Seeing what happened to Ultrakill is a particularly sore point for me on a personal level--as mentioned in the
FP/KO thread, I'd been following the game since near its beginning. As in back when it was just a single forum thread of dozen or so people talking about a user's amateur Unity project on itch.io, way before Hakita went commercial with it. It was only after he signed on with New Blood that it became such a phenomenon that I'll see even total strangers bring it up out of nowhere.
In another life, I'd have been happy for him, but I just feel dead inside when looking at the clusterfuck it's become. It's a shame, because it's a legitimately good game in my opinion. It'd done a lot of things right back when it was just a one-man show, and even now there's a lot to like about it (again, IMO). But I had the misfortune of watching those chodes slowly infest the project in
real time. It's not even New Blood or the other professional hires like Gianni who I'm talking about, it was the vultures who were circling it on Knockout itself as it grew in popularity--I saw development priorities shift as more and more of the forum's rogues gallery joined the team and tainted it with their self-serving degeneracy. And so, seeing it become so infamous that it's gotten a thread on the Farms hits close to home, not because I don't think the whole shitshow deserves it (it sadly does), but because for a while I had the rare privilege of seeing a breakout hit in its initial stages of forming from
behind the scenes, and had glimpsed a path where things didn't have to turn out this way. Sometimes I wonder if there was anything I personally could've done to alter things.
It's a weird feeling knowing there's a game in your Steam library with official sections in its "dev museum" level devoted to people you knew and hated
personally. I haven't even touched the game in about 3 years. I can't bring myself to, not after seeing what happened to it. Call me a pussy if you must, but going back to where I started off, I've never felt this sort of disappointment in a game on such a
personal level.
Again, Hakita's own thread titles on the game over the years really do say everything about how production went to shit.
(2019 was the itch.io days, 2021 was post-New Blood acquisition/commercial release, and by 2023 the downfall was in full force--all in rough sync with FP/KO's collective trooning out)
both surprised and horrified that this genre of all managed to get infested by troons with their brains rotten from watching too much porn
