my hiveswap rant (its long and unedited so do with it what you will)

[Angelskittle]

Ok look
i literally couldnt give less of a ♥♥♥♥ as to whether anyone sees this or not, and cmon its steam activity whos really checking this lets not kid ourselves
heres my ♥♥♥♥♥♥ hot take on hiveswap
ill admit im a big ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ slut for homestuck and naturally hiveswap seemed like the next best thing to navigate to
theres been some red flags for years that everyone has just been collectively denying all the signs since 2012 homestuck fever but damn yall ok weird flex but fine i mean go off
ik there was some shady ♥♥♥♥ with the odd gentlemen stealing about oh i dunno a million dollars from the kickstarter to make the next kingsquest game but we just ignored it i guess because godamn we are homestuck ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ first and human beings second i guess and i literally cant say i didnt do the same damn thing
i havent even talked about the ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ game yet at this point but hold ur ♥♥♥♥♥♥ ♥♥♥♥♥ in ur pants im gettin to it
so whatever right? hiveswap was released in september of 2017 and everything was goin good i guess
the music slapped real hard, the art in the game was ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ beautiful, and the gameplay was pretty good (or rather as good as you can get for a point and click sidescroller) id honestly still recommend you play the game even if you dont know ♥♥♥♥ about homestuck because its just that good
and well damn now youd think that whats there to complain about right? cuz everything sounds pretty dandy and yeehaw cowboy ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ or what the ♥♥♥♥ ever
what it really comes down to is that the game's production was and still is a huge ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ mystery
the game took five years to launch since the initial kickstarter, and during that period there was rarely any news of development seen from andrew hussie or the what pumpkin team. and well then the hiveswap comic contest happened and WP started heavily interacting with the fanbase to feature art and comics for a chance to have the winner's fantroll put in the game. (there was some other prize ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ too but lets be honest no one ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ cared about that) and well then trollcall was a thing. every week there were two new hiveswap trolls revealed to the fanbase for a few weeks and it was ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ cool as hell. the character design was sick as ♥♥♥♥ and all the new trolls looked so cool. everyone was so excited and with everything going on we stopped caring about development news. then the comic contest ended, the winner was announced and we never heard anything about it since. its almost like it never happened. then 4/13/18 rolls around and everyone is ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ pumped because oh its homestuck day what if they announce hiveswap act 2? its just plain radio silence, which is pretty typical for what pumpkin at this point tbh.

Rn i just wanna take a break with the timeline ♥♥♥♥ for a quick blurb and disclaimer. Im not a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ historian. i have done no research whatsoever into the actual timeline of events so far, so im just going off of my own experience and memory. Second, i just want to state here how big of an operation this game series was, and still is suppossed to be. Not only was hiveswap going to have multiple games with 3+ hours of gameplay for each, there was going to be a separate sister series called Hauntswitch to mirror the adventures of joey and xefros on alternia with jude and dammek on earth. This is a massive degree of content to produce, and the sheer span of how long it had taken to get one game out should have been a massive red flag early on that people are still ignoring! Honestly im real ♥♥♥♥♥♥ pissed rn and i cant stress enough that hiveswap's development and team itself is shady and suspicious as hell while it hides behind a playful guise of fun characters and side content.
okay back to the ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ timeline i guess
so whatever, its been a few months during the span of all this ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ right? then oh ♥♥♥♥ guess what everyone at what pumpkin has been laid off and there is no one on the team ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ saying anything about it. all hiveswap and homestuck products and or merch related to what pumpkin have had all logos or anything resembling affiliation removed and its ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ scary. a bunch of time passes and everyone is ♥♥♥♥♥♥ scared and all like ♥♥♥♥♥ what the ♥♥♥♥. so apparently viz media now is in charge of the rights for homestuck and hiveswap. (viz is a manga publishing company and theyre a pretty big ♥♥♥♥♥♥ deal) so a bunch of ♥♥♥♥ gets revamped and changed in an instant. mspaintadventures.com is changed to homestuck.com which is a pretty big shock thatd youdve heard about if youre anywhere near the homestuck fanbase. additionally, a bunch of licensing ♥♥♥♥ and the terms of service policy on homestuck.com is changed too. viz also announces that theyre going to be publishing and releasing the new set of homestuck books. (yknow cuz the old ones were ♥♥♥♥) and a bunch of other merch gets announced too. and yet despite all this, there is nothing relating to hiveswap. sooner or later, the hiveswap friendsims get announced. theyre going to be releasing visual novels on steam for a dollar that depict the trolls revealed in the trollcall interacting with the user who plays as the mspa reader. (at the time of me writing this the friendsims are still being released. honestly it was totally just a stunt to buy the devs some time because the scheduling of all of this is total ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥. there are 36 trolls in the trollcall. that makes a lot of friendsims.) so yeah we're getting friendsims every two weeks and so many fans are caught hook, line, and sinker for the promised allure of hiveswap act 2. then oh i dunno, the music team and the friendsim writers and devs are pretty active on tumblr now so a lot of fan interaction is happening. its better than before and certainly an improvement over the deafening silence of what pumpkin. then oh for ♥♥♥♥♥ sake of course, well into the release of the friendsims the team announces that this entire time they hadnt even started development of act two. so ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ GREAT I GUESS
honestly thats pretty much the entire timeline as of right now. and its so ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥.
my main point after writing all of this is basically that, dont ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ trust any of this ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥. it shouldnt be that much of a surprise that i dont trust andrew hussie, and that i dont trust a dev team i know ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ nothing about. the ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ website doesnt give me any info on them. from what i can tell theres no business adress or PO box listed on the official website, and while there may be a list of the team members, its safe to say that simply doesnt suffice.

tldr; I dont trust andrew hussie or anything remotely related to hiveswap development, and neither should you because if you inspect it even a little it appears so shady. At this point its not even about the game itself anymore, its about how much more suspicious can this ♥♥♥♥ get.

and hey if you did actually read everything i wrote, thanks a lot. it was mostly an unproofread rant and its certainly not rock solid, but i really needed to get my opinions and thoughts out there. thanks for listening

[Ꝏ]

Thanks for writing. It was fun trying to decipher the hearts

But for real, I agree with your sentiment. Radio silence for projects like these is a big mistake, that way you can easily turn fans into haters.
I think it's... admirable? that WP still wants to finish the Hiveswap series, but that doesn't change the fact that WP is... bad at video game development, for lack of a better description.

[Angelskittle]

Originally posted by ส็็็A wrenchin' Nep:

Thanks for writing. It was fun trying to decipher the hearts

But for real, I agree with your sentiment. Radio silence for projects like these is a big mistake, that way you can easily turn fans into haters.
I think it's... admirable? that WP still wants to finish the Hiveswap series, but that doesn't change the fact that WP is... bad at video game development, for lack of a better description.

thanks again for reading my dumb rant lmao
and oof i forgot that steam was gonna censor my swears so oof
but thank you for the reply and honestly yeah i totally get what youre saying and i think you put it really well

[kkclassico]

I applaud you. I did a lot of investigation into the subject a while ago, it is shady as heck, man. It's turning into Star Citizen.
It really does make me mad. However, Homestuck fans are huge orbiters who DON'T QUESTION WP AT ALL.
I wish we could like, send Hussie an ultimatum, but the people who actually notice this stuff are a small portion of the people who want act 2.
Everyone else is under an arseload of NDA's. Legal terms, Viz won't let them tell anyone anything.
I want Hiveswap too, but I also realize that it's gone for the worst.

[Angelskittle]

Originally posted by Red Scarf Teller:

I applaud you. I did a lot of investigation into the subject a while ago, it is shady as heck, man. It's turning into Star Citizen.
It really does make me mad. However, Homestuck fans are huge orbiters who DON'T QUESTION WP AT ALL.
I wish we could like, send Hussie an ultimatum, but the people who actually notice this stuff are a small portion of the people who want act 2.
Everyone else is under an arseload of NDA's. Legal terms, Viz won't let them tell anyone anything.
I want Hiveswap too, but I also realize that it's gone for the worst.

absolutely yeah
:/ it kinda feels like a lost cause at this point

[Angelskittle]

Originally posted by Retronaut:

I'm playing through Hiveswap right now, but haven't finished it. Honestly, a lot of the complaints about the writing feel petty to me. No matter what you think of Cohen or any other writer as a person, I believe the writing is fantastic. It's distinct from Homestuck: Act 1, and amusing in its own way. It's less frenetic and more subtle. I love the humor of Homestuck: Act 1, but Hiveswap is better so far because there's very little filler.

But, as for the actual game, it crashed on me 4 times so far. If you want to play Hiveswap, save constantly. I hope the team working on Act 2 removes these BS crashes.

The rant i made here was more of a criticism of the actual development team, rather than the game itself. I believe that the writing in the game is quite good, and I certainly had a great time playing it, but Hiveswap is rather short and all of my personal issues and gripes with its development are mentioned in the above rant. I don't want to sound too rude but, did you read what I said at all, or did you simply skim the title and rush to the comments section to defend the game? There's nothing wrong at all with liking Hiveswap, this is just my opinion. Take what I say with a grain of salt, if you will.

[platinum]

i wont argue, but i believe they are spending FAR TOO MUCH time contributing to fans of the extended zodiac trolls (far too many of these) by making recycled friendsims to feed and blind fans of them from the fact act 2 is not being worked on. also, has anyone noticed there is merch of hiveswap without a full release? this just kind of annoys me considering it sometimes feels like viz/whatpumpkin want to milk the universe without picking up on story.

[ClownVoid]

I did not read it all the way but the things that i did read are some good facts. but the reason they did make the extended zodiac was because is its a capricon its going to be gamzee or really close to gamzee. but still, i love the points you brung up <3

[ShockSword]

I personally didn't like Hiveswap act 1 and the troll call stuff all that much. However, there are people like you that do take these things to heart and really enjoy them. The fact is that there is an active fanbase that's filling the role of demand but a dev team that hasn't been able to fulfill their part of supply is really upsetting. The whole friendsim and extended zodiac seem to be a band-aid solution on keeping the fans happy. Give the fans what they actually want, dammit, a new act of hiveswap.

[platinum]

Originally posted by ShockSword:

I personally didn't like Hiveswap act 1 and the troll call stuff all that much. However, there are people like you that do take these things to heart and really enjoy them. The fact is that there is an active fanbase that's filling the role of demand but a dev team that hasn't been able to fulfill their part of supply is really upsetting. The whole friendsim and extended zodiac seem to be a band-aid solution on keeping the fans happy. Give the fans what they actually want, dammit, a new act of hiveswap.

not to mention the friendsims are always seemingly reskins

[󰀉tempeh󰀉]

Originally posted by ส็็็A wrenchin' Nep:

Thanks for writing. It was fun trying to decipher the hearts

But for real, I agree with your sentiment. Radio silence for projects like these is a big mistake, that way you can easily turn fans into haters.
I think it's... admirable? that WP still wants to finish the Hiveswap series, but that doesn't change the fact that WP is... bad at video game development, for lack of a better description.

It might be more accurate to say they're bad at project management. Hopefully that's something Viz's greater experience will address, but I'd imagine Viz is only in it for the money, and has many other competing project proposals to consider. They must have seen some potential if they committed the resources to purchase the IP, though. But who knows what their plans entail?

[Professional Prejaculator]

Its shady yea but we arent getting involved, keep in mind like you said a lot of ♥♥♥♥ has happened and its unfair for the company, everyone is getting on their arse when they got royally ♥♥♥♥ and they want act 2, ill gladly wait and check in every once and awhile, i genuinly dont want it to be a lost cause because while it took a long time and its not the BEST game, act one hooked me, it caught my attention and enticed me back into the webcomic i had dropped off of so long ago, i respect what work was put into it and hope that there is more to come, its amazing to me, it was really enjoyable on the first play and i want the rest but i know based off of how long it took the first time not to expect much, pretty much expect the incredibles 3 to take just as long lmao.

[Invader19]

Gonna start by saying that I haven't even thought about Hiveswap for quite some time now. I only just now checked in to see if anything was announced because of the Homestuck epilogue that just happened- which I haven't read because from what everyone is saying and the summaries I've read it seems like a miserable piece of ♥♥♥♥ fanfic commissioned by an author (Hussie) who actively hates his creation (Homestuck) and its fanbase even more. I'm sure I will eventually get around to reading it, I'm not a 'superfan', but HS is a thing that I loved for many years and I guess I don't want to ruin my memories of it by reading such a horrible thing.

Since I haven't been checking out any HS news for a few years now, all this stuff about friendsims and what pumpkin employee layoffs is news to me. I also only heard that there were snapchats or something? What even is all this stuff, could I get a quick explanation? I did know that the website mspadventures became homestuck, and I remember the extended zodiac quiz and that fantroll thing, and that Hussie hasn't said a single word since then, so I knew things were in a bad spot regarding Act 2, but man it sounds like it's way worse then I'd imagined.

I want to hope that we will get Act 2, and 3, and whatever other games were promised, but Hussie has always always always had problems delivering things on time and of the quality expected, and apparently he has very poor business sense (or at the very least money management) and over the years its become obvious that he is bone tired of Homestuck and no longer cares so it's impossible to not be skeptical about any promises.

I dunno what I'm trying to say here. Maybe that I want to be optimistic of the future, but deep down, if Hiveswap is just completely dropped forever, I won't at all be surprised.