SoV3 Post Mortem #1

Hello everyone,

While I do have more stuff to share on TH2, I'd rather wait to have the visual elements that go with them before showing them to you. So meanwhile, I thought it would be a good idea to make a serie of posts about what Slice of Venture 3 should have been.

After all, it would be sad that all the prework we've worked on with PeakJump stayed on my hard drive forever without anyone seeing them. SoV3 is dead, long live SoV3 :D

And what better occasion than to FINALLY expose the guy who stole me money :)

Nito is at ease when pixel stuff don't roughly go over 100x100 pixels. But his comfort zone is more 48*48 or 72*72 (TH2 sprites are 48*72). So when came the problem of having to create side-view battlers at a bigger resolution I quickly took the decision to hire someone else for that particular part. Nito was happy I'd do and since SoV3 was supposed to shower me with money I thought that it was an important investment.

So I browsed a forum specialized in Pixel Art where it was possible to hire artists.

And I fell on someone that looked promising and I contacted him. He was interested in the project and we ended up discussing on Discord together.

The beginning was cool. I'll give you the timeline (I'm reading our conversation right now: I haven't kicked him from my contacts JUST for that moment :x). So we talked on Discord for the 1st time on January 12th (I wasn't kicked from Patreon yet). Things were progressing properly, I showed him Yuki, Ayame and Aleksia's sprites, described what I needed etc...

He quickly comes up with Aleksia's sprite (on January 16th so only 4 days after.)

At that moment I'm like "sweet, he's fast and good, this is going to be nice." And the same day, he asks me that I pay half of the commission price. He calculated that if he converted the number of hours needed to do all the animations of Aleksia, he'd roughly need $1,000 (30 hours x $35 per hour). That was for 12 animation poses + an idle one (the collapsed one).

Back then I couldn't aford to pay 1k in one go so that's why he asked for half the price. I was supposed to pay the other half once the work was finished. So at that moment, things are good. I pay him the $500 and wait for him to come up with the rest.

I contact him on the 20th asking him how it goes. He answers me on the 24th to tell me he had a bit of a bad schedule problem but it should be fixed. He shows me the final version with Aleksia's axe.

The day AFTER, he comes up with the following gif. Showing me he's done one full animation (victory one) and is working on the attacking one and the guarding one.

At that moment, SoV3 just came out and I have other things to think about (it's during the small timing window where SoV3 is out BUT not taken down.) I tell him everything is good and I'm like "Okay, he's going to show me the progress regularly and I'll just validate things as they come."

And then no more word until February 8th. Where I tell him that I had some little "problems" (duh) with my Patreon account and I ask him about the progress. He answers me the 19th (so 11 days after...) to tell me he had personal problems etc... At that moment, I'm fine. I'm like "it's bad timing, it's okay." He writes in his message that he's working hard and hopes he'll have everything finished by the weekend. I just answer that I'll be available on saturday but not sunday so we might have to wait for monday (so nothing more than a couple of days.)

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaand the next message is from me on March 13th basically asking him to have a conversation as he's taking way too long. At that moment, he came up with the base sprite and one animation in roughly 2 weeks, and now, in almost two months, he hadn't come up with anything else.

He answers me the same day with tons of excuses. Once again, personal life problems + the animations took much longer than planned. He tells me that as a token of good faith he'll give me some of the requested animations for free and he's basically saying "give me a couple more days and I'll show you the almost finished progress".

At that moment, I've already been fucked by quite a good amount of people so I know where this is going. I stay diplomatic, though. I tell him that I've already seen this situation and that I'd like to avoid the case of him actually finishing the sprites before telling me he doesn't want to keep on. Cause if I have to change the artist, I have to redo those sprites and I'll have sent the money to the trash bin. So if he's not motivated by the project anymore, I'd rather him telling me right away.

He answers, and I quote "I do have the total motivation". We chose a date for a meeting to go over the current progress. He never came. On March 22 I ask him if the fact he was absent is supposed to be the answer to our problem. He tells me that no and then the conversation is a way for us to try and catch each other because of timezone differences. And then we're moving to March 26th 2021. For THAT specific part I will copy/paste the conversation. Up to now, you have absolutely no way to tell if I'm actually saying the truth or not. So here are the final lines of our conversation. I've taken the beginning of the text field and the scroll button on the right so you can see I'm not lying. Those are REALLY our last lines.

As you can see, my final concern is "will you stay with us on the project"? And the answer is both "I'll stay and there will be no more delays". That was 1 year and a half ago. I've never gotten a single more message from him. And I didn't talk to him on purpose.

When you're a professional who's been PAID, you should be the one coming up and saying "here, I've done this and this, please check". Until then I had ALWAYS been the one calling out for him. So I thought "It's simple. If he's really honest, he'll come back with the content. Even if it still takes a couple more days/weeks. After all he maybe REALLY had huge troubles IRL."

Does he still have trouble IRL? Nope. https://pixelation.org/index.php?topic=21432.50

His thread on Pixelation shows that he did work for people in 2021, and he even bumped his thread last month, proving he's actually available.

As you can see, he's name is MaxCreed and I have no problem exposing this guy. He stole me $500. Okay, he stole me $465. Let's count one hour for the only animation he came up with (even if I'm not even able to use it cause I don't even have the original files, only that gif I'm showing you.)

Now, I hope you understand a bit better why I hate more and more having to contact new people. That guy had a presentation page with tons of references, artstyle etc... Proving that he was good at what he was doing, and professional enough to work on several projects. Did that prevent him from stealing me? Nope. Even in the case SoV3 was still on rails, how the heck am I supposed to trust another artist? I'd be like "do half of the job first if you want to see money" and they'd be "I don't deal with scammers, fuck off" (and they'd be right). It's like real life: goodwill artists fall on scamming devs, and goodwill devs fall on scamming artists...

And I don't even want to hear about the excuse of "the longer you wait, the harder it is to contact you back." We are ADULTS. If you're unable to face your own mistakes, and can't even TALK to someone because you're afraid while you've been PAID to provide a RESULT, you're not mature enough to be considered an adult and should be put under the protection of vulnerable adults (with everything it leads to.)

Do I sound salty? :x

Anyway, I hadn't planned to open this serie of posts with that particular case but seeing the gif actually changed my mind. This guy is nowhere the major fucker who stole me several thousands for Slice of Cards, but still. He's in second place (if I don't count money lost due to people leaving/cancelling stuff on projects already launched.)

You know what? I'm not even angry. I'm jaded for sure. But not angry. Knowing that I shouldn't face this situation anymore in the future easily lightens my mood :p

That's all for today folks. Next time, things will be funnier with real content that was actually made 8D

See ya o/