Hey there!
You might be wondering what is going on with everyone's favourite project, Barkley 2.
Well, sit down, because it's a long story.
I am Paperjack, a programmer who got onboard the project because I was also worried about the project's status, so I just contacted the Tales' of Games FaceBook page (yes, I'm old) and I just so happened to appear at the right place and right time.
I will tell you how it all went down from my own viewpoint - keep in mind I was never part of the Original Tales Of Games team, just someone who hopped in trying to help at the very end of the story. What I will comment here is from a purely technical viewpoint and doesn't have anything to do with the team's interpersonal relationships.
The project has a very long history (almost 10 years in the making!) and this is reflected in the project itself. I was the last of a long line of programmers who came into the project, each with their own vision of how things should work, and everyone was doing their best to deliver this huge, ambitious game.
What I want to say is that I don't want to diminish the efforts of anyone - it is clear that there was passion AND effort, and a lot of both. They didn't "steal" the money by lazying around, the developers spent a huge amount of time on all of this, creating code and content.
But why is it that there isn't much to show then, you might ask?
When you work on a complex task, eventually mid-way through it becomes clear that there are better ways to do things.
Developers are then faced with a really hard choice, which is whether to start from the beginning, using the better methods, or to try to compromise and try to combine the new with the old.
Doing it from the beginning is the best option long-term, however it is slow, expensive and boring to do: you're redoing things you've already done, afterall.
Merging the methods tends to be much faster, however it introduces chaos into the system. It is hard to explain, but imagine building a house and halfway through, you decide to switch the plans with ones from a different architect. The new architect takes in mind what's already been built, however their own style and way of making things is very different. As a result, you will have a liveable house, but it will be disjointed.
Usually, people choose the latter because of a very simple reason: budget and time constraints. You don't have the time to start from scratch, because your development time is literally bound to a finite budget (in our case, the KS money + other funds the team members had).
As the game quickly grew in size and scope, this problem happened quite a few times, and the latter choice happened often.
Eventually, the codebase became chaotic, clunky and hard to work with. Things were all over the place, it wasn't clear what did what, legacy code was forgotten and standards were not constant. It became very frustrating to work on anything, but you could not simply restart from scratch and do things correctly because you do not have the money for it.
I do not blame the previous developers for this, it is an extremely common problem in larger software projects, as any experienced software engineer can attest.
When the project was announced and funded via KS, it was the very beginning of the video game Kickstarters. A lot of people just did not know how much it cost to make a video game, nor about the nuances of what it all implied. In short, they overpromised for the money they requested.
But, the main problem - and difference from a lot of other failed projects - was that they *cared*. That’s right, they all really cared about actually delivering the best game they could, but life is never so simple.
The developers were really enthusiastic at the beginning, but the sheer scope of the project and bad pacing (a lot of crunch happened), combined with the worsening technical state of the project, eventually ground them down and they burned out.
Going down the project's files you can literally feel the state of mind they had and how it was getting more and more negative. The last parts that were done are quite fucked up (in a literary sense, rather than qualitative) and you can feel them trying to let out their frustrations.
Eventually, the funds ran out. You might think 120k USD is a lot of money, but just calculate expenses for a couple of people and it's really not that much. It's two years at 12k USD for 5 people (only 1000 USD/mo!).
However, the TOG developers still kept going and developing FOR YEARS, basically for free. This really made me respect their discipline, but it clearly had a very heavy mental toll.
They didn’t just ditch the project, or request more money. Silently, they kept toiling away, chipping at the massive project in the dark.
Combining the burnout and forcing themselves to work for years, what inevitably happened was an explosion. I don't want to give names - neither do I know them, nor have worked with them - but it is a natural result of the environment that was created. I do not blame or accuse them of anything other than giving their best, I just honestly think that it was unavoidable.
Everyone was tired, burned out and penniless: the best kind of situation to ruin friendships and turn disagreements into hostilities. Small slights keep piling up and there’s no good experiences to wipe them away. Marriages get ruined for far less.
I come in the picture just after the explosion (or implosion?) happened, fresh like a flower and ignorant of the drama, and just concentrated on releasing the demo. I fixed some bugs and packaged it up. I did it for free because I was a fan of the original and I did not want my dream to end.
After we released the demo, I looked back at the whole project: the original GM2 project is massive and there's so much remaining that, for me, is unfeasible to complete it without a budget or completely rescoping the project. I selfishly gave the latter a few shots, unsuccessfully.
As more time passed without me or anyone touching the project, I realized that B2 had no future as it is right now.
We finally arrive at today, where after a long discussion, I finally decided to release all the files as open source.
Here they are:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1y-HMRcbGIB0sdqZLqpla8IPKiPvzWq95/view?usp=shari...
I hope this post gave you all some more insight on the project and why what happened has happened. I don’t hold bad feelings toward anyone, I just would like for B2 to see the light of the day, someday.
Feel free to contact me for anything, really.
Have a good day!
- PaperJack
