- Joined
- Aug 7, 2017
There is no shortage of egotrips in fiction and cinema, but what about video games? First things first, let's define what makes vanity projects what they are(you are free to correct me on this and suggest more).
Anonymous Agony. The perfect specimen, hits almost every point from the list. If you know something about this masterpiece of an egotrip, please, share, since all I was able to find were just brief recollections from those who followed the development back in the day. I wish I would be able to talk to people who suffered under this guy.
The review from Mandalore Gaming. Not very good, but gives you an idea of what it is.
Yandere Simulator and The Lunar Scythe. Both games dead on arrival and never to be released prototypes are by Alex Mahan, who has a giant thread here. Despite having some experience in the field, Alex hasn't learned to code after almost 11 fucking years of dragging this shit anywhere, but a release window. Most of the game was made for free by volunteers and there are tons of messages about misconduct, theft and just shit treatment. Both are full of Alex's teenage edgy worldview i.e. "dark and serious" as he calls it. According to him he keeps YS around just because he doesn't want to prove his haters right and he had a lot of slapfights before resorting to his highly moderated Discord and Reddit hugboxes.
YIIK. Without going much into authors being bad at gamedev and putting "postmodern" into the title without really understanding what it means, you can feel that the only reason they made this was the giant disaster that their previous game was. They were so upset by the backlash that near the end of YIIK the protagonist of that game comes to the aid of YIIK protagonist and gives speech about not giving up despite and shit.
Video that gets deeper into the dev drama and their previous game.
Derek Smart and his games. To his credit he learned to code to make his games and worked on them mostly alone, but holy shit if he has an ego which led to him becoming a full on lord of Tekken in internet slapfights back in Usenet days. No self inserts, but I doubt there is a game able to handle an ego like this one.
Video about the old drama.
- Author is obviously an egomaniac or at least terribly narcissistic.
- Had no previous experience in the field and just one day decided to crush it with his marvelous never seen before idea.
- Usually takes a role of an idea guy behind the project, but can also do some stuff for it.
- Refuses to actually learn or take criticism to heart due to the reasons listed above.
- The product has author's sueish self-insert or his world views as a immutable truth, but usually both of these.
- The plot, if the product has one, usually bent over towards the protagonist always being correct and his enemies being wrong.
- Lots of drama, fights and departures behind the scenes thanks to constant clashes between author's ego and the voice of reason from the team.
- All of the above leads to the end product being rushed, underdeveloped or sometimes just canceled.
- If it gets released and meets a wave of criticism, the author either goes DFE or most likely starts slapfight tournament with his critics everywhere he can.
Anonymous Agony. The perfect specimen, hits almost every point from the list. If you know something about this masterpiece of an egotrip, please, share, since all I was able to find were just brief recollections from those who followed the development back in the day. I wish I would be able to talk to people who suffered under this guy.
The review from Mandalore Gaming. Not very good, but gives you an idea of what it is.
Yandere Simulator and The Lunar Scythe. Both g
YIIK. Without going much into authors being bad at gamedev and putting "postmodern" into the title without really understanding what it means, you can feel that the only reason they made this was the giant disaster that their previous game was. They were so upset by the backlash that near the end of YIIK the protagonist of that game comes to the aid of YIIK protagonist and gives speech about not giving up despite and shit.
Video that gets deeper into the dev drama and their previous game.
Derek Smart and his games. To his credit he learned to code to make his games and worked on them mostly alone, but holy shit if he has an ego which led to him becoming a full on lord of Tekken in internet slapfights back in Usenet days. No self inserts, but I doubt there is a game able to handle an ego like this one.
Video about the old drama.
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