Behind the Alley

Greetings Bare Backers! Continuing the momentum of our work transparency going into 2024, today I wanted to talk more candidly about both the progress of BBS and Amorous 2 as they go full swing into healthier production, but also the difficulties the project faced in the latter half of 2023.

We have been quite protective of the identities of our former staff members in an effort to be polite and professional, but at the same time I do believe our supporters deserve a more complete picture of why the game struggled as much as it did for a period of time. Most of our struggles stemmed from the difficulties interacting and working with on individual in particular who was undermining the project, the truth of the matter needs to be aired out to some degree to validate the experience and move forward. We will call this particular individual Mr Jobless as they had catalyzed a persona for themselves of being completely unemployable in the games industry. We will not be using their real name or personas as it would give them fuel for further animosity.

Mr Jobless pitched himself early in development as someone in desperate need to be seen, validated and downtrodden. All previous employers were bastards who simply did not give Mr Jobless a fair chance to prove himself as a diligent, hard working developer. Similarly, all personal projects did not generate any revenue, and they felt deeply frustrated that consumers did not appreciate the true value of his work.

Regardless of these red flags, I brought them onto the project in an assistant role in hopes BBS could be an opportunity for them to turn their career around. They were very enthusiastic about being promoted to a lead position for Amorous 2 in the future and appeared to be in good spirits about working on the game.

Sadly, at this time our lead programmer could no longer work due to physical health issues and had to resign. We only had one assistant who could take on the responsibilities, Mr Jobless and thus he was promoted up to position of lead as he was requesting more hours to work anyway to avoid getting evicted from their apartment. This was a decision we ultimately regret, as this is where the pace in which we released builds began to slow down as they lacked the skill required to meet the weekly demands of our development cycle.

Mr Jobless struggled with reporting their working hours to our taskboard diligently and accurately. They averaged 10% accuracy in terms of both task and time estimations for a sprint. Meaning they would promise the completion of 10 tasks, and only complete 1 in time for the deadline. Often, this task would be something very simple and all complicated work would get ignored, leading to a state of the game where most features where held together with spaghetti code and disjointed scenes that would break and become buggy with minor alterations. It became a challenge to find assistants that were willing to work with Mr Jobless as a project lead, causing us to need to rely on him as the only person who could comprehend his own code for months at a time.

It was clear that the issue at hand was incompetency and that our lead programmer needed to be fired, but due to my own fear of having to scrap months of poor work and potentially needing to rebuild expensive scenes from scratch, I hesitated to remove Mr Jobless in hopes that if they were given more chances, it would all work out. Mr Jobless failed to pay rent and lost apartment, moving back in with his parents, working on BBS on a student laptop on their bed as they did not have a desk. This would mean it would take over an hour simply to open Unity as his hardware did not meet minimum specs to even develop the game effectively. BBS did not work in the play scene of Unity due to the way it was being made, thus the only method of testing changes was to build, taking several more hours.

Pressure to pay Mr Jobless more and more for less work or else he would be kicked out of his parents home became the new narrative. At this point, they were logging less than 5 hours a month on our task tracking board, but still felt entitled to normal pay.

Hearing news that they had finally found a new job as an entry level dishwasher after working with BBS for the better half of 2 years, we settled on a final payment for Mr Jobless's efforts on the project and parted ways, seemingly on good terms.

However, we were later shared leaks of a secret hate group that Mr Jobless was an active member of that served as a gloating platform for their scams. For months, they had been  intentionally delaying the game for personal gain while calling his fellow staff members as "villains worse than the joker" that deserve to be taken advantage of. At the same time, Mr Jobless made claims that the the lodge in which gave him free accommodation with the dish washing gig, burned to the ground 2 weeks after he started and that he was again, out of work and began requesting free replacements for all his Bare Backstreets themed merchandise such as hats, signed comics etc. We declined the request due to the evidence of the hate group and remarks made behind our backs and neglecting to onboard his replacement.

Mr Jobless has since been spending their free time lambasting BBS on a nigh daily basis and has made multiple personal attacks on myself, my wife and is willing to use any tactic, including doxing to save face. They have made multiple threats to extort the development team for more money, but has neglected to actually provide evidence of the additional hours requested. When contacted for this evidence his reply is to "Go fuck yourself with a rusty spoon".  They will likely try to milk their connection to more successful individuals as long as possible until they deem it unprofitable.

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What I learned from this experience, is that we cannot afford infinite empathy and compassion to employees just because they share an affinity for the furry fandom and you can't shoulder the responsibility of a staff members personal plights no matter how disastrous they may seem. At that point you take more of a role of a surrogate parent than a manager and everyone suffers as a result.

We no longer hire individuals that have history of incomplete projects, poor relations with past employers or have any connection with clout chasing or furry drama. We offer no favoritism for applicants that are in the furry fandom and enforce a strict 3 strike policy for violating our team mission statement and general misconduct. As mentioned in previous blog posts, we have high trust and confidence with the new team and connections to Mr Jobless such as co-conspirators have been removed from the project. I take full responsibility for being green and inexperienced dealing with narcissistic individuals in a team setting and I aim to remain attentive to these behaviors and act appropriately as they manifest going forward. Most of the work Mr Jobless did do, is being phased out of the project as it's deemed too low quality to use.

In more positive news. Here are some small previews of improvements to our sprite work (SFW versions so I can keep this a public post.). Color data has been simplified from RBG to only alpha values, meaning we can both have amazing optimization, but also render sprites at 4K with no degradation in quality.

You may recall sprites in older builds being a bit blurry and low quality. No more! They now scale at any resolution.

Similarly, the game now has real physics. Arrows and projectiles travel and react to the environment in ways that you would expect and are effected by gravity!

Our Amorous 2 rig is shaping up to be the best we have made to date. This is an example of a humanoid walk cycle being applied to our digitigrade furry rig. No clipping or strange behaviors occur.

Previous rigs needed a lot of cleanup when mocap data or other template animations were used. With refinements to the rig, we will be able to greatly optimize our animation pipeline and make the game very unique and expressive with it's animations as a result!

A NSFW post will be uploaded next week sharing our genitalia rig and character creator environment! Thankyou for reading if you made it this far into the post and I hope this helps fill in the gaps to our activity the last few months.

I did not feel confident making more news posts until we were working with people we could trust and it took some time to solidify those positions while also distancing ourselves from bad actors. I'm very happy with the change in development and our goal remains the same to finish all our projects. As we begin to feel more safe, productivity will naturally begin to shine once more.