It would seem that it’s been too long since the last gaming-related tragedy has happened, and thus the developer of Ant Simulator has been screwed over by two of his long-time friends.
Having been successfully funded via Kickstarter and garnering a small following, the Ant Simulator by Eric Tereshinski was looking to be a fairly cool indie survival title where players would be taking control of an ant drone trying his best to survive in an inherently dangerous environment. However, the programmer’s two business partners had other plans with his development money – apparently, the dynamic duo had spent it all on fancy restaurants, alcohol, gambling and – naturally – strippers.
In a video featured on his Youtube channel, Tereshinsky apologizes to the backers and shakily admits that the development of Ant Simulator cannot continue.
“A year and a half ago, I signed an LLC agreement with them. I trusted them and they had been my friends for 11 years. That means that resigning, and therefore cancelling the development of Ant Simulator, is really the only option available to me right now.â€
As one may expect, this means also that all of Tereshinsky’s code is lost, as well as a large portion of his Youtube channel, which amounts to extremely handy game development tutorials people enjoyed watching and found helpful.
The developer has offered an updated comment on Youtube as well:
“A lot of people are telling me to seek legal advice. I have. The problem is that these guys covered their asses in the contract. They’ll say the drinks were for business meetings, and they have the paperwork/minutes to prove they had meetings (even though I know they were bullshit meetings). They went over the contract line by line with me and I reviewed the whole thing twice. I just didn’t realize they had protected themselves, screwed me (like the fact that they listed themselves as consultants, so they aren’t legally obligated to work on anything, but still have the rights to spend money ect.), and I had no idea what their plan was until it was too late. I could try to sue them, yes. The problem is that the most likely outcome is that things will end up more or less the same as they are now. The only difference is that I would have wasted a lot of time and money on court and lawyer fees. Cutting ties with them is just faster, simpler, and safer. Besides, I’m really damn good at making games. I will make other games. They won’t. And thank you everyone tremendously for you support!“
While not much can be done at this point, gaming publications such as Mouse N Joypad can and should spread word about people such as Devon Staley and Tyler Monce in an effort to support those who got scammed. In this case, this means the developer AND all of the people who funded his project on Kickstarter. Watch the video below and tell us what you think of this matter.