for the game. We both declined. At this point, I asked not to be contacted on the matter of Beast Fury again.”
-JasonAFex
Over the course of the game’s development, around four crowdfunding campaigns were raised, with two of them ever succeeding in fulfilling their set goal.
Here is the rundown of the campaigns, accompanied by quotes from a small interview I conducted with the game’s then Lead game designer, Andrew “40%Flashkick” Fein, back in January of this year ( I will explain myself):
Andrew Fein is a professional Street Fighter, a writer and an amateur artist. When he caught wind of the project, he was just 18 years old.
“To start, I was 18 years old at the time when I happened to see an art stream stating that Juco, an animator[one of the animators], was working on making fighting game animations. I thought ‘wow that’s pretty cool.”
“So I joined the stream thinking ‘I’ll be happy to watch this, see how it goes, talk to the animator, the creator, it’ll be a good time.’ And you know what? It was! I got to flex all my fighting game knowledge, I got to give some minor direction for animation, it was great!”
“It was so great in fact, that the project owner, Ryhan Stevens, reached out to me and said ‘Hey, you know a lot about fighting games, you wanna help me with this project?’ I was -over the moon-. Imagine being an 18 year old getting asked to work on the thing you love?”
Oh Andrew, if only you knew…
“Thus began my work with the group as a whole. By the end of the first week, I’d written an entire character design document for two characters, and overall gameplay design. We started working in earnest with the programmer with what limited funding we had, and life seemed good.”
Andrew commented that Ryhan told him about Mike Zaimont being Ryhan’s inspiration point, as in Ryhan’s words, “he came out of nowhere and managed to create Skullgirls blew his mind.” That kind of “big dream energy” is what Andrew loved about Ryhan. If only you knew…
“Now if you ask anybody, they’ll say ‘But Mike Z wasn’t some Rando, he’d been in the community for a long time.’ Ryhan wasn’t a fighting game community member, he was just a guy who loved Bloody Roar and fighting games. He wanted to make his own. On that level? I respect that.”
Andrew later remarked about how the team was always low on money and that he wasn’t in for the money but for the passion.
“Things seemed pretty good for the most part, but we were always lacking money. I was a volunteer, with promises of ‘When things get big I’ll give you a percentage’. But to me it wasn’t about the money, it was about making a fighting game. I often forewent any payment if I could.
I’d tell Ryhan ‘Any money you’d give to me, give it to Juco, Give it to Evildog, give it to Patrick (Dirk)[one of the artists], just make sure it goes into getting work done.’ And he did. Any time we had money, he funneled it to the right people. But it still wasn’t enough…”
Andrew commented further on the financial part: Ryhan was having issues with keeping EvilDog, the game’s main programmer, paid. So he went on to look for people that he could outsource the project to. For a brief amount of time, he had some alternate coders but they seemed to didn’t know what they were doing so they had been let go. Thus the team started looking at crowdfunding as an option.
Marco “EvilDog” Arsenault is a French-Canadian game developer. Before working on the project, he was primarly known for being the creator of the Road of the Dead Saga, a Flash game series, as well as Punk-o-matic 1 and 2. Even before his rise to fame, he worked at Ubisoft Montreal. He was part of the Programming team behind Far Cry 2, part of the Gameplay programmers team for Rainbow Six Vegas and part of the AI programmers for Avatar: the game. In the Beast’s Fury project, he was by far the only one experienced with game development. Throughout the game’s development, a handful of other programmers hopped into the fray, names unknown.
“This was about the time crowd funding was like, ‘the big thing’. You’d see crowd funding for everything. Crowd Fund my art, my game, my marriage, my BOWL OF POTATO SALAD, and they usually worked! So we dreamy, starry eyes, we put one out out too.”
-Andrew Fein
The first campaign raised in around 2012–2013, in Indiegogo, didn’t manage to accomplish anything and so did the second one. From what I gathered, Fein joined the team after the second campaign and stuck around when the third and fourth ones were announced.
“”Hey guys we need 5000 Dollars to pay an animator to finish our second character. Please and thanks~”
And we got it, surprisingly. A lot of mystery benefactors came in and said ‘Yeah we’ll support you’. So sure enough, we paid off Dirk to finish drawing Don.”“But, that was also a grave mistake on our part. Ryhan made outlandish promises in the kickstarter. Ridiculously so. Big platform releases, animation background characters, essentially tried to word for word copy the skullgirls kickstarter stuff.”
However, the third and fourth campaigns did not solve a lot. In fact it only added more pressure, especially with the unfulfilled rewards…
“Which, flying blind as a bunch of novices, who I was I gonna be to tell him ‘no don’t do that’? We didn’t know any better. We were just a bunch of fuckin’ idiots who thought we were making a thing that people wanted to see come to life.”
“So pressure started to mount. We got a lot of work done but our second build with all the updates to it wasn’t ready yet. The one build we did have was… A mess. There were no hitboxes on crouching characters, certain attacks would cause animations to freeze, etc…”
“Evil Dog, rightfully, wanted more money to keep working on the project. A LOT more. More money than we could reasonably afford. Which, ya know, he was a programmer, and at the time was about to take on a contract with a big company (which I won’t name). If we wanted his time…
… We had to pay for it. Which, again, totally fair. I had told Ryhan time and again that this was to be expected. But we’d still yet to deliver on our previous promises.
-Andrew Fein
The third campaign managed to raise over 20.000 USDs and, as stated by Andrew, the promises Ryhan were outlandish.
Here is ALL of the outlandish promises on the indiegogo:
PROWLER Digital line Art Piece- 80USD
Beast’s Fury Character T Shirt- 100USD
Don Plushie(Plushie of one the characters): Includes Shipping- 400USD
Beast’s Fury Oil Painting- 600USD
Alpha-”Everything from the $200(the price range, I think), reward tier plus your very own animated background character designed by you.”- Also 600USD
Beast’s Fury Fightstick- 1.200USD
Beasts Fury Playable Character- “Everything from the $200 reward tier, plus you will be able to work directly with the team to create a character based on your own design to be playable in the finished game. Final approval on said designs are up to us, of course, as we want to release as balanced a game as possible, but we are willing to work along side you to develop a character that you are proud to call your own.”
35.000 United States Dollars
Let me emphasize the following:
The team had only three animators, with two of them being part-time. Those being:
Ben Halstead
Patrick Stannard
and Rafael Llerena A.K.A Sorcerer Lance
Ben Halstead was assigned as Lead Animator, while Patrick Stannard was just assigned as animator(the indiegogo and kickstarter pages don’t specify but judging by his name being written without a title in front of it, he might have been the second lead animator).
Sorcerer Lance was assigned with animation Cleanup, color and shading.
Also worth noting was that they had only one lead artist by the name of Carlos Enrique.
Likewise with Andrew Fein, I interviewed Lance on his experience with the project(Also back in January).
OK to the point: Three animators were not enough for the amount of work needed to get shit done with just 20.000USDs
There were plans to hire more artists and animators to lighten the current workload from the trio but, from what I found out, it did happen but because of Ryhan’s lacking management skills, nothing effective was done.
The new individuals were Phillip Joseph A.K.A Koru Xypress(2D Clean-up Artist), Ricky Bryant(Animation frame cleanup), Kenny Chen(Cleanup) and Rukiya Hassan(Cleanup animator).
The community was quick to point that 20.000USDs was not enough for the animation costs of the first-two characters of the game, Vincent and Don, and especially with such a small animation team(as pointed out earlier).
So, another campaign was declared… This time, on Kickstarter.
The Kickstarter campaign amassed around 47.000USDs, reaching the original set goal of animating and programming Vincent and Don.
The stretch goals ranged from 75.000USDs for one of the two guests characters, to 225.000 for Rita, one of the game’s fighters from the initial six-fighter roster.
Maximilian Miles “Dood” Christensen is a colossal figure in the fighting game community, known through his Fighting game-based content on YouTube and for organizing grassroots fighting game online tournaments alongside campaigning for the revival of several fighting games, along other stuff. Around 2013, he caught wind of the Beast’s Fury project and was interested to the point where he openly supported it. Arin “Egoraptor” Hansen, an overall widely know figure of the Internet, also caught wind of the project and stated his support as well.
Thus, the two guest characters were made: Benny and Ego.
Benny was modeled after Max’s Pomeranian, Benny, while Ego is a literary and visual pun in reference to Arin’s Username, Egoraptor.
A shame that such talent was wasted…
If it weren’t for Arin’s and Max’s open support, the third and forth campaigns wouldn’t have amassed that much money.
“If we’re successfully funded, we can hire on several new animators to the crew, and all animators will be able to dedicate FULL TIME to the project. This will shorten our estimated timespan of completion to 2–3 months!”
-Ryhan Stevens
However, with Ryhan being the incompetent man he was, lacking every necessary skill that needed to be aqcuired even before the project’s start, fucked up.
Instead of being funneled to gameplay and its mechanics, the campaign money was blown on visual gimmicks, including cinematics, 3-D models and art for unfinished characters. Not helping were the Mortal Kombat-esque finishing moves; by design, they had different animations when performed on all current and future members of the roster. In contrast, Skullgirls reused animations and avoided gimmicky mechanics with little impact on gameplay in order to lower costs. By this point, Ryhan had outclassed the Skullgirls team in the production cost aspect.
The expansion of the staff roster improved nothing, and the animators themselves were overworked, verbally abused, and barely paid by Stevens. After the project was declared dead in January 2016, Sorcerer Lance spilled the beans on his experience:
“Well, since the cat’s out of the bag due to the news I and sonicmega(one of the Voice actors) found out, I’ve been off the Beast’s Fury project for the past year.
The game started out as a nice potential experience on the indie game scene while being paid for the work… we WERE paid early on, but… Things eventually got stressful, it became obvious the guy had NO idea about the first thing about making videogames & was stubborn about it. Demands increased to do work faster, get every single animation done ASAP & with our small handful of artists did the work of a whole studio. The guy expected Disney-style animations, originally wanting ONE animator to do EVERYTHING, that’s where I came in to lighten his workload. A frequent thing I kept hearing was that he wanted to make his own Skullgirls, seemingly wanting the same fame and recognition as their team.”
“Worse still was he was INDECISIVE. This idle animation? http://fav.me/d6bv3r4 (the link directs to Lance’s DeviantArt, the animation cannot be played for some reason)COMPLETELY scrapped because he wanted to redesign her.”
By “her” he referred to one of the game’s characters, Matilda, a Kangaroo barkeep. Truth is, Don wasn’t the game’s second character in the development line but the third and last. Matilda was the second in line but for some unknown reason, just as stated by Lance, Ryhan wanted her redesigned, resulting in her not being shown in the “demo”. In the playtest/”demo” videos that are still up for public viewing, only Vincent and Don were playable, not to mention that Don’s overall sprites and whatever looked half-finished.
In my opinion, I feel that there is something wrong with the redesign…
Anyway, back to what Lance had to say:
“I had plans to move to Georgia last year, but had to abort those plans when it seemed clear his payments weren’t coming in as they used to.
Stress levels were high which didn’t help, he also seemed to have some bipolar disorder going back & forth being friendly or confrontational. It became obvious morale was at an all-time low among my fellow animators, we all wanted out, but we were too far in to quit now. We felt bad for all the backers who were anxiously wanting to see our results, we didn’t want to disappoint them and not have a demo done.”
“The last bit of work I did was shading Don (the shark), I was promised to be paid for it, that was last year, STILL waiting on that payment. Any further discussion with the guy on Skype avoided the topic of pay as he kept blindly wanting to go forward with or without the old team. Last I heard he claimed he found a company (Wayforward?) to rework the game and scrapping all our hard work, the suddenly he became silent.”
“So now his FA is disabled with a journal saying the project is over… This whole experience was a massive lesson of “what NOT to do”.
-Sorcerer Lance, January 2016.
I think it is the right time to mention the pledge rewards…
A lot of them were pretty much the same from the indiegogo but some others were new. For instance:
Pledges of 100USD or more and the pledger would have gotten everything before it(T-Shirt, art piece), the contributor title “Fury” plus a Beast’s Fury voice mail from one of the voice actors.
For pledges of 150USD or more: title “Omega” and an invitation to a live Skype group chat with some of the voice actors.
For pledges of 250USD or more: title “Vicious” everything from the 200USD reward tier plus a 9 inch Don Plushie…
That is… worryingly specific.
Last but not least, for pledges of 600USD or more: title “Alpha” plus “Everything from the $200, reward tier plus your very own animated background character designed by you.”
And he still had to deliver the last promises from the indiegogo…
For the confused ones, here is order to chaos:
The first and second campaigns were raised around in 2012–13. The third one was declared in 2014, shortly followed by the fourth one on Kickstarter.
The fifth one, We’re getting on that one later…
“OK, the project was pretty much left again in a tough spot due to Ryhan’s unbelievable incompetence. So what happens next?”
The waves.
“And then the second blunder came. Ryhan began to personally respond to criticisms.”
-Andrew Fein
Ryhan was astonishingly bad at taking criticism and lacked any bit of professionalism. He most likely didn’t have it in the first place…
The criticism ranged from nit-picks to heavy questions about the game’s development and design to questions about the funds of the backers and even concerns about the production costs and resource management.
The criticism was either met with ignorance or utter animosity…
“Holy -fuck- was that a disaster. Ryhan couldn’t take the professional side and just sit back and let people lambast the project. But people were mad, rightfully so, in that they had put money into the project and hadn’t gotten everything promised yet.
So they wrote some pretty hateful stuff on our public pages. And Ryhan responded in kind with some pretty hateful responses. ‘Where’s our stuff?’ “Fuck you, you try making a game and see how easy it is!” Just to give an idea of how he acted.”
-Andrew Fein
In one particular instance, a individual by the name of Nicholas Day (then username Grangach) started pointing out the project’s flaws and then was told by Ryhan, who was in control of the team’s account, to practically shove it.
On three different platforms might I add…
Ryhan was so bad at being professional that he contacted Andrew to take over the team’s Skullgirls forums account, to handle the chat with Mike Zaimont…
“He even once contacted me to take over the Skullgirls forum account we had, in order to talk to Mike Z.
Now, I want this on public record, but I’d always believed Mike Z was a human piece of shit, since long before all the recent shit. It wasn’t until THIS interaction, though.”
“The Skullgirls forums were not nice to Ryhan. He was always trying to ask for help and feedback but they blew him the fuck up. For negative reasons, IE, being a furry cited as one such reason, but they were a mix of people mad about the fundraiser and people being dicks.
None of them were as bad as Mike though. Imagine being Ryhan for a second, and having the guy you look up to, who inspired you, to essentially say ‘Never make games ever again and go kill yourself while you’re at it.’”
“So I took over the account for a second, and I talked to Mike. I tried being respectful, kind, trying my best to hold a conversation, but boy did he have words for me, the ‘Lead Game Designer’. I was basically a child, when it came to fighting game technical knowledge. But he pulled no punches. Saying I was just making ‘Furry Street Fighter’, calling me a moron for wanting to design for fighting games, just really laying into me. Despite that, I continued to be professional. I didn’t call him any names, I apologized for my inadequacies.”
-Andrew Fein
Now, it is very likely that all that HELLFIRE was fanned after EvilDog (and possibly Ryhan) rejected Mike Zaimont’s advice and offer to be provided with the Skullgirls game engine. The spiral can be found here, at its untouched form, along with a compiled image archive with the highlights.
It still raises the unanswered question though: Why did EvilDog lose his shit? Was it a sense of pride? Was it something deeper?
Then someone called EventStatus found out about Ryhan’s bullshit and spat fire on his lack of professionalism.
These interactions practically burned every bridge that the team had with the Skullgirls community, leaving them(obviously)at a much unfavourable spot. They tried to gain their support, but Ryhan and EvilDog fucked up.
By now, you, the reader, should have a complete yet tangled image of what Ryhan Stevens was: An all-around incompetent man, that lacked any leadership, financial and overall management skills, had a poor social media attidude, with him being easy to anger, was overall ignorant of every situation, pretty much did not know how to properly conduct PR and grossly underestimated the scale and cost of the entire project. Furthermore, as described by Lance, Ryhan was prone to bipolar mood swings and was completely indecisive. Just by his interactions with other people and backers of the project, every reply hints a sense of megalomania and arrogance. All of this earned him the hate of the fighting game community’s forums. When I asked Lance for more information back in January, he clarified that the lead animators and programmers did get paid, but ended the phrase with “I think”, which made me suspect that Ryhan only paid them half of what they were promised, which by itself, isn’t a far fetched possibility but rather a fact that has yet to be confirmed. Meanwhile, the “lesser” artists, in Lance’s words, the ones that handled the inking, coloring, shading and such got screwed over not getting paid what they were promised, especially after crunching to get the third and last character (Don) done. Speaking of Don, he was a very popular character among the fans. Actually, he became so popular that Ryhan got sidetracked by planning a spinoff…
While the game was STILL in development…
“He already commissioned some other artist for concept art and a poster for his hypothetical beat ’em up akin to Streets of Rage and showed it off to the team… it looked nice, but it was clear his attention towards the fighting game he hired us for was absolutely divided.”
-Sorcerer Lance, January, 2022
Lance later remarked that Ryhan’s incompetence was so great, that one of the lead animators took it upon himself to become the leader in getting shit actually done.
Now, imagine being that incompetent to the point where one of your employees basically mutinies…
However, the mutiny did not succeed due to obvious property laws, unfortunately…
From what I “collected”, there was another problem that Ryhan caused because of his lack of forward thinking, this one had to do with the studio. Since Ryhan was located on the southeast coast of Australia, and since most, if not, the rest of the team was scattered around in North America, it posed a natural timezone barrier that could have been bypassed with the enstablishment of a centralized communication center. However, Ryhan did nothing to alleviate the problem and the only means of communication between him and the team was Skype and his email(as far as I know), since his Twitter and Facebook were repurposed to be the game’s accounts. Despite the fact that the team had some sort of communication between the departments, it was rather limited and the departments were isolated between their own or similar departments(e.g. the artists could communicate with the animators, but it was not constant).
Remember, development started in 2011, with individuals joining the project over the course of its run, having to use the already (horribly) enstablished communication lines. Discord was released on May 13th 2015. Even if the team’s members started using Discord to enstablish a better means of communication, it wouldn’t have done a lot, since the damage had already deeply rooted itself.
Now back to the story…
Meanwhile, Andrew found out that Mike was going to attend the Ultimate Fighting Game Tournament 10 at Illinois. So Andrew took his notebook and went to the tournament.
“Funny enough, He was also going to UFGT10 in illinois that same weekend. So pretty much as soon as I finished talking to him, I had to get up and go to the same event he was going to for Street Fighter 4/Street Fighter X Tekken. Imagine my surprise to see his presentation there?”
“So I sat down, got out my notebook, and just took notes. Mike is really smart, he knows his shit, but before he even started the presentation he prefaced it with ‘If you wanna design fighting games; don’t!’ People laughed, but I was a little upset.”
“Anyway, I sat through Mike’s presentation, people got up after and walked up to say hi, shake his hand, so I did too. I said ‘Hi Mike, my name is Andrew Fein 40%Flashkick, lead designer for Beast’s Fury. We talked over the skullgirls forums the other day.’
“He was scared.”
“Mike was an internet tough guy, through and through. But he was small, and I was very big. I was an intimidating fellow. However, I didn’t do anything to him. I just asked him ‘I want to ask you some questions, and I want some real answers this time. Can you do that?’”
“Mike sat down with me and we talked about the game in earnest, and at the end, he gave me some good advice. ‘Play more fighting games.’ I took it to heart. So I did.”
-Andrew Fein
Meanwhile, voice actors got the shaft. Allegedly, Stevens fired Vincent’s voice actor, and his replacement, when they asked to be paid. He later came crawling back for the original voice actor, who agreed to be rehired only after being paid first. However, Stevens sampled “demo recordings” and passed them off as final audio so that he didn’t have to pay.
Let me repeat this:
Stevens sampled “demo recordings” and passed them off as final audio so that he didn’t have to pay.
Here are the Voice actor’s words:
“ Hi I voiced Vince for those boosting this.
So here is the fucked up thing,
They originally hired me, I gave them demo samples, loved it…months later I asked for payment. Got fired.
They hired someone else. They asked for payment. They got fired.This dude comes begging to me to rehire me as Vince, I say yes and give them some new samples cause I changed my sound setup, and under the condition I get paid first before they got everything else, they agreed…
MONTHS LATER
I find out they used not only like two of the new samples, but the old ones to make a “fully” voice character. (I say it quotations cause 3 battle noises, one delivery of a special attack and 2 pain noises is apparently MORE THAN ENOUGH //sarcasm)
What they did to not just myself and the staff who worked so hard on voicing, animating and programming this is unacceptable.
You never fuck with indie artists, cause we will know, we will spread and we will make sure your greedy scamming ass doesn’t get a single dime again.”
-Vincent’s voice actor.
Egregiously, a sequel and animated short film were planned…while the first demo languished in a two-year Development Hell. Upon release in 2015, the demo was a buggy, unbalanced mess and, apparently, for some reason, entire updates were dedicated to adding purely cosmetic elements.
AyaSenpai, at the request of Fein(he didn’t mention him to me in the interview)fully redesigned Beast’s Fury.
But who is AyaSenpai?
From whatever I gathered, AyaSenpai is the designer of the doujin fighting game MONSTER. At first, he joined the project early as a consultant, however he decided to take a chance at the project as part of the team after witnessing the project’s crowdfunding successes. Aya sent a contract for Stevens to sign(Since he was an independent contractor),however, Ryhan never signed Aya’s contract, and when approached about payment two and a half months later, Ryhan became hostile. Aya would learn that Stevens also owed money to Fein(Weird, he told me that he did not want dosh)and Evil Dog lead programmer Marco Arsenault(Aya learned that much later, after he bailed out).
Now, let’s back up a bit on something also worth noting.
During the third and fourth crowdfunders, before the bridges between the game and the Skullgirls community were burned, one individual asked if a man by the name of Adam Wan was involved in the project. EvilDog responded by saying that he doesn’t.
But there it was… Adam’s name in both the third and fourth crowdfunders on the staff section.
I do not know much about Adam but from what I gathered, Adam “Zaush” Wan is a furry artist that is widely for his…suggestive illustrations.
Adam was given the priority of developing the project’s GUI. Around the same year, Adam was accused by the furry community of being a bully and a sexual predator(Couldn’t find any solid evidence. Probably an information leak that must have been forgotten in the plains of the net). Stevens and Evil Dog quietly deleted all mentions of his name but did not elaborate further on his removal. Until an Internet chat log appeared(the log dates to the final months of the project before its cancellation, where Andrew was chatting with other individuals outside of the project, talking about its state. The individuals then question whether Adam Wan was kicked out or not.) The suspicions of the fans about Adam’s involvement were confirmed. They then interpreted the damage control as deliberately hiding information.
OK, back to Andrew’s side of the story…
With his newly found wisdom, it made designing the game going forward easier. The messy build was cleaned up a bit, but they still had the ancient problem of how they were going to pay for Evildog’s time.
“So then comes Blunder 3. We put out a new fundraiser.”
-Andrew Fein
The fifth fundraiser, also known as the last-ditch indiegogo, was the last crowdfunding campaign of the game. The goal now was to accumulate a sum of 185.000USDs, with the “intent” to be used for the completion of the game, its launch on PC, MAC and Linux, “8 character and stages Arcade Mode,Training Mode, Local Versus and Online Versus”
It also had stretch goals, with the highest being at 645.000USDs that “would have provided them” with Story Mode Animated Cut scenes + Animated Short Movie.
“In the end? This is what killed the project. We’d still yet to deliver the previous rewards in the last fundraiser, and here we were asking for more money. We needed EvilDog to finish the build, it was desperate. It reeked of desperate.”
-Andrew Fein, before the last-ditch campaign
Speaking of the rewards, Ryhan took the time to learn a new skill to combat this.
Unfortunately for everyone, it was deceit.
Stevens, allegedly, convinced one of his biggest supporters, by the name of Melodie(?) to lie on social media about receiving her wooden arcade stick, with Stevens promising to send her his arcade stick in return. He also convinced her that the rest of the team were “the bad guys” just to keep her in the illusion. He never gave the joystick and ghosted her. When AyaSenpai found out about it, he went to talk to her and tell her the truth. Aya kept telling her the truth but she was very adamant and did not believe him. ONLY after Aya mentioned his involvement in the Doujin fighting game, was she convinced that something wasn’t the way she thought it was.
That girl was terminally ill…
According to Aya’s description, she can’t walk and sometime after the chat between Aya and her, she was hospitalized for a month.
Today, she might be dead…
Back to Andrew…
“Did we learn our lesson though? Hell No. Ryhan doubled down. We tried getting big name support for the project as much as we could. We reached out to Maximilian, Egoraptor, whomever we thought could help us out, and boy was that some mixed results.”
Maximilian was convinced to promote the game by playing the build the team had on his stream. As Andrew put it: “It wasn’t the super final build, but it was coming along well enough to where we could present it. Things looked good.”
Arin on the other hand…
“Arin was blundered completely, however. We were hoping to get Arin to play the game on Game Grumps at the time, but Ryhan was such a bad email writer that he said ‘Yeah if you help MAYBE we’ll feature you in the game.’ Instead of just saying what he should have said, which is ‘Yeah if you help, WE WILL put you in.’”
“So Arin didn’t gamble on a maybe and said No. Which, ya know? I get that. I wouldn’t say yes either to a maybe. Which, in hindsight, is kind of what led to this whole thing, yeah? I shouldn’t have worked for a ‘maybe’ promise. Yet, I did.”
-Andrew Fein
On May of 2015, the campaign was launched with Promotion being solicited from professional fighting game player Justin Wong(Probably the second time I heard of him). Also, big emphasis on “promotion” because it was a tweet with “Check this shit out” with a link and a tag.
So it begins and…
“It failed. Like, hard. The new fundraiser didn’t secure jack shit. Evil dog got his other contract, and here we were, dead in the water with the internet trying to claw our guts out. It sucked. Imagine being a now 19 year old looking at all this hate, and anger.”
As a testament to all the bridges burned, it only grossed $1,620 (which, thanks to “flexible funding”, the scraps were definitely funneled to Ryhan’s pockets).
“I was kind of broken at this point.”
“I couldn’t design a good enough game that the game itself could stand up on its own two legs, and I had a project lead who kept sabotaging us with stupid pr shit. He kept making bigger, grander promises, and I tried to make them work, but I shouldn’t have.”
-Andrew Fein, broken
Now you might be asking, “Why were they wasting their time with crowdfunding? They should have tried to search for investors the MOMENT they got something.”
Oh, they did try to find investors. Actually, they did find investors. They had investors even before the last ditch.
And all of them were driven off…
According to Aya, all of the investors-including WayFoward Technologies, the creators of the game series Shantae-were driven-off by Ryhan’s behavior. When Aya was asked to elaborate on what Ryhan exactly did to piss-off the WayForward, he refused to fully elaborate on what he did, but just said: “He messed up something very important and they bowed out.”
One day, around in 2014(maybe), Aya and Ryhan go to another investor meeting. The meeting goes smoothly and they go back home. The next day, is contacted by Ryhan through an email, that the investors wanted a prototype within two weeks. Aya asked about the game engine’s source code but Ryhan told him that he couldn’t get the code from EvilDog, because “EvilDog couldn’t provide the code at that moment.”
Do you, reader, smell any bullshit in these words?
Anyway, Aya had an eye surgery scheduled during that week, but Ryhan managed to get him to reschedule it.
After two weeks of sleepless nights, Aya sent himself the prototype to the investors. And then, he was informed by the investors that they never said that they wanted a prototype in two weeks. What they actually said was “Make a prototype as soon as you can do.”
Aya, was, LIVID.
After digging into the supposed payments of the other members of the team, along with a lenghty chat with Mike Zaimont, Aya bailed out of the project and only then he started to think that the reason Ryhan couldn’t get the source code, wasn’t because EvilDog couldn’t provide it at the moment, but probably because EvilDog refused to do so…
After the bailout, Aya was contacted by RockawayCarter, a furry artist and avid Fighting game player. According to Aya, Carter formerly worked on Beast’s Fury as an artist but left the project because, simply put, Ryhan. Carter wanted to interview Aya on his involvement in the project.
However… According to Carter, the “interview” was more of a casual chat and when it came to his involvement, Carter was more of an “outside observer who tried to offer their expertise and was essentially rebuffed.”
At that point of the story, Carter just watched the dumpster fire.
Carter also told me that, through his interactions with Ryhan, he found out the following:
“He had this delusion that any game reviewed that has a score of less than 8 is a bad game that is not worth his time. He also openly shit on Skullgirls and Dragon’s Crown on a livestream of an animator.”
Also, Carter stated that he is no artist, but a guy who plays a lot of fighting games.
What I can confirm though, was that Ryhan hassled Aya for his design — despite that he never signed Aya’s contact to be legally entitled to it — and tried to stop the interview. That failed, and so Ryhan made his own FurAffinity interview to refute Aya’s points.
I personally tried to find to find the “interview” between Aya and Carter. Here is how it went:
>Found Carter’s page on Furaffinity.
>Cannot access it.
>Be forced to create a Furaffinity account.
>Go to journals
>Search
>Find nothing
>Return empty handed with a facial expression that expressed cringe…
OK, now back to 2015…
EvilDog had already left the team after the failed crowdfunding, leaving a only a handful of programmers in the team. The demo build they had was still a mess and they needed to tidy it up fast. So, Andrew had to call a friend of his for backup. That friend goes by the username of Akhos.
This is his story:
“Glad to see this project finally canned and hopefully Ryhan’s reputation will forever be tarnished. He’s a scumbag and a scam artist and screwed people over at any chance he got, myself included. Granted I got off very lightly compared to others involved, since I wasn’t involved too long.”
“For those curious, this is my experience with the whole thing:”
“I’ll spare the details of how I got involved, but the tl;dr version is that a friend asked me to help with frame data, and in the process of that one of the guys working on the project asked if I could help build a prototype for Beast’s Fury (this was around mid-October), since I had built a fighting engine for a fan-made game I was working on. From what I understand, the BF demo was…really, really, really bad. (I might add that it took them four years to get that demo out to begin with). So Ryhan brought this guy on board to re-design the entire game due to all of the negative feedback it was receiving. So using the new design document he had drawn up, I built the prototype (Ryhan wanted it in 2 weeks so he could show it to investors, so it’s a good thing I had my engine to work off of or that would have been impossible to achieve).”
“Then…that’s when things started going south. Aside from the fact that Ryhan owed money to the guy I was working with and was repeatedly pushing back the date to pay him, Ryhan was supposed to have a meeting with an investor to show him the prototype that I built. However, the day that the meeting was supposed to happen, Ryhan claims that the investor never contacted him. On top of that, Ryhan claimed that the work I did didn’t warrant him paying me…which is BS because I’m the reason they even had a prototype to show the investors to begin with, but I digress. Point being that we start to think that the whole investor story was a load of crap, and he threatened to drop the project if Ryhan didn’t pay what he owed. A few days passed and it turns out that the investor thing is legit, surprisingly enough…turns out that the whole 2 week deadline thing that Ryhan had mentioned was a load of crap and that the investment company was willing to wait for a prototype if need be. In any case, we spend the next few days continuing to work on and fine-tune the prototype…”
“…then out of the blue, Ryhan wants the guy I’m working with to learn Unity to build the game…and to learn it for free, and that’s on top of the work that we’re already doing for him. That doesn’t go over well, so after a heated discussion between Ryhan and him, Ryhan just says for us to work on the game ourselves, and that the budget for the programming is…something around $150k, I think. Him, myself, and another programmer would be paid for working on the game, but we’d only have around 12–14 months to do so. And we’d be doing everything, including the UI work and such. Shortly afterwards…Ryhan starts flip-flopping again. Not only has he still not paid the guy I’ve been working with, not only was I not getting paid for my work on the prototype, but the other programmer that was working with on the project wouldn’t be getting paid either (Ryhan claimed that “he couldn’t afford to”). Not too long after that info was given, the other programmer dropped the project, as did the guy I was working with, and I followed suit.”
“Best part is that the investors that Ryhan was working with refused to work with him because of all of the crap that he’s tried to pull, and just how unprofessionally he acts. They would only work with the project if the guy I was working with became the team lead instead. But Ryhan is far too stubborn to let that happen, so we just washed our hands of it. The best part is that Ryhan was STILL asking him for help with the project but still would not pay what he owes. To this day he still hasn’t.”
“That’s just the light stuff. It gets worse beyond that, as you’ve probably seen. The guy I was working with can give more details on the depth of Ryhan’s stupidity, ignorance, and just how shitty he treats people in general, but it’s up to him if he wishes for that to be shared here or not. The above is what I remember from the time I was involved.”
-Akhos, in the now archived Shoryuken forums, 2016
This is where something gets interesting. Because, in Akhos account, he said that Ryhan told them that they have a dealine of two weeks, which likewise Aya’s account, the deadline was a lie. When I asked Akhos if there was anyone in the team by the username of AyaSenpai, he told me that he didn’t know. EvilDog was still working there when Aya was making the prototype, but when Akhos was called to help, EvilDog had already left.
In Aya’s case, the demo was still in development. In Akhos case, the game’s demo was already out and needed clean-up.
This led me to only one conclusion…
Ryhan had used the deadline lie twice.
Meanwhile, Andrew…
“I wasn’t doing much anymore. I wasn’t designing new characters or working on more Design Doc stuff. Ryhan brought on another gentleman, someone who seemed cool enough, but he had some wildly different ideas for what the game could be. We didn’t really butt heads, I just nodded.”
I wish I asked about the name of that gentleman.
On January 7th, 2016, after five years of hell, the project had collapsed under it own weight…
“Beast’s Fury, after a year’s worth of limping along in a zombified demo state and failing miserably to attract more investment, finally shut down on January 7th. Not only were backers who hoped to get more than a demo completely screwed, folks who’d worked on the game were stiffed on expected pay. They soon took to Twitter with anecdotes of working with creator Ryhan Stevens, and the picture they painted was of a project riddled with amazingly poor design decisions under the control of someone who seemed prone to cultivating bad PR and who was reluctant to actually pay people.”
-A now archived storify post on the project.
“With my apathy and disinterest in play, Ryhan was getting increasingly frustrated with me. So in January of 2016, he said something that the new guy saw, and then shared with me. ‘Yeah if he keeps acting like this I’m not going to pay him.’”
“I was heart broken. Everything I’d done, all the work I’d put forth at this point, all the effort I’d put in to the project, for him to say that? He had a history of saying dumb shit and then regretting it and apologizing later, but in that moment, I’d had enough.”
“I quit.”
“Ryhan tried to apologize, tried to tell me he was sorry, tried his hardest to say he was an idiot, but I wasn’t having it. I’d been destroyed by social media, and what he said was the last straw. From then on, he tried to do it himself, but soon closed down the project.”
-Andrew “40%Flashkick” Fein, got tired of Ryhan’s shit
Ryhan Stevens, in an attempt to save face, and sought work elsewhere in the game industry, did another FurAffinity interview ,but a conga line of voice actors and animators publicly alleged him of poor leadership and stiffing their pay. Some onlookers regard the train wreck as how not to make a fighting game.
He left the internet and was never seen or heard from, ever again…
Despite this, the game’s Facebook, Twitter account and YouTube channel, were left untouched. These are still up to this day. Same goes for the crowdfunders…
The demo links are also still up in the crowdfunders, but the domains that housed the demos were deleted long ago. The only way for one to get an image of how the gameplay played out is to watch a video with gameplay in it. Example given, HurtBoxTV.
Ben Halstead would move on with his art, later on becoming the technical director for “The Ghost & Molly McGee”
Patrick Stannard would also move on with his art, later participating in the animation department of Netflix’s Castlevania for six episodes. After that, as the producer of the music video TWRP: Starlight Brigade, and after he will go on to direct ten episodes for Netflix’s Masters of the Universe: Revelation.
After being cheated out of his pay that could’ve immensely helped him after getting hit by Hurricane Irma, Sorcerer Lance had been fruitlessly looking for freelance work while mainly doing commissions. When I talked to him back in January he stated that “current events haven’t made things much easier since then…”
AyaSenpai would move on by working on other projects. On September of 2018, a full two years after Beast’s Fury was cancelled, Christian Stewart, one of the developers behind the game Pocket Rumble, a fighting game, released a one hour and forty-seven minute interview with AyaSenpai. In that interview, Aya talked about his experience, from his work before Beast’s Fury, to the previously-mentioned Two-week-deadline lie and the deceived terminally-ill girl.
On the comments section of the indiegogo campaign trailer on youtube, one commenter had this to say:
“This guy tried to make a AAA quality game using barely enough money to pay a single AAA developer’s yearly salary. Wait, scratch that, he tried to make a AAA quality game, pay crowdfunding cuts, and manufacture and send backer rewards on less than a single developer’s yearly salary. And people are surprised this failed? This was doomed from the start. $25K (Indiegogo) and $45k(Kickstarter) will not get you a finished game. It will get you a rough prototype at best, and the fact that the project was horrifically over-scoped, meant it was dead from the start. The guy’s actions are incredibly shitty, and the people he hired absolutely should get paid, but from the looks of it, both he and his backers have no idea how much it cost to make a game. All of them had unrealistic expectations for this project, and that was why this got big enough to hurt so many people instead of just dying in the funding stage. If you want to make a dream game and can’t animate, program, or design, you better be loaded or you better start hitting those books and begging for all the help you can get, because games are fucking expensive and they take a lot of time and years of specialized labor.”
In the comments section of the “Beast’s Fury EXPOSED” video, a commenter who was a 150USD backer, wrote about his experience when he met Maximilian Dood and asked him about Beast’s Fury:
“As one of the $150 dollar backers of this title who will never see it come to pass, I wanted to know Max’s take on it. So two years ago I went to his panel at EVO to ask him. I told him straight up I wanted to know his thoughts about a topic and he said ok. I simply said “Beast’s Fury” Max broke eye contact with me and stared at the floor for a split second, then he stared off into the distance. He had that thousand yard stare as I’m sure he completely forgot about it and tried to think of something to say. he opened his mouth to speak but no words came and he closed it again. he tried again but again no words came. he then turned to me and when he went to speak I said “No. that’s all I wanted.”
-WelcomeToTwinklePark, Beast’s Fury EXPOSED, 2017
A user replied to his comment with “To give him the benefit of the doubt, he probably just completely forgot about it. If your story is true, then that’s all he really should’ve said…” The user TwinklePark simply replied saying “well, he did answer afterward. he said that he still thinks it’s a good idea and it was a shame that things turned out the way it did. I just wanted his initial reaction”
Marco “EvilDog” Arsenault would later participate in the Gameplay programmers team for Watch Dogs 2. It is unknown whether he still works at Ubisoft or not, but if he does… Godspeed man…
Andrew “40%Flashkick” Fein would move on with his life. Same goes for Akhos. I never asked both of them about what exactly they did after this disaster…
There were many individuals who had participated in the project, but couldn’t find a lot of info about them.
Now, you reader, might be asking: “Why didn’t I heard of this colossal tragedy in the first place? I mean, this should have placated as a prime example of how NOT to do a video game!”
Well, here’s the kicker, as best as I can explain it. Fighting games by nature are a niche genre. They’re niche because they’re a competitive genre of gaming that not only takes lots of time and dedication to start seeing tangible success in, but also because the sole deciding factor of said success (or lack thereof) is the person.
You can’t blame your team or the stage when you lose. Unless there was some form of cheating or technical issues, the loss is 100% your fault. (That factor pretty much laid the foundation for decent sportsmanship in the Fighting Game Community.)
Now if you take the Fighting game part and combine it with furries, which is a widely known community but still, quite niche, the end result would be something very VERY niche. Like I mentioned much much earlier, if it weren’t for Max’s and Arin’s support and advirtising and whatever, the third and fourth campaigns would only have amassed scraps and the game would have landed into more obscurity.
The catastrophe that was the Skullgirls forums, plus Ryhan’s behavior becoming known in other forums like Shoryuken, also contributed to the game’s obscurity. After the game’s cancellation was announced, I found: that one archived article on storify, 4 discussions on Reddit(all of which were small), a discussion on the Skullgirls forums and another discussion on Shoryuken. After the date of cancellation, Beast’s Fury was never mentioned on the halls of the internet, ever again…
Something that I should have mentioned earlier is that some people considered the project to be a scam, with some others damning the entire development team.
The truth is, the game was a legit project, and that Ryhan Stevens was THE reason behind all of the pain and incompetence. The rest of the team were victims of Ryhan’s shit.
While looking for that one comment stating the financial cost of the game on the Indiegogo campaign trailer, I stumbled upon a very…interesting comment.
User by the name of “Xovelis TV” stated in the comments section that his “older brother” is the creator of Beast’s Fury and that he “actually called it that he was going scam everyone.”
When asked by a user if he is in contact with his “brother” he replied by saying that he cut contact with most of his family “due to them not being good people and drug addiction making them too dangerous to be around, he hasn’t spoken to most of his family in years.”
At first, the use seemed somewhat shady, but then I came to the conclusion that he was some scum that wanted clout.
First of, Ryhan at some point did care about the project, but somewhere during the development mid-way, he started to care less about the game and more about himself.
That is according to AyaSenpai in the 2018 interview…
Second, the way Xovelis’s comments are writing look and feel a bit shady:
“My older brother is the creator of Beasts fury and I actually called that he was going to scam everyone, and what happened, he did scam everyone, he took the money and ran”
“No I don’t, I actually cut ties with most of my family due to them not being good people and drug addiction making them too dangerous to be around, I haven’t spoken to most of my family in years”
-The comment and the reply to another user.
Third, he did not only post his comment on the indiegogo trailer, but he also posted it on Frosty’s exposition video…
and finally, four, Xovelis made the comment a year ago…
Five years after the game was cancelled…
Unless that guy comes forward(which he most likely will NOT) he is to be a considered a scum that wanted to scrounge clout by impersonating an individual that may, or may not, exist.
Two years later, a traversty had sent shockwaves…
Hunt Down The Freeman, a traversty of a fan game, with a development story similar to Beast’s Fury, but with key differences like 1: the devs and actors didn’t really get paid in the first place, and 2: “costed less” since there was only one crowdfunding campaign that only amassed 12USDs by a single backer, had not only managed to send shockwaves to the mod community and Valve themselves, but also to the entire gaming community. To add salt to the injury, the failure had formed a thorn on Valve’s trust between them and the modding community.
Why is that disaster more popular? Simply put, the knowledge of the genre, the modding community around Half Life and the franchise itself, Half Life, are far more widespread in popularity. I mean, everyone knows what Half Life is, and everyone knows about its massive modding community.
There is a third key difference that I intentionally left for last: Unlike Ryhan Stevens, Berkan, the lead of HDTF, had managed to get away by finding a job in Activision-Blizzard…
(For a summarized version of the shitshow, go here.)
And let me tell, I firmly believe that this is unfair.
It is unfair that Beast’s Fury, a massive tragedy, got little coverage and recognition, and was just tossed and left over to collect dust for time immemorial.
That is why I want you, yes YOU reader, to share this elsewhere, to raise the awareness of this tragedy, so it can be pulled away from the shadows of obscurity. Besides, that was the reason I made this article in the first place.
To Andrew, Akhos, Sorcerer Lance, Ben Halstead, Patrick Stannard and all the others that suffered under Ryhan’s incompetence, may you find prosperity.
And now, a personal message…
When I practically reunearthed this story back in January, I went on to Twitter and made a thread talking about Ryhan’s incompetence. At the end of the thread, I basically called a fancy call to arms for modders, artists and whatever, to cannibalize whatever was left from the project. To this day, I still regret making this call to arms, not only because of its dangerous nature of cannibalizing someone else’s IP, but also I was too foolish to realize that the only thing that could have been effectively salvaged, was the concept, and by itself was pretty much useless without cultivation.
What I don’t regret though, is giving Lance a mention in the thread. The mention on Twitter kind of works like a ping on Discord
After getting his attention I asked him about some more info from his side of the story and told me what I had written down here, in this article.
After getting what he had to say, I wished him luck and parted ways.
Then I went after Akhos and asked him his side of the story. He didn’t have much to say, since what he wanted to say was written down in his the Shoryuken post after the project was cancelled.
However, his friend Flashkick (you already know the rest of his name) had a LOT to tell about his involvement. So, I sat down and waited Flashkick to finish his thread. After he finished, I asked him three final questions, with one of them being his thought on a cannibalization of the project’s remains because I was still under the illusion that something could have been done.
Thankfully, you put sense in me by saying that messing with someone’s property is generally a very bad idea(apparently, even if the project was cancelled and having to fuck-off from the internet, Ryhan still technically owns Beast’s Fury).
Flashkick further stated that he still sees Beast’s Fury art being ripped off to be used as Profile Pictures in RP websites…
Oh….
I thanked Flashkick for his time and parted ways.
After a few days, I decided to make a small video documentary about this tragedy.
It was a mistake.
From February to March, I made an attempt with the first iteration of how the video would be, which was documentary like. Then, I realised that with my video-making-editing-whatever skills(which were and still are non-existent) it would had been impossible to finish or even create. So, I dropped it and ran the second iteration around April to May. This one was supposed to be a more laid back type of storytelling. However, I failed on even this one, and since the first year’s exams were over the horizon, I was forced to abandon it.
…
June to July…
My mind was still exhausted after pulling myself through the exams and I couldn’t think straight. The third iteration was basically a commentary with background gameplay. At this point, I was done with ideas and I couldn’t bring myself forward to a lot. I felt constant burnouts and at one night, I discovered that I had developed some degree of insomnia. These were more of side reasons than something major. The main reason why I dropped the video idea, was because I grew extremely skeptical of YouTube and their guidelines. I wouldn’t have cared if I had managed to make the video and then get demonetized because of the “Stew” of the tragedy, but I highly doubted that they would have only done that. So I drop the idea altogether and focused on trying to get some rest that now gone Summer…
It is mid of September, I discover the site Medium through a friend of mine. I ask what it is and tells me that “It is a site anyone can write articles on anything.”
Then…Memory clicks.
And since I was good with articles, I started right away.
The end result?
The article itself.
