Ant Simulator was shaping up to be an interesting take on the survival genre. Now, sadly (and much to the frustration of the project's backers) development on the game has come to a halt with lead coder Eric Tereshinski making claims about scandalous behaviour going on behind the scenes at the studio.
In a video posted on YouTube, Tereshinski alleged how his co-developers, who he had known for more than a decade and who he considered friends, had used "the overwhelming majority of our Kickstarter money and the Ant Simulator investment money on liquor, restaurants, bars and even strippers".
Tereshinski said that due to legal wrangling, he has had to remove all tutorials for the game from YouTube (including the Ultimate Game Dev tutorial series, the part of the project that was funded via Kickstarter) and says that he is no longer able to work on the game and then release it without his former colleagues for fear of legal action.
"My ex-business partners said if you release Ant Simulator without us, we will sue you," he said. "A year and a half ago, I signed an LLC agreement with them. I trusted them and they had been my friends for 11 years. That means that resigning, and therefore cancelling the development of Ant Simulator, is really the only option available to me right now."
With the game cancelled Tereshinski says that he is contacting backers and trying to arrange refunds.
However, there's always two sides to any dispute, and the accused parties - Tyler Monce and Devon Staley - have come out with their own statements, and their explanation of events paints a very different picture.
"It's completely false," Monce said of the allegations when speaking to Game Informer. "I don't know why he's painting that picture, but the reality is that anything that was spent in a bar or restaurant was very reasonable in nature when you look at any business, including video game companies. It was part of our operating budget, it's not anything that was excessive. It was all reported to the IRS. The picture he's painting about that is 100 percent bull****."
According to Monce the relationship between the three colleagues deteriorated late last year.
"He took control of everything," Monce explained. "He took control of not only all the company's physical property, our bank accounts, our social media accounts, our website (which he changed to just our faces for some unknown reason), that was all him.
"This all started to take place right after the game started to get really popular late in the summer. My personal theory is that he wanted to take it all for himself and cut us out of it. We made it clear that we weren't going to let him do that, because we had a moral and legal right not to."
Devon Staley, the former director of operations at Eteeski, explained that there were multiple parties involved, not just the three caught up in this scandal: "We had a lot of contractors. Nine or ten people who worked on this game. Models, Rigging, our environmental art, and our human art, were all done through contractors."
"We paid all those contractors, as well," Monce confirmed. "He's making this claim that we spent all this money on expensive entertainment, and that's completely false. We paid all these people who worked for us."
When speaking to Polygon, Tereshinski alleged that his former colleagues were deceptive in their bid to get access to a PS4 dev kit, something that Monce denies:
"We had everything ready to go," Monce said of conversations with Sony with regards to getting hold of a dev kit. "All we needed from Eric was a playable demo. He was not able to deliver a playable demo. I spent a month right after GDC getting ready for that. That's a big part of where our financial resources went to. All the infrastructure was in place and all we needed was a playable demo.
"It looks fantastic, because of all the great modelers and artists and stuff. But gameplay itself was taking a lot of time to get off. If you show it in a YouTube video, it looks fantastic. But if you play the game, there's only three or four minutes of actual gameplay before you run out of things to do."
What will happen next remains unclear, with claims and counter claims circulating. Will the game ever see the light of day? With things as they currently stand it's hard to have a positive outlook.
Monce sums things up from his perspective by saying: "I think he wanted to create this outlandish story, grab headlines, and make us look terrible. So far, it's working for him."
On the other hand Tereshinski said: "The problem is these guys clearly demonstrated to me I should have no part of them. The clearest thing was I should get as far from these guys as possible."
It seems the situation is at an impasse, but one thing that we can say with certainty, in a mud fight no-one comes out clean, and all those involved have work to do if they're to repair their reputations.