"guises I was just scared to believe I can make a game and didn't know whyyy" while actual project is a technically and creatively really complex product that has very little to do with why and all about figuring out what and how. this is all "the secret" bullshit just wrapped up in a fancier wrapper.
These diary entries have always been very revealing about who caspian actually is vs who he imagines himself to be. To me it reads like someone decided one day they're going to build a car and they're going to live-blog the process in order that other people can learn what it really takes to build a car. Then spend six months talking about the ideal arrangements of knobs on the dashboard, or what shape the side view mirrors are going to be, or how difficult it is to make the fog lights work. Earnestly presenting these as the real challenges of car manufacture and himself as a wise thing-understander who has chosen to pierce the veil and really simplify it for all the unenlightened out there. Then someone asks about the intake manifold, and he talks about the differences between leather and fabric trim, just before announcing that he's decided that the car will fly at a million miles an hour and never break down. "Why do they even make cars that break down?" he chuckles to himself. Then he makes a sled out of a trash can lid he found at his neighbor's house and says the updates are going to be about the sled for a while since he feels like it's an important step in the car-making process. The next update is about how the sled broke down.
I am waiting for his fanfic how met Hideo Kojima and John Romero the same day, and went to punk concert, after sex with five prostitutes they hired just to him as a gamer challenge.
yeah pretty much. reminds me of the guys who would just pitch software startup ideas talking about what it would do trying to attract someone to magically do the how - while the idea is just a bulk idea and the real work would have been in how it would actually work and even if it could work. like.. imagine you're living in the late 90s and you're working on a company funded way too much and you're an exec on drugs having orgies. you think that wouldn't it be cool if you could have a mmo golf game on the nokia 7710(first WAP phone, a pocket phone protocol for cut-down standard of web) and you could swing it to play it - and imagine genuinely thinking that you genuinely just did "work", then you go pitch that to the owners and the owners are like thumbs up and nobody fucking questions that it's actually impossible and a dumbass idea. dude was just ~15-20 years late to the bullshit party.
The "if you don't succeed, keep trying" idea is correct for some people in some circumstances. But there's other correct ideas too like "know your limits" and "have some self-awareness" and "take personal responsibility."
Kira said it perfectly at the beginning. Who needs to know any of this? We all have personal struggles. He's supposed to be working on a playable MMO that people put their money into. That process started 10 years ago. As of today there is not a single second of playable game. Not one second. This is nothing but a personal journal about why nothing's been accomplished. And his goal is to not only make a massive MMO, but develop his OWN UNIQUE GAME ENGINE? Yeah, ok.
Yeah, a highschool student could have graduated, gone to college, gotten a degree, started a new project, and shipped an MMO in the time it's taken him to do nothing.
nah man the goal is to figure out _why_ he should make a game engine. actually thinking about it now, I think he is a stoner, not the fun kind but the kind of who get grandiose ideas and think they're doing research when they're not doing anything of the sort.
Except that takes effort, self-discipline and a knowledge of the craft and field - and you can't bilk people out of millions of dollars doing it. Unless you're L. Ron Hubbard or Joseph Smith.
Business owner here. I hired a friend. Ironically, he did the same thing Caspian is doing here, spent all day doing write-ups of what he was going to do, never did it. So we fired him. Sure, it sucked, there were some tears, but we remained friends. There's literally no excuse for putting this much effort into *not* doing what you have been paid to do.
Saw some of that while working at an art museum. Completely effort-free and talentless "art", 10-page pretentious essay texts to "vicariously elaborate" what the "elucidating art" supposedly represents and how anyone who has any criticisms "just doesn't get it." And many entitled "artists" spinning absolute BS on the fly during exhibit lectures. Also had a graduate trainee I was supposed to train to film and edit video. Gave him a simple project (that would take me a day, tops), instructions for the equipment and music/video library for editing and an entire 5 day workweek for him to get it done. I ask him how's it going daily, he says it's going fine. Friday and presentation rolls around, he has nothing but a pointless, bloated and convoluted text document about his _plan for the project_ and a "training journal" he's typed out and color-coded for every day. He hadn't even touched the cameras, nor opened Premiere once. He had somehow found the time to watch through an entire season of GoT online though, and didn't even bother or know better to clear his browser history. 😂
@@RuSosan These kind of people confuse me. Obviously that trainee had some faculties to fulfill tasks and some logical/rational thinking skills (color coding days, etc) as evidenced by what they actually produced. My friend was technologically capable bordering on brilliant. In a rare moment of execution he modified and recompiled a Linux file system because our task had grown beyond it. Saved a project. Caspian here has written a lengthy, somewhat cogent and reference-filled essay. This obviously takes some intelligence, skill, time and effort. So laziness/ineptitude doesn't fully cover this phenomenon. I think there's some kind of dysfunction under which they are unable (or unwilling) to align their capabilities with their goals. I feel sorry for them, tbh.
@@RuSosan As an engineer who often works with students and recent graduates, I've seen this a lot. I think the reason is partly that they are used to putting in that little effort, and partly that in so many places the bar is low enough to get away with it. In other words, if everyone does very little, the managers see that as normal and how long things are supposed to take.
@@RuSosanyour second story is why real and practical check-ins are required anytime someone is unproven at something. Yours is short term and sounds low importance but I've heard plenty of times it being much more. Because it's all well and good to blame them intirely with "anytime I asked they said it was fine" and "they never asked for help" and finding out later they were just slacking... but at the end of the day you're now the one with a 100+ hour project barely actually started and going to run overdue and the people you answer to probably won't let you place all of the blame. Even if you think it is totally reasonable for them to just do it: CYA
ive worked in game development for a few years and ive met someone like caspian before. she was heading an indie project we were making and she would spend so many hours writing nonsense and doing excel spreadsheets, all while creating drama with other coworkers, talking herself up and writing similar manifestos about how she was glamorizing her involvement in other people's work. it's genuinely absurd. working with people like this is a death knell and it's giving me terrible deja vu to read his blog posts
kind of obsessed with how caspian makes 80% of his blog post be about the books he read. the woman i worked with did something similar; spent all her time making powerpoints on useless bullshit like picking a random assortment of colors we could pick from for texture work (which is absurd, this is what we have concept artists for... why does my boss feel the need to give me 15 shades of yellow?) she's also spend literally hours of her workday doing nothing. meetings were useless with her because she would detail all the nothing work she did and then refuse to clarify or help the work of everyone else. she started doing UI work, unprompted, to add things to our game while we were literally in the process of doing the final builds. anyways im pretty sure there's a special place in hell for awful managers like her and caspian
We have a game designer and project manager like that as well. We ended up having to design stuff on the fly with minimal input from the two key members who's supposed to get the project to a presentable state. Obviously when it was presented to higher ups the numerous power points were key to "getting the team motivated to meet the deadlines." It's insane how this behavior is pretty common in the games industry.
You just described literally every single Corporate middle manager. This is because they are literally paid to EXPLAIN how they are helping the company to the higher ups, while simultaneously not ACTUALLY helping the company at all. And most of the time they get these little pet projects of theirs they've talked up to the corpo office that literally make the job worse in every way but you NEED to do them because THEIR paycheck is based on it "succeeding" so even in failure they will somehow make it a win for them. Then that change will stay because they explained how helpful it was, and they move on to the next "great idea".
That's admittedly funny. On the other hand, this really does look like Caspian being an incompetent idiot who lacks self-awareness, rather than a hoax. It's unfortunate, but some people are stupid.
So essentially… instead of the guy admitting he was wayyy over his head, made promises he couldn’t keep, he made mistakes and ruined his chances of repairing the situation… he went on a philosophical tangent on how he decided to not call any of his actions a failing in his part (which,,, wouldn’t the better lesson be that yes he failed, but he could try to make some form of amends) and decided that he would stop caring about how his actions had hurt others. Did this man even say sorry.
For 8 million dollars, he could have bought Atavism (MMO engine that already has the major systems built), Unity, and paid a bunch of people to create 3D models for him and would have a game already. Maybe not a good game, but he could have released something playable. That's about all you could do with such a small budget for an MMO.
Why it needed its own engine when lots of decent ones could be used off the shelf is bizarre. It's setting yourself an utterly unreasonable goal from day one. That's, what, a year or two at the beginning before even starting to make a game.
@@molochz You should see what has been created with Atavism by small teams. It's definitely possible. Not saying he would have been able to create something at the scope he wanted to create, but someone with some sense (maybe not this guy) could create a halfway decent MMO with $8mil and a pre-built engine. Most of what you'd spend would be on the 3D models and world building since you get all of the major systems with the engine (grouping, instances, auction house, guild system, etc etc)
Caspian has outmaneuvered everyone by deciding that failure doesn’t exist, therefore he can keep working on his game forever and not give a fuck. Meanwhile in reality, I have to ask how he’s paying his bills if he’s working in the game as full time.
I believe he's so incompetent, that simple task are hard work for him. And when he gets something basic done, he thinks it’s a huge accomplishment. He just fails to see or can’t admit that all his work is basically nothing. And that other people are more competent than him. To him figuring out the basics and learning how to use the tools is hard work.
The fog of war in his own life definitely hasn't lifted. Doesn't he realize the only way to redeem himself is to release the game? There is no other way and no amount of words can change that. But that would take more work, right? Would have taken work...it's a little late, now. And the guy is still clowning around, so he'll never understand what all this philosophy was trying to teach him: Word's are cheap, act upon your promises. Fight for them, instead of making excuses and blaming others. I doubt this guy ever really learned to work alone or with others. Everything I've seen was cobbled together and even his writing is highly inefficient. The guy can't do anything right, except taking your money.
Caspian is the Yandere Dev of MMOs... so caught up in his own ego that he'll take great pains to explain _ad nauseam_ how nothing is his fault. This is just a _slightly_ more eloquent version of _"I'm wasting all my time responding to complaint emails instead of finishing my game, so stop sending me complaint emails!"_
I think this is actually unfair to yandere dev, because yandere dev made a game while we haven't seen a second of gameplay from Caspian. It's hard for me to believe that I'm defending yandere dev.
You know. While the game he made is spaghetti code and causes my computer to tell me to stop playing or I won’t have a computer anymore. There’s… *a* game
This whole thing was surprisingly interesting, although I'm glad you continually pointed out the whole way through the way that he's obfuscating the obvious mistakes he made and not mentioning things like how he never released the forensic accounting stuff to prove his innocence.
0:03 Everyone always asks "When" Caspian, nobody ever seems to ask "Why" Caspian. I love how so many of his blog posts are essentially just him being like "hey guys, look at my random screenshots from my development software, look at all these PC towers!". And we're all just expected to say anything other than Yes. Yes Caspian. That is certainly some photos of of your PC screen and your many towers. That's lovely. I don't suppose you'll be releasing a, oh I don't know, _AN ACTUAL GAME_ at some point? The audacity of writing an essay advising folks how to go about starting a business... xD You'd need to start one first Caspian.
One thing that's puzzling me is how he just refuses to admit he fucked up, he'd get way less flak if he just admitted he fucked up and just be more transparent. It honestly doesn't seem like a scam and more like things massively went wrong
Right? Anyone that seriously thinks they can spearhead an mmo alone and without any prior experience shouldn't be trusted with any amount of money to begin with, but I can at least admire the ambition. There comes a point however where that kind of blind, stubborn insistence just becomes impossible to justify/understand. The time where it made sense for this guy to own up was like 7 years ago, lol. But hey, it's a good cautionary tale, at the very least. That tale being: "Don't make your first project as a budding game dev an MMO, you thick prick." 😂
He wasted 10 years and 8 million dollars without even an alpha or any other proof they were actually working to make a game that is a scam not simply making a mistake
@syndrathedarksovereign1609 even if you give the benefit of the doubt that maybe he had reasonable cause to think he could do it at the start, there is simply no way to run out of that much money while accomplishing so little without seeing much much earlier earlier that the goal will not be reachable. I would call this one of the situations where Kira points out the difference between "was not a scam" and "was not a scam initially/ didn't set out to be scam"
I feel like he just got himself in a position where he was trapped. He promised something he couldn't deliver though I am sure he THOUGHT he could, got funds for it, failed to make his project a reality and spent all the money meaning he can't refund anybody and is basically stuck trying to make a game he doesn't have the ability to make, or even the funds to make anymore. I am sure the guy is massively depressed - his life has became basically trying to keep angry people who want their money back at bay because he can't refund them by making them think he's working on a game that he now knows he can't ever complete. He's probably constantly worried he's going to be sued for money he doesn't have too. His life is going to remain miserable and stressful until he decides to finally admit he doesn't have the ability to make this game a reality and just accepts the fallout that not releasing the game will have.
@@This-Was-SpartaSee his mistake is that he tried to do this with traditional money. If he made vaporware with NFTs and blockchain hed be a multi-millionaire rugpuller right now. lmao
This "failure is a good thing because it's how you learn to succeed" idea is true and great. The problem here is that he didn't bother learning how to succeed and instead writes 10,000 word blogposts about what success would be like. Even if you'd never heard of this saga before and just read this blogpost cold, you'd know from reading it that nothing worthwhile would ever come of this project.
Ok, so this is a glimpse into very complex pathological personality disorder. Keep in mind that all of this massive journal keeping of his personal life and struggles is supposed to be the progress of an MMO'S DEVELOPMENT. All this guy has really done with money and time is to dream out loud about what he would want his ideal MMO to be like. THAT'S IT. It's a JOURNAL. Where is the gameplay? Even a gameplay demo? Or even screenshots from the actual game? The Alpha? A combat demo? A gathering resources demo? There is nothing. To this day there is not a single second of actual playable game. And yet he envisions, with no money, virtually no staff, that he's going to create an immersive, evolving world on a scale that rivals or even surpasses The Elder Scrolls Online, or New World, etc? Where your character not only can interact with the world, but also grows old over time and watches things actually change around him? Those games had billions of dollars of investment, hundreds of people working on them, and those MMO's are considered ok but not great. At what point do we step back and realize that this man suffers from not only depression as he admitted, but also a serious delusional, perhaps sociopathic disorder. One in which he absolutely loves being able to write pages and pages about what's going on in his head and then pass it off as "developer notes" and "developer progress updates." WHAT development? WHAT updates? There's NOTHING.
Well, he has spent a considerable amount of time on writing his autobiography over the years. You have to admire this mans commitment to not making a video game.
This is not sociopathy...anti social personality disorder, which is what sociopathy and psychopathy are now grouped under, requires defiance of the law/authority. Not just lack of respect for fellow human beings. He has SOMETHING, clearly, but let's not group everyone who doesn't care about their fellow humans into "sociopath"...many disorders can cause that on lesser levels.
"Knowledge is understanding how to do a thing. Experience is understanding how not to do it" is one of the most "I am 14 and this is deep" sentences I've heard in a minute.
I swear, if this never ending story dosent make it as a script for a game, i will make a game about crowdfunded games. Its gonna be a multiplayer experience for massive audiences, stay tuned for a kickstarter campaign!
@@snooganslestat2030 I think that deserves to be a funding goal. At 1 mil, i will provide my lifestory in excruciating detail, leaving out the incriminating parts. 2 mil, ill add obfuscating detail Etc. It will be great!
I mean FRFR, Caspian is clinically insane, no? I mean who is he writing this endless nonsense for? He’s probably like I have to go to an investor meeting today but it’s just him reading these absurdly long nonsense rants to his stuffed animals on his bed. Dude has lost the plot
Not insane, but definitely seems like psychological disorder. He reminds me of when my anxiety disorder overloaded me so I dropped out of uni and spent 4+months pretending I am going to Uni before my family got me help. He's very similar. to me. He's essentially pretending he's running a company making an mmo. Just on much larger scale than I ever did. I seriously hope his family is aware of what he's doing and have a way out in case he spirals into debt.
@@dracoknight9066 You've got a big heart and the strength of self-reflection to say those things about yourself and see them in others. I meet so many people in life who aren't taking charge of their future and making something, they are roleplaying it and pretending it. Only, this man here is doing that with millions of dollars
"Yeah, I know you all gave me 6.5 million dollars to make this game you were excited about, but let me take some time to talk to you about some books Ive read during development!"
So glad Caspian came down from his monk's monastary to impart his wisdom on the game making process. I'm sure those who paid for his learning experience over the last decade is grateful. Seriously though, this is a huge document to tell everyone he (apparently) no longer cares about the 'unjustified' criticism.
It's always amusing when a middle-aged man FINALLY has a little dip in the philosophy/human psychology pool and runs around shouting "Look at this marvelous thing I've discovered!". Good work Caspian, you've finally taught yourself the barest minimum self-awareness. Better late than never, I guess
I know, right? I've read Aurelius in my early twenties. And while there are some excellent things in his works, and certain aspects I have definitely tried to follow and integrate into my life, it's really not this earth shattering realization or anything. Just a book filled with some decent advice, and a lot of stuff that's just downright harmful or unworkable today. But somehow people like Caspian read it halfway through their lives and pretend like "don't let any small thing bother you" is somehow the most profound piece of philosophical teaching ever. And not just something you should have learned as a teenager.
@@ulch11 Yeah, and of course it would be "modern stoicism" that a terminally-online chronically unaware "man" (read: boy) like Caspian gravitates toward. It's like he's actively trying to make satire of his own existence. Do all these emotionally immature men read from the same script book or something? I'm surprised we didn't hear him say "It is what it is", that would've been the cherry on top.
I have a rather autistic best friend who is exactly like this. He will endlessly "discover" all sorts of philosophers, quotes, aphorisms, writers and thinkers and tell you all about this wonderful new discovery.. that he read in a book someone else wrote. He almost acts like he discovered it, and if you don't feel like listening to a 45 minute rant about Marcus Aurelius, he seems to think you're just simply too dumb to understand and appreciate his wisdom, he becomes visibly uncomfortable and annoyed. It gets really annoying when you're the one who originally told him to read the book about 10 years ago. It's like he's incapable of understanding that other people can and have found out about these same things he's raving about before him. No understanding that I might know the idea he's just discovered from someone elses book and I just disagree with it, and that's why I don't need a lecture from him. Either you praise him for his borrowed wisdom, or you're a jerk who just doesn't get it. Needless to say, it's very tiring interacting with him sometimes.
Seems like he's just feeding off the attention at this point, since he's got a semi-captive audience of people who are still under the belief that they're going to get this thing that they threw money at ages ago.
You're right, if this was a scam he would have just taken the money and disappeared. Hence this is not a scam. Caspian is just an idiot with no self-awareness.
Unless he instead wrote a diary of all the ideas he had for a plot & how to structure the story in agonising detail whilst occasionally releasing chapter titles?
Okay, so the stoicism part was meant to make himself look good but it does the opposite. I consider myself a stoic, having read Marcus Aurelius and Epictitus (I recommend both). Why this is so damning is that if he is following stoicism then he would be doing everything he could do to make thia game. He would come clean and expose his failures with inside data. The stoic says to his critic, "if only you knew the half of my flaws you'd have so much more to say." The stoic does not pay his critics much mind because he knows that the fruits of his labors and his honest dealings with others will speak more than any defense he can muster for himself. So, if he hasn't been pushing out a game, what has he been doing? Trying to convince people hes a good person and enriching himself. These have been the core focus of his efforts because these are his true pursuits. By telling you of his stoicism, his fraud is laid bare.
I don't know very much about stoicism, but even I felt that what Caspian is doing doesn't feel like stoicism. He seems to not have understood for example the prayer he quoted. The purpose of accepting things one cannot change is to focus on the things that one can change, and then go do it. Not write lenghty excuses why one can't. He also seems to virtue signal a lot, and painting himself as a victim. If someone feels the need to tell people how good of a person they are, they probably aren't, and they try to convince themselves that they are.
The heart of all art is that the best response to early criticism is a great finished work. Doubts about your abilities and your output are silenced best and fastest by finishing your project, and making it exactly as good as you said. In my own creative field the best feeling as a critic is when a project you doubted comes out and proves you completely wrong.
sounds spot on imo in his mind, he's a great man _a priori,_ and if he tells us enough about all his great ideas, his great vision, then he can convince us to recognize the greatness he feels he has by default he will never honestly confront the need to actually _build_ these ideas in order for them to be worth anything
@@oliver_twistor True but this is what I'm saying. He HAS focused on what he can control in his mind: his public perception. He has given up on what he cannot control: making a game. I also think that he has completely misunderstood his quote. It isn't meant to say that your obstacles must be tackled head-on as he seems to think it does. It means that the obstacle is the most important thing to focus on because it is what will prevent you from completing your goal. You can find ways around it. You can ask others to help you overcome it. Whatever. It just means you can't "cross that bridge when you get to it" because you WILL get to it so you might as well start tackling it now. Don't procrastinate. Marcus Aurelius has a bunch of stuff like that. About how it's pointless to worry about the problems of tomorrow when there is barely enough time today to start tackling them. Also, Aurelius is very against the idea of "not giving a fuck" in the general sense. He gives loads. His meditations are about what and what not to give a fuck about.
The single sentence describing him allowing the engine to move to Node/TS says more than the 5 million word essay to anyone who has had any performance-critical dev experience.
at 40:22 if anyone's curious, though that timestamp skips a bunch of rambling about management apparently it was his team lead's idea, not his own, but he drops this bombshell after talking about how rigorously he vetted his employees
It’s all very simple and needed no techno babble. All he needed to to, ever…; was show what he accomplished in 4 years with all that money before he shut it down. In the last two months of working on my own game, I have showed every step of development for $0. Caspian is the singular most incompetent’developer’ and fragile man I have seen play the development game.
His talking about "leadership" mirrors my experiences too with some project leaders. They make incredibly bad decisions out of a lack of understanding, then suddenly feel the need to show they are "the boss", make an arbitrary decision that hurts everyone and stick to it. The actually competent people leave, and everyone is angry.
At this point in time, it's better for him to start selling a story of a failed developer so people can learn from him. Remove the graphics, remove gameplay, name it "Chronicles of a failed developer" and this whole venture becomes legit
It would actually have been pretty cool if the whole game was turned into a text adventure with ASCII graphics called Chronicles of A Failed Developer and it's all about starting off with a huge amount of money and spending it as rapidly as possible. I think that might have been enough to redeem this whole project.
He really shouldve just done that and hired actual people who actually know what theyre doing. And then they could take features that work, impliment them and chuck the ones that dont work. But something tells me thats too logical for Caspian
His mental and personal problems are his and have nothing to do with him not providing what he promised. It's not an excuse for me or for anyone else when you accept the responsibility of a job you chose to do. We all have personal problems but you don't bring them to work and definitely don't use them as an excuse for failing a project.
Having worked for the public sector for a few months, Caspian feels like a lot of my supervisors and coworkers. It’s crazy how people can build these habits over time.
I love the book stories. I'm sure he goes around now, quoting them to people he talks to all day, every day, like a precocious toddler learning about a brand new color.
Shout out to all the people who paid for this dude to read a bunch of books and go on a personal life journey. Who would’ve thought that crowd funding could lead to throwing millions at a mentally ill person who has no clue what to do with it?
Honestly, I would like for people to give me 8 million to, idk, read some books or something. And I think if I started a Kickstarter for that expressed purpose I might just make some cash. At least I would be honest about what the money is for. Me being a lazy POS
"I want to confess all my mistakes: I was too nice; I cared too much; I didn't believe enough in myself; I wasn't tough enough in an uncaring world; I didn't spend enough time on fog of war." What a pathetic, delusional, self-pitying, time & money wasting human being. However, great update!
It's kinda uncannily familiar to see how Caspian uses tech babble to obfuscate and to pretend he's still doing something and making progress. 🤔 CIG do a lot of the same kind of techbabble BS regarding Star Citizen. It's pretty much all Citizencon is nowadays beyond the vapid community spotlights, new ship jpeg releases and pre-rendered hype trailers.
much like how he writes about making a game instead of just making the game, now we get the joy of a man writing a self-patting book about how he's reading self-help books. hope the court one day asks him to prove his progress and he brings this behemoth of a blog out for them to read.
When I was in school for game design, I was told there are two kinds of people. The Idea Man and The Execution Man. Someone to come up with the super cool stuff and someone to execute on those ideas. Caspian sounds like the idea man who forgot to hire the Execution team and needs to asap if this is all he's doing with the game lol.
23:10 "...the smarter your leadership team, the more challenging the problems are that do land on your desk." What a nonsense. If the leadership team was incompetent, the challenging problems would have landed on his desk nonetheless, plus a pile of trivial ones.
So basically; Self absorbed person is handed a commercial/creative opportunity, talks a big game, does bugger-all, squanders time, then becomes an endless excuse-fountain of personal problems 'unique to them'. We all know one. Keep them out of your life.
There's a good quote by I believe Robert. C. Martin (software guy). It goes "Don't go to the sydney opera house to practice. Go to perform.". Basically meaning, learn what you need to, but not when you are getting paid to already know.
I swear, people will spend 5 hours writing about what they should work at, rather then spend 5 hours actually doing the work. Knowing Caspians type, i bet he felt like he really accomplished something after posting that blog.
A quick rundown: ~9 pages ~6 thousand words ~35 thousand characters 'Notepad cannot find "sorry"' So his 8 million dollar, 7 year long philosophical journey didn't teach him any sense of responsibility or how to take accountability for his own actions. He should just run for public office at this point.
Procrastination is a bitch... Caspian thought after a long and hard day of scrolling the Chronicles of Elyria discord channel... I'll better tackle this issue head on... and gently he opened a book about meditation by Marcus Aurelius.. his eyes got heavier and heavier... finally he drifted to land of sleep his final thoughts being "I'll tackle this issue tomorrow head on !".
Caspian's most consistent statement is that things are "finally" where they need to be to "really move forward now". How many times has Caspian told us that everything is all set now, with clear roads ahead, no more obstacles, on track, full steam ahead?!? With CoE / KoE, the future is always bright, and _always_ just around the corner.
I have a very close family member who Caspian reminds me of. All the blame should lay on his shoulders but he has created a reality that has diminished every wrong he has done and tried to blow up in value the minimal successes. This in turn makes it seem like they are a victim in this reality and no one sees it but them. This unfortunately just hurts themselves more and more. Sad really.
That was a very rare glimpse into the mind of a narcissist in the midst of self imposition. Firstly the victim secondly the phoenix. Reading books to encourage and inflate his ego while living out a fantasy. Philosophy gave him the ability to pretend that those quotes applied to his life actions while everyone faces those consequences. The fantasy means he can apply now responsibly and carry on.
If I had put money in CoE, I would be pretty pissed reading this post. That's great that Caspian seems to have grown as a person (or so he claims) and that he knows what he has done wrong, but he was doing it on other people's dime (as Kira pointed out). I think I heard a little victim blaming as well in his rant about how people won't accept failure. There is failure and there is failure. Quite the flippant attitude to take someone's money, blow it all and then expect a forgiving attitude. Some of his backers spent a lot of money (not the best decision, but still it's upon Caspian to do right by them). I hope he has learned the most important lesson from making mistakes: learning from them, to not to the same mistakes. I highly doubt that he is capable of that, since he comes off as quite the narcissist. "Only I can fix it." Not to become political, but I think most of us have heard that sentiment before. If he truly loves his project and wants to see it become a real game, he should try his hardest to find someone who can take over the entire operative responsibility, while he remains as the owner, but a passive one. That might be easier than what he tried, to sell the studio. It's easier to find a CEO than to find someone who is ready to take on financial responsibility of this sinking (sunken?) ship. He is way to close to his passion to see things clearly, especially if he's dealing with bouts of depression. I know someone who started their own business without the proper skills to run that business. They were blind to their incompetence, and instead of hiring a CEO who could run the day-to-day operations, their narcissism got the best of them and they were unable to relinquish that level of control over the business to another person, even though that CEO wouldn't have ownership of the company. It's a shame really that some people are like that.
If someone scams you out of your hard earned money then some or most people will want their head, so is not unreasonable to feel that way if a large percent of people share that feeling.
LOL! I just wanted to point out that there is a weird noise when you told me that there is sb. cleaning in the background Thanks for this great piece of quality content. Very good comments to read too, thanks guys
What backers wanted: A game
What backers got: The autobiographical diary of someone they thought was going to make a game
I'm half convinced he just likes attention at this point, good or bad.
"guises I was just scared to believe I can make a game and didn't know whyyy"
while actual project is a technically and creatively really complex product that has very little to do with why and all about figuring out what and how. this is all "the secret" bullshit just wrapped up in a fancier wrapper.
@@jameseast9229 He doesn't have any. Alot of people nolonger remember his project even existed.
Actually, they got book reviews
“The KoE Autobiography: How I Wasted Your Money and Why I Don’t Care”
I don't just "move my arm" peasant I engage my muscles individually and use tendons in tandom to create a forward motion with my hand.
😂😂😂
These diary entries have always been very revealing about who caspian actually is vs who he imagines himself to be.
To me it reads like someone decided one day they're going to build a car and they're going to live-blog the process in order that other people can learn what it really takes to build a car. Then spend six months talking about the ideal arrangements of knobs on the dashboard, or what shape the side view mirrors are going to be, or how difficult it is to make the fog lights work. Earnestly presenting these as the real challenges of car manufacture and himself as a wise thing-understander who has chosen to pierce the veil and really simplify it for all the unenlightened out there.
Then someone asks about the intake manifold, and he talks about the differences between leather and fabric trim, just before announcing that he's decided that the car will fly at a million miles an hour and never break down. "Why do they even make cars that break down?" he chuckles to himself. Then he makes a sled out of a trash can lid he found at his neighbor's house and says the updates are going to be about the sled for a while since he feels like it's an important step in the car-making process.
The next update is about how the sled broke down.
funniest thing I've read in a while apart from the actual blog post
Top tier post 😂
I am waiting for his fanfic how met Hideo Kojima and John Romero the same day, and went to punk concert, after sex with five prostitutes they hired just to him as a gamer challenge.
lol, fog of war lights do be difficult tho
yeah pretty much.
reminds me of the guys who would just pitch software startup ideas talking about what it would do trying to attract someone to magically do the how - while the idea is just a bulk idea and the real work would have been in how it would actually work and even if it could work.
like.. imagine you're living in the late 90s and you're working on a company funded way too much and you're an exec on drugs having orgies. you think that wouldn't it be cool if you could have a mmo golf game on the nokia 7710(first WAP phone, a pocket phone protocol for cut-down standard of web) and you could swing it to play it - and imagine genuinely thinking that you genuinely just did "work", then you go pitch that to the owners and the owners are like thumbs up and nobody fucking questions that it's actually impossible and a dumbass idea.
dude was just ~15-20 years late to the bullshit party.
To sum up Caspian's rambling...he didn't fail to deliver a playable game, he is simply still learning how to do it. Wow. Game coming any decade now.
*century/millennium
hahhahaaa you know what, i fucking love this novella. detailed journey of a man’s acceptance of his true self :an unaccountable sociopathic conman
The "if you don't succeed, keep trying" idea is correct for some people in some circumstances. But there's other correct ideas too like "know your limits" and "have some self-awareness" and "take personal responsibility."
at this rate star citizen will be out of early access before the alpha of CoE XD
At least he used his time to read a lot of books.
Kira said it perfectly at the beginning. Who needs to know any of this? We all have personal struggles. He's supposed to be working on a playable MMO that people put their money into. That process started 10 years ago. As of today there is not a single second of playable game. Not one second. This is nothing but a personal journal about why nothing's been accomplished. And his goal is to not only make a massive MMO, but develop his OWN UNIQUE GAME ENGINE? Yeah, ok.
All whilst trying to paint HIMSELF as the victim in all of this after essentially committing fraud.
Yeah, a highschool student could have graduated, gone to college, gotten a degree, started a new project, and shipped an MMO in the time it's taken him to do nothing.
@@SvendleBerries Exactly!
@@Trafulgoth 100%!
nah man the goal is to figure out _why_ he should make a game engine.
actually thinking about it now, I think he is a stoner, not the fun kind but the kind of who get grandiose ideas and think they're doing research when they're not doing anything of the sort.
He would be so much happier writing novels.
maybe but it wouldn't earn him 8 mils
@@windy8544I honestly believe he himself regrets the whole fundraiser at this point. Definitely has hurt himself along with the people who donated
And I’d be super happy to not read any of those novels.
@@dubioushumor9243I hope he writes a novel in his development blog and Kira reads it.
Except that takes effort, self-discipline and a knowledge of the craft and field - and you can't bilk people out of millions of dollars doing it.
Unless you're L. Ron Hubbard or Joseph Smith.
Caspian really wrote his own villain origin story lmao
Kek
Business owner here. I hired a friend. Ironically, he did the same thing Caspian is doing here, spent all day doing write-ups of what he was going to do, never did it. So we fired him. Sure, it sucked, there were some tears, but we remained friends.
There's literally no excuse for putting this much effort into *not* doing what you have been paid to do.
Saw some of that while working at an art museum.
Completely effort-free and talentless "art", 10-page pretentious essay texts to "vicariously elaborate" what the "elucidating art" supposedly represents and how anyone who has any criticisms "just doesn't get it."
And many entitled "artists" spinning absolute BS on the fly during exhibit lectures.
Also had a graduate trainee I was supposed to train to film and edit video.
Gave him a simple project (that would take me a day, tops), instructions for the equipment and music/video library for editing and an entire 5 day workweek for him to get it done.
I ask him how's it going daily, he says it's going fine.
Friday and presentation rolls around, he has nothing but a pointless, bloated and convoluted text document about his _plan for the project_ and a "training journal" he's typed out and color-coded for every day.
He hadn't even touched the cameras, nor opened Premiere once.
He had somehow found the time to watch through an entire season of GoT online though, and didn't even bother or know better to clear his browser history. 😂
@@RuSosan These kind of people confuse me. Obviously that trainee had some faculties to fulfill tasks and some logical/rational thinking skills (color coding days, etc) as evidenced by what they actually produced.
My friend was technologically capable bordering on brilliant. In a rare moment of execution he modified and recompiled a Linux file system because our task had grown beyond it. Saved a project.
Caspian here has written a lengthy, somewhat cogent and reference-filled essay. This obviously takes some intelligence, skill, time and effort.
So laziness/ineptitude doesn't fully cover this phenomenon. I think there's some kind of dysfunction under which they are unable (or unwilling) to align their capabilities with their goals. I feel sorry for them, tbh.
@@RuSosan As an engineer who often works with students and recent graduates, I've seen this a lot. I think the reason is partly that they are used to putting in that little effort, and partly that in so many places the bar is low enough to get away with it. In other words, if everyone does very little, the managers see that as normal and how long things are supposed to take.
@@RuSosanyour second story is why real and practical check-ins are required anytime someone is unproven at something. Yours is short term and sounds low importance but I've heard plenty of times it being much more.
Because it's all well and good to blame them intirely with "anytime I asked they said it was fine" and "they never asked for help" and finding out later they were just slacking... but at the end of the day you're now the one with a 100+ hour project barely actually started and going to run overdue and the people you answer to probably won't let you place all of the blame.
Even if you think it is totally reasonable for them to just do it: CYA
He wanted to get the most for the least, that's legit goal.
we only hear from him every few months because that's how long it takes him to write these manifestos.
He spends more time writing his blog then actually making a game
Never has been making a game.
Seems like.
THIS.
Spoiler alert... The blog is the game
reminds me of Yandere Sim dev
well credit where it's due, Elyria is certainly chronic
Now the only thing he needs is to make it chronicless
Between this and Earth II, there will always be content.
Holy shit I forgot about earth II
I forgot Earth II even exists.
@@mattpeters4700 did it ever really exist?
Wow hahah forgot about earth 2
Earth 2 has been really quiet - i am impressed it still exists at this point, its hype died aeons ago.
ive worked in game development for a few years and ive met someone like caspian before. she was heading an indie project we were making and she would spend so many hours writing nonsense and doing excel spreadsheets, all while creating drama with other coworkers, talking herself up and writing similar manifestos about how she was glamorizing her involvement in other people's work. it's genuinely absurd. working with people like this is a death knell and it's giving me terrible deja vu to read his blog posts
kind of obsessed with how caspian makes 80% of his blog post be about the books he read. the woman i worked with did something similar; spent all her time making powerpoints on useless bullshit like picking a random assortment of colors we could pick from for texture work (which is absurd, this is what we have concept artists for... why does my boss feel the need to give me 15 shades of yellow?) she's also spend literally hours of her workday doing nothing. meetings were useless with her because she would detail all the nothing work she did and then refuse to clarify or help the work of everyone else. she started doing UI work, unprompted, to add things to our game while we were literally in the process of doing the final builds. anyways im pretty sure there's a special place in hell for awful managers like her and caspian
We have a game designer and project manager like that as well. We ended up having to design stuff on the fly with minimal input from the two key members who's supposed to get the project to a presentable state. Obviously when it was presented to higher ups the numerous power points were key to "getting the team motivated to meet the deadlines." It's insane how this behavior is pretty common in the games industry.
Worked with people like that as well, this kind of planing usually hurts more than it helps.
Sometimes you just need to... You know, start developing
@@AracheNerd These ppl lack self reflection. It's why they look to others for inspiration. They look for a window, instead of a mirror.
You just described literally every single Corporate middle manager.
This is because they are literally paid to EXPLAIN how they are helping the company to the higher ups, while simultaneously not ACTUALLY helping the company at all.
And most of the time they get these little pet projects of theirs they've talked up to the corpo office that literally make the job worse in every way but you NEED to do them because THEIR paycheck is based on it "succeeding" so even in failure they will somehow make it a win for them.
Then that change will stay because they explained how helpful it was, and they move on to the next "great idea".
This is the longest “the dog ate my homework” scenario in human history.
“They claimed that all the development work…were all part of an elaborate hoax” …I don’t recall saying it was elaborate 🙄
Very good point!
😂
That's admittedly funny.
On the other hand, this really does look like Caspian being an incompetent idiot who lacks self-awareness, rather than a hoax. It's unfortunate, but some people are stupid.
So essentially… instead of the guy admitting he was wayyy over his head, made promises he couldn’t keep, he made mistakes and ruined his chances of repairing the situation… he went on a philosophical tangent on how he decided to not call any of his actions a failing in his part (which,,, wouldn’t the better lesson be that yes he failed, but he could try to make some form of amends) and decided that he would stop caring about how his actions had hurt others.
Did this man even say sorry.
Nope. Admitting fault starts with self reflection but Caspian has no mirrors around him.
He didn't, but on the other hand, it legally wouldn't be smart for him to say sorry. Yes, the legal system is messed up.
Clearly not, he didnt even play the ukulele
For 8 million dollars, he could have bought Atavism (MMO engine that already has the major systems built), Unity, and paid a bunch of people to create 3D models for him and would have a game already. Maybe not a good game, but he could have released something playable. That's about all you could do with such a small budget for an MMO.
Why it needed its own engine when lots of decent ones could be used off the shelf is bizarre. It's setting yourself an utterly unreasonable goal from day one. That's, what, a year or two at the beginning before even starting to make a game.
@@stuartmorley6894 And from one developer it's literally impossible; by the time it's done it's 10+ years out of date.
@@molochz You should see what has been created with Atavism by small teams. It's definitely possible. Not saying he would have been able to create something at the scope he wanted to create, but someone with some sense (maybe not this guy) could create a halfway decent MMO with $8mil and a pre-built engine. Most of what you'd spend would be on the 3D models and world building since you get all of the major systems with the engine (grouping, instances, auction house, guild system, etc etc)
I'd honestly take the current L + the Kira uploads
"Thankfully to people I could live my dream, but I've fd up, I heartfully apologize. Now here are all the data about our work and finances."
Caspian has outmaneuvered everyone by deciding that failure doesn’t exist, therefore he can keep working on his game forever and not give a fuck.
Meanwhile in reality, I have to ask how he’s paying his bills if he’s working in the game as full time.
"No one is recognizing our hard work" Well, you haven't shown us anything other than a little parkour demo soooo...
I believe he's so incompetent, that simple task are hard work for him. And when he gets something basic done, he thinks it’s a huge accomplishment. He just fails to see or can’t admit that all his work is basically nothing. And that other people are more competent than him. To him figuring out the basics and learning how to use the tools is hard work.
You make a little parkour demo in 60 years! It's not that easy!
Donʼt forget the tavern demo with characters named things like Jgrrll
Caspian is simply the best at making no game at all. What happened to his other passion project and the fog of war?
What do you think he's been doing, he's been obscuring public views like a functioning fog of war
It's now turning into a fog of mind.
NO, PLEASE... SPARE OUR BABY BOY THE HORRORS!!! The fog of war is too nebulous to be tamed!!! 😭😭😭
I imagined reading this in a field filled with fog in early morning just as the fall colors hit the trees
The fog of war in his own life definitely hasn't lifted. Doesn't he realize the only way to redeem himself is to release the game? There is no other way and no amount of words can change that. But that would take more work, right? Would have taken work...it's a little late, now. And the guy is still clowning around, so he'll never understand what all this philosophy was trying to teach him: Word's are cheap, act upon your promises.
Fight for them, instead of making excuses and blaming others. I doubt this guy ever really learned to work alone or with others. Everything I've seen was cobbled together and even his writing is highly inefficient. The guy can't do anything right, except taking your money.
Caspian is the Yandere Dev of MMOs... so caught up in his own ego that he'll take great pains to explain _ad nauseam_ how nothing is his fault. This is just a _slightly_ more eloquent version of _"I'm wasting all my time responding to complaint emails instead of finishing my game, so stop sending me complaint emails!"_
At least yandere dev made a game.
@@NickyBlue99
Holy shit, Caspian was _actually_ outdone by YanDev. 👏🤣
I think this is actually unfair to yandere dev, because yandere dev made a game while we haven't seen a second of gameplay from Caspian.
It's hard for me to believe that I'm defending yandere dev.
You know. While the game he made is spaghetti code and causes my computer to tell me to stop playing or I won’t have a computer anymore. There’s… *a* game
I love how the Chronicles of Elyria jokes on your videos have developed and grown more than the game
Ahh it's been a while. Time to pour a little rum and sit by the campfire and learn of the latest from the far of land of Elyria.
Darn it... why is the rum gone??
Aye...tall tales still come from the land that nought hath seen...
What a lengthy and detailed excuse Caspian has written.
This whole thing was surprisingly interesting, although I'm glad you continually pointed out the whole way through the way that he's obfuscating the obvious mistakes he made and not mentioning things like how he never released the forensic accounting stuff to prove his innocence.
0:03 Everyone always asks "When" Caspian, nobody ever seems to ask "Why" Caspian.
I love how so many of his blog posts are essentially just him being like "hey guys, look at my random screenshots from my development software, look at all these PC towers!". And we're all just expected to say anything other than Yes. Yes Caspian. That is certainly some photos of of your PC screen and your many towers. That's lovely. I don't suppose you'll be releasing a, oh I don't know, _AN ACTUAL GAME_ at some point?
The audacity of writing an essay advising folks how to go about starting a business... xD You'd need to start one first Caspian.
"How" Caspian.
One thing that's puzzling me is how he just refuses to admit he fucked up, he'd get way less flak if he just admitted he fucked up and just be more transparent. It honestly doesn't seem like a scam and more like things massively went wrong
Right? Anyone that seriously thinks they can spearhead an mmo alone and without any prior experience shouldn't be trusted with any amount of money to begin with, but I can at least admire the ambition. There comes a point however where that kind of blind, stubborn insistence just becomes impossible to justify/understand. The time where it made sense for this guy to own up was like 7 years ago, lol.
But hey, it's a good cautionary tale, at the very least. That tale being: "Don't make your first project as a budding game dev an MMO, you thick prick." 😂
He wasted 10 years and 8 million dollars without even an alpha or any other proof they were actually working to make a game that is a scam not simply making a mistake
@syndrathedarksovereign1609 even if you give the benefit of the doubt that maybe he had reasonable cause to think he could do it at the start, there is simply no way to run out of that much money while accomplishing so little without seeing much much earlier earlier that the goal will not be reachable.
I would call this one of the situations where Kira points out the difference between "was not a scam" and "was not a scam initially/ didn't set out to be scam"
I feel like he just got himself in a position where he was trapped. He promised something he couldn't deliver though I am sure he THOUGHT he could, got funds for it, failed to make his project a reality and spent all the money meaning he can't refund anybody and is basically stuck trying to make a game he doesn't have the ability to make, or even the funds to make anymore. I am sure the guy is massively depressed - his life has became basically trying to keep angry people who want their money back at bay because he can't refund them by making them think he's working on a game that he now knows he can't ever complete. He's probably constantly worried he's going to be sued for money he doesn't have too. His life is going to remain miserable and stressful until he decides to finally admit he doesn't have the ability to make this game a reality and just accepts the fallout that not releasing the game will have.
@@This-Was-SpartaSee his mistake is that he tried to do this with traditional money. If he made vaporware with NFTs and blockchain hed be a multi-millionaire rugpuller right now. lmao
This "failure is a good thing because it's how you learn to succeed" idea is true and great. The problem here is that he didn't bother learning how to succeed and instead writes 10,000 word blogposts about what success would be like.
Even if you'd never heard of this saga before and just read this blogpost cold, you'd know from reading it that nothing worthwhile would ever come of this project.
The old saw applies: there's a big difference between a person with 10 years' experience, and a person who's had one year of experience, ten times.
Nevertheless at least I got some potential book recs from it
Ok, so this is a glimpse into very complex pathological personality disorder. Keep in mind that all of this massive journal keeping of his personal life and struggles is supposed to be the progress of an MMO'S DEVELOPMENT. All this guy has really done with money and time is to dream out loud about what he would want his ideal MMO to be like. THAT'S IT. It's a JOURNAL. Where is the gameplay? Even a gameplay demo? Or even screenshots from the actual game? The Alpha? A combat demo? A gathering resources demo? There is nothing. To this day there is not a single second of actual playable game.
And yet he envisions, with no money, virtually no staff, that he's going to create an immersive, evolving world on a scale that rivals or even surpasses The Elder Scrolls Online, or New World, etc? Where your character not only can interact with the world, but also grows old over time and watches things actually change around him? Those games had billions of dollars of investment, hundreds of people working on them, and those MMO's are considered ok but not great.
At what point do we step back and realize that this man suffers from not only depression as he admitted, but also a serious delusional, perhaps sociopathic disorder. One in which he absolutely loves being able to write pages and pages about what's going on in his head and then pass it off as "developer notes" and "developer progress updates." WHAT development? WHAT updates? There's NOTHING.
Unfortunately, you can't force someone to get the help they desperately need unless they want it. And he's never gonna want it.
Well, he has spent a considerable amount of time on writing his autobiography over the years.
You have to admire this mans commitment to not making a video game.
Great comment
This. This "man" has spent more than five years doing nothing on what he wanted to create, and wrote a blog about doing nothing.
FIVE. YEARS.
This is not sociopathy...anti social personality disorder, which is what sociopathy and psychopathy are now grouped under, requires defiance of the law/authority. Not just lack of respect for fellow human beings. He has SOMETHING, clearly, but let's not group everyone who doesn't care about their fellow humans into "sociopath"...many disorders can cause that on lesser levels.
"Knowledge is understanding how to do a thing. Experience is understanding how not to do it" is one of the most "I am 14 and this is deep" sentences I've heard in a minute.
The time he took to write that, he could've finished Elyria and started on Elyria 2
Maybe Elyria and Elyria 2 can be bundled with Half-Life 3 and 4
I swear, if this never ending story dosent make it as a script for a game, i will make a game about crowdfunded games.
Its gonna be a multiplayer experience for massive audiences, stay tuned for a kickstarter campaign!
Not interested.....unless you're going to provide a painfully detailed dev blog!
I think you should crowd fund a Manga about it
@@snooganslestat2030 I think that deserves to be a funding goal.
At 1 mil, i will provide my lifestory in excruciating detail, leaving out the incriminating parts.
2 mil, ill add obfuscating detail
Etc.
It will be great!
@@pegcity4eva I mean at that point i could make it a furry manga, no?
This needs more thumbs up. Let's get this funded. Lol!
I mean FRFR, Caspian is clinically insane, no? I mean who is he writing this endless nonsense for? He’s probably like I have to go to an investor meeting today but it’s just him reading these absurdly long nonsense rants to his stuffed animals on his bed. Dude has lost the plot
Not insane, but definitely seems like psychological disorder. He reminds me of when my anxiety disorder overloaded me so I dropped out of uni and spent 4+months pretending I am going to Uni before my family got me help.
He's very similar. to me. He's essentially pretending he's running a company making an mmo. Just on much larger scale than I ever did. I seriously hope his family is aware of what he's doing and have a way out in case he spirals into debt.
At this point I think these blog posts are letters to Kira
@@dracoknight9066 You've got a big heart and the strength of self-reflection to say those things about yourself and see them in others. I meet so many people in life who aren't taking charge of their future and making something, they are roleplaying it and pretending it.
Only, this man here is doing that with millions of dollars
"Yeah, I know you all gave me 6.5 million dollars to make this game you were excited about, but let me take some time to talk to you about some books Ive read during development!"
So we shouldn't care about your mental health and just watch you jump?
They were more than 8 million dollars actually
50 minute video?!? This just made my day much better! Nothing makes the time go by faster than Kira talking shit.
I am not sure if this is supportive, or a criticism.
@@Eleanor_Ch....SMH...it's humor.
@@Stepatee I am well aware. Would it be more obvious that I didn't mean it seriously if I used an Emoji? Do people still use those?
Making time go faster is not a good thing
So glad Caspian came down from his monk's monastary to impart his wisdom on the game making process. I'm sure those who paid for his learning experience over the last decade is grateful.
Seriously though, this is a huge document to tell everyone he (apparently) no longer cares about the 'unjustified' criticism.
It's always amusing when a middle-aged man FINALLY has a little dip in the philosophy/human psychology pool and runs around shouting "Look at this marvelous thing I've discovered!". Good work Caspian, you've finally taught yourself the barest minimum self-awareness. Better late than never, I guess
I know, right?
I've read Aurelius in my early twenties. And while there are some excellent things in his works, and certain aspects I have definitely tried to follow and integrate into my life, it's really not this earth shattering realization or anything.
Just a book filled with some decent advice, and a lot of stuff that's just downright harmful or unworkable today.
But somehow people like Caspian read it halfway through their lives and pretend like "don't let any small thing bother you" is somehow the most profound piece of philosophical teaching ever.
And not just something you should have learned as a teenager.
@@ulch11 Yeah, and of course it would be "modern stoicism" that a terminally-online chronically unaware "man" (read: boy) like Caspian gravitates toward. It's like he's actively trying to make satire of his own existence. Do all these emotionally immature men read from the same script book or something?
I'm surprised we didn't hear him say "It is what it is", that would've been the cherry on top.
I have a rather autistic best friend who is exactly like this. He will endlessly "discover" all sorts of philosophers, quotes, aphorisms, writers and thinkers and tell you all about this wonderful new discovery.. that he read in a book someone else wrote. He almost acts like he discovered it, and if you don't feel like listening to a 45 minute rant about Marcus Aurelius, he seems to think you're just simply too dumb to understand and appreciate his wisdom, he becomes visibly uncomfortable and annoyed. It gets really annoying when you're the one who originally told him to read the book about 10 years ago. It's like he's incapable of understanding that other people can and have found out about these same things he's raving about before him. No understanding that I might know the idea he's just discovered from someone elses book and I just disagree with it, and that's why I don't need a lecture from him. Either you praise him for his borrowed wisdom, or you're a jerk who just doesn't get it.
Needless to say, it's very tiring interacting with him sometimes.
@@anxietyfox4322 well at least he's autistic. what's caspian got as an excuse lol
Man I got a lot to do today, gonna be a busy afternoon…
*Kira drops a Caspian video*
“Cancel everything, I’m leaving early!!”
It's actually commendable how committed he is to his scam. Most would have just found a way to disappear by now.
It's not a scam, he just doesn't have a clue what he's doing and is in denial about it.
Seems like he's just feeding off the attention at this point, since he's got a semi-captive audience of people who are still under the belief that they're going to get this thing that they threw money at ages ago.
You're right, if this was a scam he would have just taken the money and disappeared. Hence this is not a scam. Caspian is just an idiot with no self-awareness.
He should have kickstarted a book, not a game. That is something he would have probably finished.
Unless he instead wrote a diary of all the ideas he had for a plot & how to structure the story in agonising detail whilst occasionally releasing chapter titles?
A "Choose Your Own Adventure" knock-off would have been a good start...
Okay, so the stoicism part was meant to make himself look good but it does the opposite. I consider myself a stoic, having read Marcus Aurelius and Epictitus (I recommend both). Why this is so damning is that if he is following stoicism then he would be doing everything he could do to make thia game. He would come clean and expose his failures with inside data. The stoic says to his critic, "if only you knew the half of my flaws you'd have so much more to say." The stoic does not pay his critics much mind because he knows that the fruits of his labors and his honest dealings with others will speak more than any defense he can muster for himself.
So, if he hasn't been pushing out a game, what has he been doing? Trying to convince people hes a good person and enriching himself. These have been the core focus of his efforts because these are his true pursuits. By telling you of his stoicism, his fraud is laid bare.
I don't know very much about stoicism, but even I felt that what Caspian is doing doesn't feel like stoicism. He seems to not have understood for example the prayer he quoted. The purpose of accepting things one cannot change is to focus on the things that one can change, and then go do it. Not write lenghty excuses why one can't. He also seems to virtue signal a lot, and painting himself as a victim. If someone feels the need to tell people how good of a person they are, they probably aren't, and they try to convince themselves that they are.
Yep, it's like how an actual self-aware person doesn't announce to others they are a self-aware person.
The heart of all art is that the best response to early criticism is a great finished work. Doubts about your abilities and your output are silenced best and fastest by finishing your project, and making it exactly as good as you said. In my own creative field the best feeling as a critic is when a project you doubted comes out and proves you completely wrong.
sounds spot on imo
in his mind, he's a great man _a priori,_ and if he tells us enough about all his great ideas, his great vision, then he can convince us to recognize the greatness he feels he has by default
he will never honestly confront the need to actually _build_ these ideas in order for them to be worth anything
@@oliver_twistor True but this is what I'm saying. He HAS focused on what he can control in his mind: his public perception. He has given up on what he cannot control: making a game.
I also think that he has completely misunderstood his quote. It isn't meant to say that your obstacles must be tackled head-on as he seems to think it does. It means that the obstacle is the most important thing to focus on because it is what will prevent you from completing your goal. You can find ways around it. You can ask others to help you overcome it. Whatever. It just means you can't "cross that bridge when you get to it" because you WILL get to it so you might as well start tackling it now. Don't procrastinate.
Marcus Aurelius has a bunch of stuff like that. About how it's pointless to worry about the problems of tomorrow when there is barely enough time today to start tackling them. Also, Aurelius is very against the idea of "not giving a fuck" in the general sense. He gives loads. His meditations are about what and what not to give a fuck about.
Caspian seems like the type of person who would use their wife and kids as human shields while he pees his pants cowering behind them.
and reading a selfhelp book
He's the type to use them as a shield and come up with convoluted excuses as to why it's not his fault
He 100% would.
Then write a blog about in detail
He punctuated that section wrong, it should be: “No, more failure”
This man wrote a 60 page essay when people asked for their paid game. Speechless
The single sentence describing him allowing the engine to move to Node/TS says more than the 5 million word essay to anyone who has had any performance-critical dev experience.
I agree. I have never even heard about using Typescript for a non-trivial game. Sounds bizarre.
Exactly! As a game developer, as soon as I saw that line about Node.js/TS, I knew exactly what happened.
What happened?
at 40:22 if anyone's curious, though that timestamp skips a bunch of rambling about management
apparently it was his team lead's idea, not his own, but he drops this bombshell after talking about how rigorously he vetted his employees
sooo.... elyria is gonna be a browser game?
It’s all very simple and needed no techno babble. All he needed to to, ever…; was show what he accomplished in 4 years with all that money before he shut it down.
In the last two months of working on my own game, I have showed every step of development for $0.
Caspian is the singular most incompetent’developer’ and fragile man I have seen play the development game.
The real Chronicles of Elyria is the friends we made along the way
That is a lot of words from Caspian that amounts to “I have absolutely no idea what I am doing”
Next Dev Log: That idea I had in the shower
His talking about "leadership" mirrors my experiences too with some project leaders. They make incredibly bad decisions out of a lack of understanding, then suddenly feel the need to show they are "the boss", make an arbitrary decision that hurts everyone and stick to it. The actually competent people leave, and everyone is angry.
wait, there are project leaders who don't do that? pull the other one, it has bells on
Keeping up withj the Caspians is back! I've missed it.
31:01 - "Not going to do the books... not doing it..." 😂
At this point in time, it's better for him to start selling a story of a failed developer so people can learn from him. Remove the graphics, remove gameplay, name it "Chronicles of a failed developer" and this whole venture becomes legit
It would actually have been pretty cool if the whole game was turned into a text adventure with ASCII graphics called Chronicles of A Failed Developer and it's all about starting off with a huge amount of money and spending it as rapidly as possible. I think that might have been enough to redeem this whole project.
*Star Wars meme*
Us: Another Caspian video Kira? Really? Man of your talents?
Kira: It's a peaceful life
Humor
The real Chronicles of Elyria is the kira playlist on the "games" development
All those books Caspian read, it seems like he omitted a key, very important book: How to Make a Game.
Hey guys, it's time for a new devblog, t his quarter I will tell you what books I read!
at this point chronicles of elyria's final product will be a documentary
Caspian’s the best sort of villain: the ones who have absolutely no idea that they’re doing anything wrong
He's literally Caspian because this game is lost in Narnia
A man who enjoys making spreadsheets about features of his game than making said features for his game.
He really shouldve just done that and hired actual people who actually know what theyre doing. And then they could take features that work, impliment them and chuck the ones that dont work.
But something tells me thats too logical for Caspian
His mental and personal problems are his and have nothing to do with him not providing what he promised. It's not an excuse for me or for anyone else when you accept the responsibility of a job you chose to do. We all have personal problems but you don't bring them to work and definitely don't use them as an excuse for failing a project.
Having worked for the public sector for a few months, Caspian feels like a lot of my supervisors and coworkers. It’s crazy how people can build these habits over time.
He's trying very hard to convince some rando boomer judge that he's done his due diligence.
I love the book stories. I'm sure he goes around now, quoting them to people he talks to all day, every day, like a precocious toddler learning about a brand new color.
Shout out to all the people who paid for this dude to read a bunch of books and go on a personal life journey. Who would’ve thought that crowd funding could lead to throwing millions at a mentally ill person who has no clue what to do with it?
Honestly, I would like for people to give me 8 million to, idk, read some books or something.
And I think if I started a Kickstarter for that expressed purpose I might just make some cash.
At least I would be honest about what the money is for. Me being a lazy POS
Holy heck, nearly an entire hour long!
Time to get cozy on the couch for this!
"If I talk about making a game, maybe eventually Ill make the game"
It's been to long since I heard about this masterpiece, spectacular as always.
"I want to confess all my mistakes: I was too nice; I cared too much; I didn't believe enough in myself; I wasn't tough enough in an uncaring world; I didn't spend enough time on fog of war."
What a pathetic, delusional, self-pitying, time & money wasting human being.
However, great update!
It's kinda uncannily familiar to see how Caspian uses tech babble to obfuscate and to pretend he's still doing something and making progress. 🤔
CIG do a lot of the same kind of techbabble BS regarding Star Citizen.
It's pretty much all Citizencon is nowadays beyond the vapid community spotlights, new ship jpeg releases and pre-rendered hype trailers.
"so what did you do with the 8 mil we gave you for a game?" "well I read A LOT of books"
He learned so much only to not go the last bit and own up.
Don't steal from people if you don't want to have massive scrutiny on every aspect of your life.
dude became existentialist philosopher just not to finish a game
much like how he writes about making a game instead of just making the game,
now we get the joy of a man writing a self-patting book about how he's reading self-help books.
hope the court one day asks him to prove his progress and he brings this behemoth of a blog out for them to read.
...does Capian not realize that failing a class is a thing? Like that's what the "F" grade stood for.
He seems the type that think F stands for Fantastic.
Yay! Just dropped perfect timing to go to bed listening to Kira talk about Caspian. Perfect.
I know time zones exist but its funny watching a video with a date in the future in the corner
Just reminded me to check in on my friend who's been giving me the runaround on some writing I paid for...
Reading books, studying stoicism, writing endless blogs- anything but actually making a game.
When I was in school for game design, I was told there are two kinds of people. The Idea Man and The Execution Man. Someone to come up with the super cool stuff and someone to execute on those ideas.
Caspian sounds like the idea man who forgot to hire the Execution team and needs to asap if this is all he's doing with the game lol.
still crossing my fingers that you will get your Caspian (live or not) interview with you. Now that would be epic.
I would pay 8 million dollars for that
23:10 "...the smarter your leadership team, the more challenging the problems are that do land on your desk."
What a nonsense. If the leadership team was incompetent, the challenging problems would have landed on his desk nonetheless, plus a pile of trivial ones.
So basically; Self absorbed person is handed a commercial/creative opportunity, talks a big game, does bugger-all, squanders time, then becomes an endless excuse-fountain of personal problems 'unique to them'.
We all know one. Keep them out of your life.
There's a good quote by I believe Robert. C. Martin (software guy). It goes "Don't go to the sydney opera house to practice. Go to perform.". Basically meaning, learn what you need to, but not when you are getting paid to already know.
I swear, people will spend 5 hours writing about what they should work at, rather then spend 5 hours actually doing the work.
Knowing Caspians type, i bet he felt like he really accomplished something after posting that blog.
Another Chapter of the Cronicles of Caspian
I am so here for Caspian's self help guru arc
A quick rundown:
~9 pages
~6 thousand words
~35 thousand characters
'Notepad cannot find "sorry"'
So his 8 million dollar, 7 year long philosophical journey didn't teach him any sense of responsibility or how to take accountability for his own actions.
He should just run for public office at this point.
Procrastination is a bitch... Caspian thought after a long and hard day of scrolling the Chronicles of Elyria discord channel... I'll better tackle this issue head on... and gently he opened a book about meditation by Marcus Aurelius.. his eyes got heavier and heavier... finally he drifted to land of sleep his final thoughts being "I'll tackle this issue tomorrow head on !".
Caspian's most consistent statement is that things are "finally" where they need to be to "really move forward now". How many times has Caspian told us that everything is all set now, with clear roads ahead, no more obstacles, on track, full steam ahead?!? With CoE / KoE, the future is always bright, and _always_ just around the corner.
I have a very close family member who Caspian reminds me of. All the blame should lay on his shoulders but he has created a reality that has diminished every wrong he has done and tried to blow up in value the minimal successes. This in turn makes it seem like they are a victim in this reality and no one sees it but them. This unfortunately just hurts themselves more and more. Sad really.
That was a very rare glimpse into the mind of a narcissist in the midst of self imposition. Firstly the victim secondly the phoenix. Reading books to encourage and inflate his ego while living out a fantasy. Philosophy gave him the ability to pretend that those quotes applied to his life actions while everyone faces those consequences. The fantasy means he can apply now responsibly and carry on.
Wow so basically it was his staffs fault for not being good enough. That's what I heard anyways.
If I had put money in CoE, I would be pretty pissed reading this post. That's great that Caspian seems to have grown as a person (or so he claims) and that he knows what he has done wrong, but he was doing it on other people's dime (as Kira pointed out). I think I heard a little victim blaming as well in his rant about how people won't accept failure. There is failure and there is failure. Quite the flippant attitude to take someone's money, blow it all and then expect a forgiving attitude. Some of his backers spent a lot of money (not the best decision, but still it's upon Caspian to do right by them).
I hope he has learned the most important lesson from making mistakes: learning from them, to not to the same mistakes. I highly doubt that he is capable of that, since he comes off as quite the narcissist. "Only I can fix it." Not to become political, but I think most of us have heard that sentiment before. If he truly loves his project and wants to see it become a real game, he should try his hardest to find someone who can take over the entire operative responsibility, while he remains as the owner, but a passive one. That might be easier than what he tried, to sell the studio. It's easier to find a CEO than to find someone who is ready to take on financial responsibility of this sinking (sunken?) ship. He is way to close to his passion to see things clearly, especially if he's dealing with bouts of depression.
I know someone who started their own business without the proper skills to run that business. They were blind to their incompetence, and instead of hiring a CEO who could run the day-to-day operations, their narcissism got the best of them and they were unable to relinquish that level of control over the business to another person, even though that CEO wouldn't have ownership of the company. It's a shame really that some people are like that.
If someone scams you out of your hard earned money then some or most people will want their head, so is not unreasonable to feel that way if a large percent of people share that feeling.
LOL! I just wanted to point out that there is a weird noise when you told me that there is sb. cleaning in the background
Thanks for this great piece of quality content. Very good comments to read too, thanks guys
Oh, it's Caspian, the same guy that took 20 minutes to explain that games can have trees, some even looking different from each other. 👏👏👏