In one part he says "I'm working on this all by myself and it's real lonely" but later he says "no no, I can't go and screenshare the game without talking to other people first"... WHAT other people?
_Zootopia_ taught us that if you encounter a difficult question, then you should answer by asking the question you *did* want, and then answering _that_ one, instead.
I watched Earth 2s newest video from a few months back recently and it is completely batshit. Reminded me of the Turboencabulator joke, the needless complexity and terminology. My assumption is that E2 has been using legal threats to reduce criticism on TH-cam otherwise I'm know Kira could do an amazing hour on their latest stuff.
Taken at face value, his whole thing about Type Script sounds almost like the archetypical control freak backstory. Like, he went against his own insticts and let someone else take the lead one time, and it blew up in his face, so now he just has to do everything himself. It'd be kinda tragic if he hadn't vaporized 8 million bucks.
In my opinion the reason as to why he doesn't show people the supposed almost finished game that he has is because of this: 38:39 During development Caspian ordered his team to make half a dozen different versions of the game to test all these things that he had in his mind instead of making ONE game client and work on all the features in that version of the game. Also he already DID show people all that he has worked on all these years, the ElyriaMUD, the parkour client, the "low fidelity" client that looks line osrs, ElyriaChat, Kingdoms of Elyria which is somehow supposed to help with the "land management mechanics", these are some of all the different games that he and his team made INSTEAD of making COE and he has showcased all of that for the community. Caspian doesn't have a 90% done Chronicles of Elyria game, he has 10 different small games that doesn't amount to anything.
think even calling these "games" is a bit of a stretch. I'd say they were mostly more just proof of concept/vertical slice projects that probably never got much further than just being able to render what we've seen.
And I have a sneaking suspicion Caspian was the one to insist on using nodeJS. Why else would he push through with it for years, esp if he was so sure it was wrong? 😂
"I don't want to release anything that doesn't meet the expectations of the community" Community in no uncertain terms tell him they expect to just see something. Still doesn't release anything.
He didn't have anything to release dude, developing an mmorpg takes hundreds of millions and hundreds of programmers. He had like 3 programmers for what 6 months? And a budget of 8M total that will get you no-where bro.
@@roserevancroix2308 We know. That's why Caspian is completely deluded, and scammed his backers. Because he could have told them what you just said. He didn't say that he would be unable to release Chronicles of Elyria. He said (and continues to say) the opposite. Nobody forced him to crowdfund a MMO on a comparatively shoestring budget. He was the one asking for money to build CoE. If he knew he wasn't able to make an MMO, he shouldn't have fooled people that he could.
Software Engineer here, No self-respecting developer blames his tools. TypeScript could be a decent choice for scripting your game if your game engine will have support for it (UE stopped supporting it I think) and your team is trained with it(they werent). NodeJS could be used for a much much smaller scale multi-player game and do well, especially if your game client is also written in javascript and has a pretty small population. These are brilliant tools for the right job, he didn't properly vet these tools then he got big mad when his poorly planned game flatlined. BTW these steps of choosing technologies are meant to occur extremely early in the development lifecycle of any application...just saying
As a programmer, 100% of the projects I've worked on has had their frameworks and technologies decided upon or at the very least explored or toyed with before they're agreed to be used in the project(s), This was, painful, I need a drink
I'm a software engineer as well. I agree with you. Choosing the right tool for the job is very important, and every tool has its use cases. That's why one should have many tools in one's belt, and have the ability to use any of them when it's appropriate. Another very important skill to have as a developer is humility and to be able to quickly toss bad ideas. Failing fast is very important. If the NodeJS idea doesn't pan out, don't wait several years and spend millions of dollars before realising it. Scrap it, go back to the drawing board. As I said in a comment on one of the previous installments of this series, Caspian has got to be the most extreme follower of the worst implementation of waterfall project managment possible.
Sounds like early on he made the colossal blunder of NOT drawing the line between employer/boss-friend ...... You can't be your employees' friend on the clock ... especially not in any kind of enterprise where failure is going to land 99% on you. And you can't lay down when they start tossing out ultimatums.
You're exaggerating a bit, it's not that amazing. It is the story of a failed company which is very very common. You know companies fail every day right?
I just got caught up on part II of this miniseries. As you've pointed out numerous times the most frustrating thing about this whole ordeal is the fact that Caspian hasn't shown any type of tangible product. Not talking about a release ready game. We haven't seen any kind of pre-alpha footage. Absolutely zero. Not even a client. All he ever had to do was boot up whatever progress his team had made and show off some assets. This is why I don't think there's actually anything at all. It sounded like the first several devs he hired all bailed in less than 6 months. This project never got off the ground to begin with and he blew all the funds on his lease, buying office equipment, and a rotating staff who realized sticking around would get them absolutely nowhere. Anyway I'm not a backer so like you I have no skin in the game but I'm getting frustrated FOR the people that gave him a pound of flesh lol.
Lmao Maulvorn, formerly known as Zultra, was quite notorious as an absolute melt back in the forum days. Of course he is now moderating the subreddit and in league with Caspian.
Being a fanboy about something that doesn't exist is one thing, but my issue is that he campaigned for people to sign the NDA that explicitly said they could not be participate in the lawsuit. He got absolutely nothing out of that, other than the gratification from shilling for Caspian.
45:32 This one line is very telling. The actual saying is "Don't let perfect be the enemy of good" - IE it's something in your control. But he rewrites it to take the control away from himself, because that way it's not his fault.
Aha, yea it's all fun and games when we grill men isn't it. Buuut when it comes to grilling women all of a sudden it's hate-speech and discriminating and bullying and bla bla
@@roserevancroix2308 The fuck? She was pointing out his lies and making him talk about them and the promises he made. I don't know how you made this about gender but I don't care. Go back to your cave, incel.
@@roserevancroix2308 Whoa! Why do you bring gender into it? I don't think @ectothermic meant anything more by "lady" than to specify who they were referring to.
I love how at one point he's bragging about being a team lead at Microsoft, and then says Camelot Unchained was able to overcome challenges because of their industry connections 🤣
This made me think of MLM's, where everyone is a recruiter of other people, and very few are actually selling any products. Because the big bucks aren't made by peddling crappy products nobody wants, it's made by having people under you.
It's actually impressive that after almost a decade of being the person in charge of over 8 million dollars, during an hour+ long QnA Caspian can barely manage to own up to *2* mistakes. The insistence on making his own engine, carrying one making KoE by his lonesome, convinced that he can get funding going just feels like this dogged pursuit of not admitting that more than a couple of things were his fault. Isn't CoE too big for a first time studio? Didn't the team grow too large to manage before any solid core was established (like not being able to get programmer)? Isn't the KS campaign filled with smoke and mirrors that gave people a misleading idea of the state of the project? Isn't the lack of an actual playable demo of any sort a complete failure of leadership? All he can do is say "I hired these people and they scammed me :C", as if that was the start and end of this mess.
Not even "these people". To me it sounds like Caspian thinks everything was going well (minus having too few programmers?) until this one new hire messed up his entire 8 year project. Not even by hijacking and deleting all the data, documentation and backups, but by turning the project around for a few months and then somehow forcing Caspian to sunk-cost himself into continuing with this apparently shitty toolkit.
I would like to know how he intends to get funding. Like, he keeps talking like he expects people to just give him more money out of pity with the constant "I have depression" and "I just need the funding". It's like, I get it. Depression sucks. But you need to _provide proof_ that anyone should put anymore financial faith in you. Either that, or drop the project. I suggest the latter. Partly for the sake of his mental state, partly because this project will not be completed to ANYONE'S satisfaction.
i dont think this will end, my guess is Caspian has spoken to lawyers and they said the loop hole is you just need to say ur working on the game even if ur not so we just keep going around in circles.
I know a couple of people who always find a way to blame others. I think deep down such people are extremely critical of themselves for their mistakes, and in order to get rid of that crushing feeling of guilt, they project onto others. Some people I've talked to think that people who blame others are carefree and think they're perfect. I think it's the opposite. Things like others wouldn't even think twice about are eating these people up inside, because they demand perfection from themselves, but they think they're worthless. Listening to Caspian makes me feel sorry for him, because he just can't let this trainwreck go, but at the same time he's incapable of steering it right. The more he digs down and blame himself for his many failures, the more he projects onto others and the farther he comes from being able to dig himself out of the hole he's in.
@@oliver_twistorAccurate, I have a tendency to blame external factors when I’m not straight up self-deprecating, because I feel terrible about my shortcomings. I can see his behaviour from that lens easily. Except I don’t take 8 mil from people and proceed to take every bad decision possible for years.
@@duntemdraws310 Yes, it's important to keep in mind that regardless of what one is dealing with, there is no excuse for taking millions of dollars from people and not deliver on what's promised.
@@oliver_twistoryh this, without getting into the full breakdown of costs and exactly how this project was managed, we may never know how much is malice and how much is incompetence. One thing of note is how much was this guy paying himself through salary and dividends, and how many team members were possible friends / relatives. While I agree that 8 million is not that much and the scope of this game was so large no amount of money would hv ever been enough. 8 million should give something?
He's not a wizard bro he cannot control everything and take responsibility for every singel thing that went wrong. Developing a game and having a studio is not a small task - it's a team-effort, and it was his first attempt. Do you think this is easy=? Try starting your own company and hire people and maybe you will see things different.
The thing that strikes me about Caspian is that he doesnt seem to understand that his job wasnt to do the work, it was to make sure that the work gets done. What should have been a big red flag is focussing on technical details, and missing deadlines/milestones.
The fact that he would rather start developing his own game engine, instead of just paying the 5 % for UE5, just blew my mind tbh. I think this is the info we have all been missing, that finally shows why this whole thing went so ridiculously south. This also shows, beyond shadow of a doubt, that Caspian has absolutely no idea, as to how to run a business. No, he doesnt even have a lick of an instinct for it. When it comes to business, Caspian is worse than an autistic osrs gamer trying to go on a date. Maybe he is a decent coder, idk, but only as regular employee, or junior manager tops. Holy shit, this actually explains everything..
Add to that, he would rather stay with the JS stuff they barely can work with, rather than salvage what they can and go JS free also says a lot. Yeah, it would be work, but it would mean a much smoother experience afterwards.
Seriously. Even on ten million the cost to unreal would've been 500k. I get it. It's a lot. But what a severe waste of time to make your own engine that'll never be able to compete with unreal. Not even close.
I was blown away before even that. He let a lead dictate the programming language even as he knew from his vast experience and knowledge (TM) that it wouldn’t work. And blames it on… being a “director”? If he was a lead and had IC, would he have been fine with the IC going off and doing his own thing? No?? Then why would you let a lead do it?! It also goes to show he had no set vision, no whitepaper, no internal guidance for his employees. Something as ground level as your language and engine should not be a debate or something you flipflop on a whim. And now that he doesn’t like it, he won’t look at the code!!! So is the game going to magically manifest out of the pile of spaghetti that your lead left? And make no mistake, it’s not the leads fault. He was given permission and support but an utterly incompetent “director” to go ahead.
He doesn’t want to pay the 5% YET still chose to use Unreal and then used a non standard scripting language for it. Then trashed it all. He should have bit the bullet and just rewritten the game logic HIMSELF in C# years ago, and not wasted time writing a single dev journal about it.
I love this series! And I hope to see part 4 🙂 But I just thought I’d give my two cents on the whole Node/typescript thing from a software developer’s perspective. I’d be worried about performance and low level control if I were to build a game engine and while Node, V8, and the whole JS ecosystem have done an incredible job in these areas - I think there’s more suitable languages/runtimes out there. The thing is, that didn’t seem to be what he was complaining about. He said the code was a mess, which usually has very little to do with the language/runtime and far more with the team, processes, and management
these two things feel like they go hand in hand tbh "let's write the backend for an MMO in an interpreted [or _at best_ JIT'd] language" feels like the kind of decision that would be made and approved by folks who just... aren't used to thinking about how anything should actually work under the hood. MMOs are expensive to run and have to simulate and sync data between huge numbers of players at once; every bit of efficiency counts, and if they're not even properly _considering_ that, then they ain't the type to consider much
For a lil background I'm a software dev of 4 years; but I think I made a little platformer parkour area when I first started to play around with UE5 after watching all the tutorials, guides, and docs. I used all the stock textures and there wasn't much but i managed to add a double jump feature, a slippery ice texture that would make you slide when running on it, a kill zone with a checkpoint so you would respawn right before the platform as well as a win zone, AND a section where the platforms would start to move back and forth only when the character was within a certain range all in about maybe two, three days at most? Absolutely boggles the noggin to see that's the progress they did with 5 whole years.
Wow, got to give Caspian his due, but he really has been hard at it working these last couple of months. Work meaning making shit excuses rather than ACTUAL work of course.
1:07:52 yeah someone definitely said that, and came to the conclusion he's a Nice Guy™ instead of, you know... realizing the reason Caspian is not asking for money anymore is because the last time he tried, ended up failing so miserably his studio closed.
To be fair, a game cannot be made without any funds. It was simply people nolonger trust him. Asking for money to continue the project is basically not wrong.
@@iloveanothermanswives4278 "a game cannot be made without any funds" Someone should warn Caspian then And of course, crowdfunding a game is not wrong on its own, but context is important. After $8 millions and 7 yeas without delivering fuck all, it would be, at best, very irresponsible to raise more money with promises of releasing the final game. I refuse to accept Caspian is that delusional, and the fact he didn't asked for more money is a hint.
@alanrcastro8580 you need to consider other elements, too. First of all, his vision for the game is simply too unrealistic for 8 million dollars. Second, he tried to develop a custom engine and third, his employees were bad at the job and other expenses in game dev that require money. Basically the entire thing was a disaster and Caspian was only a percentage at fault.
@@iloveanothermanswives4278 if 8 million is not enough, maybe asking for only $900,000 in the Kickstarter original goal was a very bad idea. I think we can increase Caspian's percentage of fault a little bit.
@@iloveanothermanswives4278Bruh, if the people he hired were so mind boggingly incopetent and he decided to develop a custom engine (which is in itself a dumb idea) that's 100% his fault. Those are terrible decisions he made on his own. Refusing to blame him for it by saying it as if they were outside his control is nothing but copium. And, regarding the cost. Yeah, it's not enough for a top tier MMORPG, but it's 100% enough to fund a minimum viable product. He should have something decent to show given the money and time he took.
40:40 "It was too early for them to come to us" It was too early for him to _go public._ They were expecting the exact same thing his backers were. If it was too early for them, how was it not too early for backers?
Im convinced you can shuffle the questions and answers he gives and no one would know the difference. Literally any answer can be used for any question. Nothing follows
It’s funny. Something I’ve learned from watching hundreds of hours of crime interrigations I’ve learned that liars, criminals, usually drag their answers out in order to take control and to decieve. He’s doing exactly that basically on all answers.
I kinda feel bad for Caspian, not that any of this shit is happening to him but he had a vision and a dream. He just didn't realize that he also sucks ass at managing a project, and should've sought a business partner that can structure the company and the project properly. I'm sure he could've found a former WoW project manager with how frequently blizz is churning them out to help out with this. Someone should've kept him humble.
Well if you watched previous videos, Caspian was too humble and let his employees took payment without hardworking, bought them movies and held parties. His biggest mistake was hiring the wrong people and spent the money poorly. What he actually needs is a group of employees that actually know what they are doing and do the job in steady pace with no parties, picnic or any of the wasteful corporate practices.
@@im_cart8656 How is he putting his kid through college on a failed endeavour? I don't think his kid is working on the game with him. If anything the kid has more of a future than Caspian and Caspian is juggling a failed game and putting his kid through college, which is actually pretty hard to do, especially if you're running low.
Kira: reads direct from the source, always wants the game to come out the way it was promised. Strange people: This is misinformation and he is a hater. I was looking forward to CoE back in the day, it looked and sounded like a great game. If we got that game, I can see myself putting in a few hundred hours. We didn't get that game, but we got some hours of Kira's videos. Quality over quantity, I suppose.
I can't wait Caspian tech session for the quarter where he give his breakdown on computer programming or information technology in general its like taking college classes or online learning program except we don't give a rats ass.
52:00 I think that exactly explains why he never released anything. People's real opinion on his work, possibly being negative, would have litterally killed him, but people never knowing the actually quality...kept his heart safer, than them ripping into his real vision. If they hated him for delays or for scamming, he could survive that pain, cause it was either explainable via "but the game is real and it will be worth the wait" but if anyone other than his kind and loving family saw it...he'd end it all of they hated it. I think that's the last piece of this puzzle as to why he never did or always made excuses that it wasn't doable.
Kira, you have never been anything other than honest with your viewers. I trust what you say and always enjoy your views and opinions, I'm not invested in anything like online gaming, or shit coin etc, I just find the subjects fascinating. Keep it up!
The endless stream of every answer is just another annal in the history of days past of the company. Q: What weather are we expecting tomorrow? A: Yeah so back then we we're celebrating the programmed pixel and we we're so proud of the driverslicense that was earned by Dale 3 years ago. And we had a lunch on tuesday so we had gotten an engineupdate...............castlewalls.................wheels...................fire. My matched iq with the first single cell organism.
Hearing Caspian speak is a genuine interesting thing from a psychological standpoint - the man quite literally wasted millions of dollars of other people's money, and has nothing to show for it. Anyone with a brain can see that he's not even close to having even a playable kingdoms of elyria let alone CoE but it's so fascinating because HE still continues putting in all this effort?! In my mind he could disband the company and disappear into obscurity and probably get some random CS job, so why doesn't he? Is it the lawsuit preventing him from doing this? I really don't think he's under any danger of ending up in jail or anything if he just gives up right?
He sounds like a dev looking at the project from 10 years after it failed. Its like, he reconizes all the issues in hindsight. But its not hindsight, its literally "I have issues, and refuse to fix them"
If Folding Ideas' recent video has taught me anything, is that people will blindly follow the weirdest more unlikely to succeed stuff if they attach enough of their personality to it.
On if this guy knows hes scamming or not, Hanlons razor says "never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by neglect, ignorance or incompetence"
So the reason why he can't show anything is pretty much: Its the fault of the customers because their expectations are to high. My man... the expectations right now are that you don't even have a game. That you are a fraudster. It's on that level of expectations. And just showing anything worthwhile would prove that something is really done and playable. But yeah... you can't be bothered because of the expectations of the people that paid your bills. Like...wtf...thats bs. Everyone knows that's bs, right? Oh and this "you don't have to be here" at the end. Man, people invested money in your game. And now they should shut up and f... off?
The parkour thing is called a greybox level which helps the developers in the early stages to get an idea of scale and player movement which is for level designers to get references when designing maps
34:40 See, this is EXACTLY why he isn't going to succeed; he's thinking about stuff that can only be implemented IF he has a viable game with an audience, and he doesn't have that. It's like setting up a merch store for a product that hasn't even been made/sold, and/or nobody's ever heard of. Like, dude, WHO ARE YOU MARKETING TO? You have no product, the only customers you have are backers and/or people SUING you, and nobody has seen a shred of the game you've claimed you've been working on all this time. You're talking about creating a system where people can sell their Elyria stuff; WHO ARE THEY GOING TO SELL IT TO? Some holdout for Elyria that thinks it'll actually be finished? Because that's the extent of the market, Caspian. Right now, this stuff that these people have bought for Elyria is literally useless, unmarketable paper weights. 48:00 "Expectations not delivering" Caspian, YOU set those expectations, not your backers, not the gamers waiting on Chronicles, not the people calling you out. The only expectations gamers have, are the expectations that YOU set when you started marketing the idea, crowdfunding, etc. Right now, the bar is so low that all people are asking for is proof that the product exists like you claim it does. You not providing that proof is why you're being sued, and why the court has mandated that you provide some evidence that the product is being worked on. People aren't out to get you, you're avoiding providing evidence that the product they paid to support development for, is actually being developed. You could solve so many problems in literally twenty minutes by doing that, and the fact that you refuse to do that is why people think you're full of crap.
software eng here. I work in TS and node daily. Never in my wildest dreams would I think to use it for an MMO. It's arguably probably fine and may do the job, but it will require a ton of work and customization to get it to be nearly as performant as other technologies out there that they were just shooting themselves in the foot trying to reinvent the wheel. Personally I love JS, and would jump at the chance to develop a small pixel game on it. But doing an MMO with any sort of guarantee on performance is confusing
What's the state of Node and multithreading these days? Anyway, him being salty about his programmer: honestly that's on him for not researching this on his own or sticking to his guns. But I don't trust him to know anything about game backend programming the way he spole about all his achievements in that barebones demo, and how cool it is to use git and version control...
I could see node working for caspiens type of mmo, of course he would had to have committed to it and take on it's limits and strengths. Without experience with it though why start?
@@jimpaek multithreading isn't even the only perf issue. off the top of my head: no control over allocation (stack/heap); all temporaries would likely end up on the heap unless you use a JIT compiler that loves you you're at the mercy of the GC; nothing like RAII; you're less able to manage when resources load and free, and a GC pass at the wrong time could cause lag no const references; the only way to grant read-only access to whole objects (think of passing an event struct to several listeners -- the sort of thing a large, complex game would do often) is to pass copies, Proxys, or some custom getter-based wrapper that's basically just a worse Proxy, and this indirection will have some overhead all math is double-precision floating point by default no SIMD, unless someone else writes native-code bindings for you; this may limit how performant things like matrix math in a physics engine can be no operator overloads, so anything in physics or rendering -- vectors, matrices, quaternions -- is gonna be unreasonably painful no compile-time metaprogramming (i.e. constexpr) unless you roll your own i use JS to prototype (heh) ideas all the time, but using it for anything that needs to be high performance is just such a bad idea. it's mindblowing that caspian would actually agree to use JS/TS for an MMO backend, reluctantly or otherwise
So wait hold on... is this new information that they are developing an $8m game/engine in node.js and typescript? Or am I certainly misunderstanding things? This is by far the most painful detail I've heard yet of this entire story by a massive margin. This doesn't necessarily explain everything, but it actually explains everything...
That whole discussion about "we payed you to write the story" and blah blah, wasn't his response really an admission that his project did not meet the kickstarter criteria? Amazing ending of the video. Just amazing. CHOO CHOO.
Javascript is not a bad language, it's pretty popular especially with Typescript. But for an MMO of this scale, this is unorthodox to say the least... It could work, but you'd probably want to use a more robust language AND choose a language that your programmers are actually comfortable with. No team lead/tech manager/CTO would choose a language that their team don't know anything about. Like you said, at least try it in small POCs for a few weeks first.
Plus, it's a pretty standard language, especially with TypeScript. I think you'd have to be a pretty junior programmer not to be able to pick it up. Or locked into only one language (even then tbh)
I mostly agree. What I think Caspians main issue with the JS UE bindings is the paradigm shift idiomatic JS can be to someone who may have used C/C++ as their bread and butter for years.
No way it could handle a massive MMO. You're definitely not going to be doing anything that is required to be performant. JS is for websites and cute little 2D games not an $8m MMO.
18:40 the correct response would've been "or not," caspian if a new hire talks your lead into using bloody _javascript_ for the backend of an MMO and he refuses to let you talk him down, the correct response is to fire both of them on the spot. you don't need to "be experienced enough as a director to know how to handle that properly." you just need to have basic or better programming competency and any genuine regard for the craft. that's all it takes to know how colossally bad an idea that's going to be, and to _care_ enough not to allow it. instead, caspian tried to build his house out of freshly chewed silly putty knowing full well that that could never work, because he doesn't value programming or game development as a craft. he's a weak-willed inept idea guy, not a craftsman
Love these videos and hope there’s a Part 4 or even just continued updates. My only point of contention is that you say it’s not a scam. Yes, I’m sure he had a studio and had people working seriously in the past, BUT, at this point, when he’s shown us ABSOLUTELY NOTHING, we have to assume that since all those people were let go in 2020, he’s just been diddling his thumbs and LARPing as a Game Dev. If he can’t boot up his “90% finished MMO” and show us some of it at all, we have to assume he has nothing and he wasted everyone’s time and that entire $8 mil on useless spaghetti code, and he isn’t doing anything now but LARPing.
Node JS on the sever side has some appeal for MMOs because by default it deals with high a number of connections a lot better. On the client side it sounds crazy if you are using someone else’s engine. Getting your whole studio to switch tech stacks when no one else has any experience in it is actively malicious
It's so tiresome that people nowadays can just say "misinformation!" and half of all people will blindly believe that something is indeed misinformation.
i think all programmers are naturally bad at estimating timetables and some of us just learn to double our estimates as a quick hack lol i always round my intuitive guess up to the next span. think it'll be a day? it'll be a week. think it'll be a week? it'll be two. think it'll be two weeks? it'll be one to three months
The concept of what it was there ,but that was not what it looked like. ( Trial of tested was the area they created as a release) was more of a dungeon looking area with some courses to run across in ,but it's still very depressing.
Didn't he exploit PPP loans by applying for it and firing the staff that were meant to be retained by the loan? That's money another small business could have used to stay afloat. I'm not sure "he's not a bad guy" flies here. He's actively dodging lawsuit, he's barely taking responsibilities and victimizes himself with every question he "answers" in these interviews I'm sure he doesn't have malicious intent like a downright villain, but he's definitely not a good guy and someone I'd have beer with
He did fire the staff, I believe it wasn't technically illegal because he's still on the hook for the debt? Like he's not eligible for PPP forgiveness so as long as he pays it back it's 'fine' (how he's going to do that I have no clue). That's just based on my memory of previous vids.
In one part he says "I'm working on this all by myself and it's real lonely" but later he says "no no, I can't go and screenshare the game without talking to other people first"... WHAT other people?
Lawyers.
His imaginary friends
Arya Realty Investments, his investment advisor
I absolutely love Keeping Up with The Caspians, never fails to make my day brighter to see what shenanigans he's up to this time around
It's my favorite soap opera.
I cancelled all my streaming services for this
"Kira spreads misinformation" "Bro, YOU'RE the misinformation" had me in tears anyway I love this series so much
Caspian's talent of "answering a question with an answer to a different question" never ceases to amaze
Dude should have just gone into politics.
@@dardo1201 XD
politics 101
PR 101 never answer the actual question if it doesn't benefit you
_Zootopia_ taught us that if you encounter a difficult question, then you should answer by asking the question you *did* want, and then answering _that_ one, instead.
Never gets old! I just wish we could have some Earth 2 updates too.
Yeah, Earth 2 was hilarious
I was just going to post this. The Earth 2 stuff was hilarious. Chronicles of Elyria is just a dead horse at this point.
Oh man I miss earth 2 content 😂
I watched Earth 2s newest video from a few months back recently and it is completely batshit. Reminded me of the Turboencabulator joke, the needless complexity and terminology. My assumption is that E2 has been using legal threats to reduce criticism on TH-cam otherwise I'm know Kira could do an amazing hour on their latest stuff.
Forreal earth 2 updates were great!
Because Kira made videos on em hahaha
I don't want this series to ever end.
Long live the king! (caspian)
I don't think it will until either Kira or Caspian dies or a band of rogue elves complete the game in the middle of the night one Christmas.
Im not a disappointment. Mommy calls me special : )
I miss earth 2 :(
Me either! It's a marvellously entertaining soap opera.
Kira mate you've quite literally made a chronicle of Elyria it's hilarious. You've put more work in than the devs have.
The real Chronicle was the lies that were told along the way.
Dude never made a game but he's made kira some top tier content for years
This and the Day Before stuff is so good, along with all his other stuff but this is some other level quality of entertainment
Taken at face value, his whole thing about Type Script sounds almost like the archetypical control freak backstory. Like, he went against his own insticts and let someone else take the lead one time, and it blew up in his face, so now he just has to do everything himself. It'd be kinda tragic if he hadn't vaporized 8 million bucks.
"Chronic Lies" of Elyria is actually some top level genius titling
Isn't that what the news and the democrats do to you every singel day? And you still believe them don't you?🙃
Haha omg, nice catch
@@roserevancroix2308 Isn't that what the documentaries and the republicans do to you every singel day? And you still believe them don't you?🙃
@@AlphaGarg World is full of lies, don't believe anyone and just eat vodka and drink borsch.
@@JustDeichan real
In my opinion the reason as to why he doesn't show people the supposed almost finished game that he has is because of this: 38:39
During development Caspian ordered his team to make half a dozen different versions of the game to test all these things that he had in his mind instead of making ONE game client and work on all the features in that version of the game.
Also he already DID show people all that he has worked on all these years, the ElyriaMUD, the parkour client, the "low fidelity" client that looks line osrs, ElyriaChat, Kingdoms of Elyria which is somehow supposed to help with the "land management mechanics", these are some of all the different games that he and his team made INSTEAD of making COE and he has showcased all of that for the community.
Caspian doesn't have a 90% done Chronicles of Elyria game, he has 10 different small games that doesn't amount to anything.
think even calling these "games" is a bit of a stretch. I'd say they were mostly more just proof of concept/vertical slice projects that probably never got much further than just being able to render what we've seen.
You’re absolutely right.
And I have a sneaking suspicion Caspian was the one to insist on using nodeJS. Why else would he push through with it for years, esp if he was so sure it was wrong? 😂
I always get so excited for these videos, would love for you to keep 'em coming 😄
The people going "I just want to see SOMETHING" and Caspian just responding "I don't believe you"
I refuse to believe that Caspian understands the concept of minimum viable product. If he did, he would have something to show from all of this mess.
"I don't want to release anything that doesn't meet the expectations of the community" Community in no uncertain terms tell him they expect to just see something. Still doesn't release anything.
He didn't have anything to release dude, developing an mmorpg takes hundreds of millions and hundreds of programmers. He had like 3 programmers for what 6 months?
And a budget of 8M total that will get you no-where bro.
@@roserevancroix2308 We know. That's why Caspian is completely deluded, and scammed his backers. Because he could have told them what you just said. He didn't say that he would be unable to release Chronicles of Elyria. He said (and continues to say) the opposite. Nobody forced him to crowdfund a MMO on a comparatively shoestring budget. He was the one asking for money to build CoE. If he knew he wasn't able to make an MMO, he shouldn't have fooled people that he could.
i’m sorry that developer convincing them to change to js then leaving is friggin hilarious
I don't believe that he did. I think he's lying to put the blame on somebody else so he doesn't have to admit he messed up.
Software Engineer here, No self-respecting developer blames his tools. TypeScript could be a decent choice for scripting your game if your game engine will have support for it (UE stopped supporting it I think) and your team is trained with it(they werent).
NodeJS could be used for a much much smaller scale multi-player game and do well, especially if your game client is also written in javascript and has a pretty small population.
These are brilliant tools for the right job, he didn't properly vet these tools then he got big mad when his poorly planned game flatlined. BTW these steps of choosing technologies are meant to occur extremely early in the development lifecycle of any application...just saying
Caspian prostitute was the lead developer last I heard. Her field of expertise was milking Caspian.
^ 💯
As a programmer, 100% of the projects I've worked on has had their frameworks and technologies decided upon or at the very least explored or toyed with before they're agreed to be used in the project(s),
This was, painful,
I need a drink
I'm a software engineer as well. I agree with you. Choosing the right tool for the job is very important, and every tool has its use cases. That's why one should have many tools in one's belt, and have the ability to use any of them when it's appropriate. Another very important skill to have as a developer is humility and to be able to quickly toss bad ideas. Failing fast is very important. If the NodeJS idea doesn't pan out, don't wait several years and spend millions of dollars before realising it. Scrap it, go back to the drawing board.
As I said in a comment on one of the previous installments of this series, Caspian has got to be the most extreme follower of the worst implementation of waterfall project managment possible.
I'm a complete moron when it comes to technology, and it sounded stupid to even me! XD
Instead of over promising and under delivering, I’m just going to over promise and not deliver anything 😂
Sounds like early on he made the colossal blunder of NOT drawing the line between employer/boss-friend ...... You can't be your employees' friend on the clock ... especially not in any kind of enterprise where failure is going to land 99% on you. And you can't lay down when they start tossing out ultimatums.
Tales of Elyria has become the modern day telling of The Neverending Story... "The Delay After" will be released before Tales of Elyria
@@felixader Storrry!
You're exaggerating a bit, it's not that amazing.
It is the story of a failed company which is very very common.
You know companies fail every day right?
Kiratreu: “Who are you, REALLY ?”
CaspiGmork: “I am the servant, of the Power behind The Nothing (project) !”
😅
@@roserevancroix2308
Yes, but crapfests like this are _fun._
I just got caught up on part II of this miniseries. As you've pointed out numerous times the most frustrating thing about this whole ordeal is the fact that Caspian hasn't shown any type of tangible product. Not talking about a release ready game. We haven't seen any kind of pre-alpha footage. Absolutely zero. Not even a client. All he ever had to do was boot up whatever progress his team had made and show off some assets. This is why I don't think there's actually anything at all. It sounded like the first several devs he hired all bailed in less than 6 months. This project never got off the ground to begin with and he blew all the funds on his lease, buying office equipment, and a rotating staff who realized sticking around would get them absolutely nowhere. Anyway I'm not a backer so like you I have no skin in the game but I'm getting frustrated FOR the people that gave him a pound of flesh lol.
I am certain that Kira has spent more hours developing ChronicLies of Elyria content than Caspian has spent developing the game
"I don't think it's a scam, I just think Caspian is incompetent." - KiraTV
Lmao Maulvorn, formerly known as Zultra, was quite notorious as an absolute melt back in the forum days. Of course he is now moderating the subreddit and in league with Caspian.
Being a fanboy about something that doesn't exist is one thing, but my issue is that he campaigned for people to sign the NDA that explicitly said they could not be participate in the lawsuit. He got absolutely nothing out of that, other than the gratification from shilling for Caspian.
45:32
This one line is very telling. The actual saying is "Don't let perfect be the enemy of good" - IE it's something in your control. But he rewrites it to take the control away from himself, because that way it's not his fault.
That lady was really grilling him. You can tell she was dancing around being too confrontational.
Good on her, need more people like that.
Aha, yea it's all fun and games when we grill men isn't it.
Buuut when it comes to grilling women all of a sudden it's hate-speech and discriminating and bullying and bla bla
@@roserevancroix2308 The fuck? She was pointing out his lies and making him talk about them and the promises he made. I don't know how you made this about gender but I don't care.
Go back to your cave, incel.
@@roserevancroix2308 Whoa! Why do you bring gender into it? I don't think @ectothermic meant anything more by "lady" than to specify who they were referring to.
@@roserevancroix2308
WTF, even? Dude, take your meds. XD
@@roserevancroix2308This is how I imagine evil Caspian
"I can't hold all this spaghetti" is the funniest visual 🤣🤣
I love how at one point he's bragging about being a team lead at Microsoft, and then says Camelot Unchained was able to overcome challenges because of their industry connections 🤣
@@scabbynack Him being a former team lead at Microsoft explains a lot.
Leading leaders? Who were they leading? Wasn't the team like 6 people at the largest?
This made me think of MLM's, where everyone is a recruiter of other people, and very few are actually selling any products. Because the big bucks aren't made by peddling crappy products nobody wants, it's made by having people under you.
Leading 6 imaginary friends
It's actually impressive that after almost a decade of being the person in charge of over 8 million dollars, during an hour+ long QnA Caspian can barely manage to own up to *2* mistakes.
The insistence on making his own engine, carrying one making KoE by his lonesome, convinced that he can get funding going just feels like this dogged pursuit of not admitting that more than a couple of things were his fault.
Isn't CoE too big for a first time studio? Didn't the team grow too large to manage before any solid core was established (like not being able to get programmer)? Isn't the KS campaign filled with smoke and mirrors that gave people a misleading idea of the state of the project? Isn't the lack of an actual playable demo of any sort a complete failure of leadership?
All he can do is say "I hired these people and they scammed me :C", as if that was the start and end of this mess.
Narcissists will say and do just about anything to avoid blame.
Not even "these people". To me it sounds like Caspian thinks everything was going well (minus having too few programmers?) until this one new hire messed up his entire 8 year project. Not even by hijacking and deleting all the data, documentation and backups, but by turning the project around for a few months and then somehow forcing Caspian to sunk-cost himself into continuing with this apparently shitty toolkit.
It was $8M?
I would like to know how he intends to get funding. Like, he keeps talking like he expects people to just give him more money out of pity with the constant "I have depression" and "I just need the funding".
It's like, I get it. Depression sucks. But you need to _provide proof_ that anyone should put anymore financial faith in you. Either that, or drop the project. I suggest the latter. Partly for the sake of his mental state, partly because this project will not be completed to ANYONE'S satisfaction.
i dont think this will end, my guess is Caspian has spoken to lawyers and they said the loop hole is you just need to say ur working on the game even if ur not so we just keep going around in circles.
There may be some statute of limitations, if he keeps this act up long enough eventually people cannot sue him anymore
I like how everything is always someone else's fault.
I know a couple of people who always find a way to blame others. I think deep down such people are extremely critical of themselves for their mistakes, and in order to get rid of that crushing feeling of guilt, they project onto others.
Some people I've talked to think that people who blame others are carefree and think they're perfect. I think it's the opposite. Things like others wouldn't even think twice about are eating these people up inside, because they demand perfection from themselves, but they think they're worthless.
Listening to Caspian makes me feel sorry for him, because he just can't let this trainwreck go, but at the same time he's incapable of steering it right. The more he digs down and blame himself for his many failures, the more he projects onto others and the farther he comes from being able to dig himself out of the hole he's in.
@@oliver_twistorAccurate, I have a tendency to blame external factors when I’m not straight up self-deprecating, because I feel terrible about my shortcomings. I can see his behaviour from that lens easily. Except I don’t take 8 mil from people and proceed to take every bad decision possible for years.
@@duntemdraws310 Yes, it's important to keep in mind that regardless of what one is dealing with, there is no excuse for taking millions of dollars from people and not deliver on what's promised.
@@oliver_twistoryh this, without getting into the full breakdown of costs and exactly how this project was managed, we may never know how much is malice and how much is incompetence. One thing of note is how much was this guy paying himself through salary and dividends, and how many team members were possible friends / relatives. While I agree that 8 million is not that much and the scope of this game was so large no amount of money would hv ever been enough. 8 million should give something?
He's not a wizard bro he cannot control everything and take responsibility for every singel thing that went wrong.
Developing a game and having a studio is not a small task - it's a team-effort, and it was his first attempt.
Do you think this is easy=? Try starting your own company and hire people and maybe you will see things different.
The thing that strikes me about Caspian is that he doesnt seem to understand that his job wasnt to do the work, it was to make sure that the work gets done. What should have been a big red flag is focussing on technical details, and missing deadlines/milestones.
40:00 imagine that the change they asked for was that the team should drop javascript and use literally anything else
The fact that he would rather start developing his own game engine, instead of just paying the 5 % for UE5, just blew my mind tbh. I think this is the info we have all been missing, that finally shows why this whole thing went so ridiculously south. This also shows, beyond shadow of a doubt, that Caspian has absolutely no idea, as to how to run a business. No, he doesnt even have a lick of an instinct for it. When it comes to business, Caspian is worse than an autistic osrs gamer trying to go on a date. Maybe he is a decent coder, idk, but only as regular employee, or junior manager tops. Holy shit, this actually explains everything..
Add to that, he would rather stay with the JS stuff they barely can work with, rather than salvage what they can and go JS free also says a lot. Yeah, it would be work, but it would mean a much smoother experience afterwards.
Seriously. Even on ten million the cost to unreal would've been 500k. I get it. It's a lot. But what a severe waste of time to make your own engine that'll never be able to compete with unreal. Not even close.
I was blown away before even that. He let a lead dictate the programming language even as he knew from his vast experience and knowledge (TM) that it wouldn’t work. And blames it on… being a “director”? If he was a lead and had IC, would he have been fine with the IC going off and doing his own thing? No?? Then why would you let a lead do it?!
It also goes to show he had no set vision, no whitepaper, no internal guidance for his employees. Something as ground level as your language and engine should not be a debate or something you flipflop on a whim. And now that he doesn’t like it, he won’t look at the code!!! So is the game going to magically manifest out of the pile of spaghetti that your lead left? And make no mistake, it’s not the leads fault. He was given permission and support but an utterly incompetent “director” to go ahead.
Why sacrifice 5% of your income, when you can sacrifice 100%!
He doesn’t want to pay the 5% YET still chose to use Unreal and then used a non standard scripting language for it. Then trashed it all. He should have bit the bullet and just rewritten the game logic HIMSELF in C# years ago, and not wasted time writing a single dev journal about it.
Caspian says, "I am really glad you're here." the same way you would to a doctor giving you a prostate exam.
🤣
Caspian could have taken a goddamn course in object oriented programming by now. The hell is he even doing?
Reading pop philosophy books lol
It's even worse, he could have completed a Masters in Computer Science and almost be done with his Ph.D by now. EDIT: eh, "could" have
Replying to questions with questions.
Working on his latest dev journal
Crying about how Typescript is the enemy, of course
Nothing says fantasy MMORPG to me than a parkour system tbh.
I love this series! And I hope to see part 4 🙂
But I just thought I’d give my two cents on the whole Node/typescript thing from a software developer’s perspective. I’d be worried about performance and low level control if I were to build a game engine and while Node, V8, and the whole JS ecosystem have done an incredible job in these areas - I think there’s more suitable languages/runtimes out there. The thing is, that didn’t seem to be what he was complaining about. He said the code was a mess, which usually has very little to do with the language/runtime and far more with the team, processes, and management
Yes I noticed that too
these two things feel like they go hand in hand tbh
"let's write the backend for an MMO in an interpreted [or _at best_ JIT'd] language" feels like the kind of decision that would be made and approved by folks who just... aren't used to thinking about how anything should actually work under the hood. MMOs are expensive to run and have to simulate and sync data between huge numbers of players at once; every bit of efficiency counts, and if they're not even properly _considering_ that, then they ain't the type to consider much
Kira feels like that youtuber that you've had a few beers with and is actually a down to earth guy
My jaw was literally dropped open when saw the parkour demo. They must have been developing things then dumping them over and over for 5 years?
For a lil background I'm a software dev of 4 years; but I think I made a little platformer parkour area when I first started to play around with UE5 after watching all the tutorials, guides, and docs. I used all the stock textures and there wasn't much but i managed to add a double jump feature, a slippery ice texture that would make you slide when running on it, a kill zone with a checkpoint so you would respawn right before the platform as well as a win zone, AND a section where the platforms would start to move back and forth only when the character was within a certain range all in about maybe two, three days at most? Absolutely boggles the noggin to see that's the progress they did with 5 whole years.
A bit of an over-reaction don't you think?
Right? It has the hallmarks of everything being *completely* mis-managed behind the scenes.
The problem is he thinks his subordinates make the decisions, and he is not responsible. He's scapegoating them. Take responsibility FFS
Caspian Joker arc is really getting expanded upon in season 2
Wow, got to give Caspian his due, but he really has been hard at it working these last couple of months.
Work meaning making shit excuses rather than ACTUAL work of course.
1:07:52 yeah someone definitely said that, and came to the conclusion he's a Nice Guy™ instead of, you know... realizing the reason Caspian is not asking for money anymore is because the last time he tried, ended up failing so miserably his studio closed.
To be fair, a game cannot be made without any funds. It was simply people nolonger trust him. Asking for money to continue the project is basically not wrong.
@@iloveanothermanswives4278 "a game cannot be made without any funds"
Someone should warn Caspian then
And of course, crowdfunding a game is not wrong on its own, but context is important. After $8 millions and 7 yeas without delivering fuck all, it would be, at best, very irresponsible to raise more money with promises of releasing the final game. I refuse to accept Caspian is that delusional, and the fact he didn't asked for more money is a hint.
@alanrcastro8580 you need to consider other elements, too. First of all, his vision for the game is simply too unrealistic for 8 million dollars. Second, he tried to develop a custom engine and third, his employees were bad at the job and other expenses in game dev that require money. Basically the entire thing was a disaster and Caspian was only a percentage at fault.
@@iloveanothermanswives4278 if 8 million is not enough, maybe asking for only $900,000 in the Kickstarter original goal was a very bad idea. I think we can increase Caspian's percentage of fault a little bit.
@@iloveanothermanswives4278Bruh, if the people he hired were so mind boggingly incopetent and he decided to develop a custom engine (which is in itself a dumb idea) that's 100% his fault. Those are terrible decisions he made on his own. Refusing to blame him for it by saying it as if they were outside his control is nothing but copium.
And, regarding the cost. Yeah, it's not enough for a top tier MMORPG, but it's 100% enough to fund a minimum viable product. He should have something decent to show given the money and time he took.
He didn’t want to use UE because he wanted to own the engine at the end of this whole bamboozle
“Transformers pyjama wearing 40 year old adults” :0
I will have you know, sir, that I am in fact 50.
I would like a part 4, provided it doesn't jeopardize Kira's mental health. Caspian and his CoE/KoE is such an interesting case study.
Why would it....what?
Can we get an update on Earth 2? That would be awesome friendo. Love the channels!
Kira doesn't realize his audience is sick in the head. If you record and post it we will come
Hilarious comment. Thanks for the laughs, fellow "sick in the head" audience member.
Amen
@@oliver_twistor he keeps repeatedly mentioning we don't want to watch this. But looking at the stats clearly we do. I'm all in
Speak for yourself kid
He missed his calling as a politician with the way he can deflect.
I felt so read when you said "Transformer pyjama wearing" while I'm here in my Optimus Prime slippers 😭
This is better content than any of these “games” will ever have. Love these videos.
40:40 "It was too early for them to come to us"
It was too early for him to _go public._ They were expecting the exact same thing his backers were. If it was too early for them, how was it not too early for backers?
Im convinced you can shuffle the questions and answers he gives and no one would know the difference. Literally any answer can be used for any question. Nothing follows
51:42
Caspian: "I need funding!"
Also Caspian: **only shows/shares the proof of "major milestones" to friends and family**
Even more Caspian: "WE decided to stop crowdfunding! That was entirely OUR choice!"
Of course we are watching. It's Caspian. I feel like he started to drop the gold in this one, telling us about JavaScript and all
It’s funny. Something I’ve learned from watching hundreds of hours of crime interrigations I’ve learned that liars, criminals, usually drag their answers out in order to take control and to decieve. He’s doing exactly that basically on all answers.
@@JuliusCaesar888 Haha, chill man. Just said that he's a textbook example of a criminal.
Definitely need a part 4.
I kinda feel bad for Caspian, not that any of this shit is happening to him but he had a vision and a dream. He just didn't realize that he also sucks ass at managing a project, and should've sought a business partner that can structure the company and the project properly. I'm sure he could've found a former WoW project manager with how frequently blizz is churning them out to help out with this. Someone should've kept him humble.
Well if you watched previous videos, Caspian was too humble and let his employees took payment without hardworking, bought them movies and held parties. His biggest mistake was hiring the wrong people and spent the money poorly. What he actually needs is a group of employees that actually know what they are doing and do the job in steady pace with no parties, picnic or any of the wasteful corporate practices.
He doesn't know when to just call it quits. His ego or whatever is making himself dig a hole deeper and deeper.
That must hurt a lot, realizing that you're just too incompetent to realize your dreams. Many people never pursue their dreams and many that do fail.
He's literally putting his kid through college on an entirely failed endeavor with literally nothing to show. Feel bad for someone else 😅
@@im_cart8656 How is he putting his kid through college on a failed endeavour? I don't think his kid is working on the game with him. If anything the kid has more of a future than Caspian and Caspian is juggling a failed game and putting his kid through college, which is actually pretty hard to do, especially if you're running low.
Kira: reads direct from the source, always wants the game to come out the way it was promised.
Strange people: This is misinformation and he is a hater.
I was looking forward to CoE back in the day, it looked and sounded like a great game. If we got that game, I can see myself putting in a few hundred hours. We didn't get that game, but we got some hours of Kira's videos. Quality over quantity, I suppose.
1:05:50
He's forgetting one eentsy-weentsy, itty-bitty, minor, insignificant detail...
PEOPLE PAID HIM MONEY!
Has he done any actual code for Bedsit Of Elyria or is it still all flowcharts?
Bless you, Kira. I was waiting for the part 3!!!
I can't wait Caspian tech session for the quarter where he give his breakdown on computer programming or information technology in general its like taking college classes or online learning program except we don't give a rats ass.
52:00
I think that exactly explains why he never released anything.
People's real opinion on his work, possibly being negative, would have litterally killed him, but people never knowing the actually quality...kept his heart safer, than them ripping into his real vision. If they hated him for delays or for scamming, he could survive that pain, cause it was either explainable via "but the game is real and it will be worth the wait" but if anyone other than his kind and loving family saw it...he'd end it all of they hated it.
I think that's the last piece of this puzzle as to why he never did or always made excuses that it wasn't doable.
Kira, you have never been anything other than honest with your viewers. I trust what you say and always enjoy your views and opinions, I'm not invested in anything like online gaming, or shit coin etc, I just find the subjects fascinating. Keep it up!
The endless stream of every answer is just another annal in the history of days past of the company.
Q: What weather are we expecting tomorrow?
A: Yeah so back then we we're celebrating the programmed pixel and we we're so proud of the driverslicense that was earned by Dale 3 years ago. And we had a lunch on tuesday so we had gotten an engineupdate...............castlewalls.................wheels...................fire. My matched iq with the first single cell organism.
Hearing Caspian speak is a genuine interesting thing from a psychological standpoint - the man quite literally wasted millions of dollars of other people's money, and has nothing to show for it. Anyone with a brain can see that he's not even close to having even a playable kingdoms of elyria let alone CoE but it's so fascinating because HE still continues putting in all this effort?!
In my mind he could disband the company and disappear into obscurity and probably get some random CS job, so why doesn't he?
Is it the lawsuit preventing him from doing this? I really don't think he's under any danger of ending up in jail or anything if he just gives up right?
He sounds like a dev looking at the project from 10 years after it failed. Its like, he reconizes all the issues in hindsight. But its not hindsight, its literally "I have issues, and refuse to fix them"
Wasn't me asking the questions! I left all those Discords a few years ago.
You know Kira is having fun when he starts asking for NFTs with the project xD
Caspian should have just been a politician. He’s great at answering a question with a not answer yet also another question.
If Folding Ideas' recent video has taught me anything, is that people will blindly follow the weirdest more unlikely to succeed stuff if they attach enough of their personality to it.
On if this guy knows hes scamming or not, Hanlons razor says "never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by neglect, ignorance or incompetence"
So the reason why he can't show anything is pretty much:
Its the fault of the customers because their expectations are to high.
My man... the expectations right now are that you don't even have a game. That you are a fraudster. It's on that level of expectations.
And just showing anything worthwhile would prove that something is really done and playable.
But yeah... you can't be bothered because of the expectations of the people that paid your bills.
Like...wtf...thats bs. Everyone knows that's bs, right?
Oh and this "you don't have to be here" at the end. Man, people invested money in your game. And now they should shut up and f... off?
The parkour thing is called a greybox level which helps the developers in the early stages to get an idea of scale and player movement which is for level designers to get references when designing maps
Please please make a part 4!
Always funny to listen to these!
34:40
See, this is EXACTLY why he isn't going to succeed; he's thinking about stuff that can only be implemented IF he has a viable game with an audience, and he doesn't have that.
It's like setting up a merch store for a product that hasn't even been made/sold, and/or nobody's ever heard of. Like, dude, WHO ARE YOU MARKETING TO? You have no product, the only customers you have are backers and/or people SUING you, and nobody has seen a shred of the game you've claimed you've been working on all this time.
You're talking about creating a system where people can sell their Elyria stuff; WHO ARE THEY GOING TO SELL IT TO? Some holdout for Elyria that thinks it'll actually be finished? Because that's the extent of the market, Caspian. Right now, this stuff that these people have bought for Elyria is literally useless, unmarketable paper weights.
48:00 "Expectations not delivering"
Caspian, YOU set those expectations, not your backers, not the gamers waiting on Chronicles, not the people calling you out. The only expectations gamers have, are the expectations that YOU set when you started marketing the idea, crowdfunding, etc. Right now, the bar is so low that all people are asking for is proof that the product exists like you claim it does. You not providing that proof is why you're being sued, and why the court has mandated that you provide some evidence that the product is being worked on. People aren't out to get you, you're avoiding providing evidence that the product they paid to support development for, is actually being developed. You could solve so many problems in literally twenty minutes by doing that, and the fact that you refuse to do that is why people think you're full of crap.
18:05 this is too funny, nodeJS and typescript for an MMO.
software eng here. I work in TS and node daily. Never in my wildest dreams would I think to use it for an MMO. It's arguably probably fine and may do the job, but it will require a ton of work and customization to get it to be nearly as performant as other technologies out there that they were just shooting themselves in the foot trying to reinvent the wheel. Personally I love JS, and would jump at the chance to develop a small pixel game on it. But doing an MMO with any sort of guarantee on performance is confusing
What's the state of Node and multithreading these days? Anyway, him being salty about his programmer: honestly that's on him for not researching this on his own or sticking to his guns. But I don't trust him to know anything about game backend programming the way he spole about all his achievements in that barebones demo, and how cool it is to use git and version control...
I could see node working for caspiens type of mmo, of course he would had to have committed to it and take on it's limits and strengths. Without experience with it though why start?
@@jimpaek multithreading isn't even the only perf issue. off the top of my head:
no control over allocation (stack/heap); all temporaries would likely end up on the heap unless you use a JIT compiler that loves you
you're at the mercy of the GC; nothing like RAII; you're less able to manage when resources load and free, and a GC pass at the wrong time could cause lag
no const references; the only way to grant read-only access to whole objects (think of passing an event struct to several listeners -- the sort of thing a large, complex game would do often) is to pass copies, Proxys, or some custom getter-based wrapper that's basically just a worse Proxy, and this indirection will have some overhead
all math is double-precision floating point by default
no SIMD, unless someone else writes native-code bindings for you; this may limit how performant things like matrix math in a physics engine can be
no operator overloads, so anything in physics or rendering -- vectors, matrices, quaternions -- is gonna be unreasonably painful
no compile-time metaprogramming (i.e. constexpr) unless you roll your own
i use JS to prototype (heh) ideas all the time, but using it for anything that needs to be high performance is just such a bad idea. it's mindblowing that caspian would actually agree to use JS/TS for an MMO backend, reluctantly or otherwise
If you can't blind them with brilliance, then bamboozle them with bullshit.
What a great thing to come home from work to on a Friday.
So wait hold on... is this new information that they are developing an $8m game/engine in node.js and typescript? Or am I certainly misunderstanding things? This is by far the most painful detail I've heard yet of this entire story by a massive margin.
This doesn't necessarily explain everything, but it actually explains everything...
part 4 please and thank you! you make the best content!!!
I want to see the day the games released and kira does a let's play of the entire thing
Part 4 plz. I need it. Yes, I'm deranged.
It’s liking listening to Michael Scott from the office
That whole discussion about "we payed you to write the story" and blah blah, wasn't his response really an admission that his project did not meet the kickstarter criteria?
Amazing ending of the video. Just amazing. CHOO CHOO.
Javascript is not a bad language, it's pretty popular especially with Typescript. But for an MMO of this scale, this is unorthodox to say the least... It could work, but you'd probably want to use a more robust language AND choose a language that your programmers are actually comfortable with.
No team lead/tech manager/CTO would choose a language that their team don't know anything about. Like you said, at least try it in small POCs for a few weeks first.
Plus, it's a pretty standard language, especially with TypeScript. I think you'd have to be a pretty junior programmer not to be able to pick it up. Or locked into only one language (even then tbh)
I mostly agree. What I think Caspians main issue with the JS UE bindings is the paradigm shift idiomatic JS can be to someone who may have used C/C++ as their bread and butter for years.
No way it could handle a massive MMO. You're definitely not going to be doing anything that is required to be performant. JS is for websites and cute little 2D games not an $8m MMO.
18:40 the correct response would've been "or not," caspian
if a new hire talks your lead into using bloody _javascript_ for the backend of an MMO and he refuses to let you talk him down, the correct response is to fire both of them on the spot. you don't need to "be experienced enough as a director to know how to handle that properly." you just need to have basic or better programming competency and any genuine regard for the craft. that's all it takes to know how colossally bad an idea that's going to be, and to _care_ enough not to allow it.
instead, caspian tried to build his house out of freshly chewed silly putty knowing full well that that could never work, because he doesn't value programming or game development as a craft. he's a weak-willed inept idea guy, not a craftsman
Love these videos and hope there’s a Part 4 or even just continued updates. My only point of contention is that you say it’s not a scam.
Yes, I’m sure he had a studio and had people working seriously in the past, BUT, at this point, when he’s shown us ABSOLUTELY NOTHING, we have to assume that since all those people were let go in 2020, he’s just been diddling his thumbs and LARPing as a Game Dev. If he can’t boot up his “90% finished MMO” and show us some of it at all, we have to assume he has nothing and he wasted everyone’s time and that entire $8 mil on useless spaghetti code, and he isn’t doing anything now but LARPing.
Literally zero chance that the choice of a back end technology solution was a "mistake" on its own
I'm slightly disappointed I didn't get called a "friendo."
Node JS on the sever side has some appeal for MMOs because by default it deals with high a number of connections a lot better. On the client side it sounds crazy if you are using someone else’s engine. Getting your whole studio to switch tech stacks when no one else has any experience in it is actively malicious
It's so tiresome that people nowadays can just say "misinformation!" and half of all people will blindly believe that something is indeed misinformation.
When (inexperienced) developers say something is “90% done”, it is about 50% done. I’ve been guilty of that myself.
I think its less than that, or he count stuff thats actually didnt count toward how far along the game is that is playable
i think all programmers are naturally bad at estimating timetables and some of us just learn to double our estimates as a quick hack lol
i always round my intuitive guess up to the next span. think it'll be a day? it'll be a week. think it'll be a week? it'll be two. think it'll be two weeks? it'll be one to three months
@@DavidJCobb a few week to a month is one thing,being off by half a decade is another story
@@poonpoon1604 oh i definitely agree
The concept of what it was there ,but that was not what it looked like. ( Trial of tested was the area they created as a release) was more of a dungeon looking area with some courses to run across in ,but it's still very depressing.
Last i heard caspian was building chocolate factory and hiring oompa loompas to finish chronicles of Elyria.
Didn't he exploit PPP loans by applying for it and firing the staff that were meant to be retained by the loan? That's money another small business could have used to stay afloat. I'm not sure "he's not a bad guy" flies here. He's actively dodging lawsuit, he's barely taking responsibilities and victimizes himself with every question he "answers" in these interviews
I'm sure he doesn't have malicious intent like a downright villain, but he's definitely not a good guy and someone I'd have beer with
He did fire the staff, I believe it wasn't technically illegal because he's still on the hook for the debt? Like he's not eligible for PPP forgiveness so as long as he pays it back it's 'fine' (how he's going to do that I have no clue). That's just based on my memory of previous vids.
Keep 'em coming, this is really interesting!