Beast Fury CANCELED

Current Fighting Games Fighting Game Discussion
101

Glad to see this project finally canned and hopefully Ryhan’s reputation will forever be tarnished. He’s a scumbag and a scam artist and screwed people over at any chance he got, myself included. Granted I got off very lightly compared to others involved, since I wasn’t involved too long.

For those curious, this is my experience with the whole thing:

[details=Spoiler]I’ll spare the details of how I got involved, but the tl;dr version is that a friend asked me to help with frame data, and in the process of that one of the guys working on the project asked if I could help build a prototype for Beast’s Fury (this was around mid-October), since I had built a fighting engine for a fan-made game I was working on. From what I understand, the BF demo was…really, really, really bad. (I might add that it took them four years to get that demo out to begin with). So Ryhan brought this guy on board to re-design the entire game due to all of the negative feedback it was receiving. So using the new design document he had drawn up, I built the prototype (Ryhan wanted it in 2 weeks so he could show it to investors, so it’s a good thing I had my engine to work off of or that would have been impossible to achieve).

Then…that’s when things started going south. Aside from the fact that Ryhan owed money to the guy I was working with and was repeatedly pushing back the date to pay him, Ryhan was supposed to have a meeting with an investor to show him the prototype that I built. However, the day that the meeting was supposed to happen, Ryhan claims that the investor never contacted him. On top of that, Ryhan claimed that the work I did didn’t warrant him paying me…which is BS because I’m the reason they even had a prototype to show the investors to begin with, but I digress. Point being that we start to think that the whole investor story was a load of crap, and he threatened to drop the project if Ryhan didn’t pay what he owed. A few days passed and it turns out that the investor thing is legit, surprisingly enough…turns out that the whole 2 week deadline thing that Ryhan had mentioned was a load of crap and that the investment company was willing to wait for a prototype if need be. In any case, we spend the next few days continuing to work on and fine-tune the prototype…

…then out of the blue, Ryhan wants the guy I’m working with to learn Unity to build the game…and to learn it for free, and that’s on top of the work that we’re already doing for him. That doesn’t go over well, so after a heated discussion between Ryhan and him, Ryhan just says for us to work on the game ourselves, and that the budget for the programming is…something around $150k, I think. Him, myself, and another programmer would be paid for working on the game, but we’d only have around 12-14 months to do so. And we’d be doing everything, including the UI work and such. Shortly afterwards…Ryhan starts flip-flopping again. Not only has he still not paid the guy I’ve been working with, not only was I not getting paid for my work on the prototype, but the other programmer that was working with on the project wouldn’t be getting paid either (Ryhan claimed that “he couldn’t afford to”). Not too long after that info was given, the other programmer dropped the project, as did the guy I was working with, and I followed suit.

Best part is that the investors that Ryhan was working with refused to work with him because of all of the crap that he’s tried to pull, and just how unprofessionally he acts. They would only work with the project if the guy I was working with became the team lead instead. But Ryhan is far too stubborn to let that happen, so we just washed our hands of it. The best part is that Ryhan was STILL asking him for help with the project but still would not pay what he owes. To this day he still hasn’t.[/details]

That’s just the light stuff. It gets worse beyond that, as you’ve probably seen. The guy I was working with can give more details on the depth of Ryhan’s stupidity, ignorance, and just how shitty he treats people in general, but it’s up to him if he wishes for that to be shared here or not. The above is what I remember from the time I was involved.

102

Said it before but it bears repeating here: I’m very sorry you all had to go through that. I know how it feels to do contract work and then never see money that either should have been promised, or was actually promised.

That said, I’ve never had it on this large of a scale. That dude sounds like scum.

103

This here is a prime example of how everyone wants to be a CEO, but everyone is not cut out to be one. And some people are just too prideful to admit that to themselves. And the bolded shows this. Some people are so prideful and want to be the person in charge so bad that they’d rather fail as a leader than succeed following someone. As Mark Cuban once said "25% of a Watermelon is better than 100% of a grape. The dude you worked for was clearly the type to take the whole grape rather than a piece of the watermelon.

104

We need a thread dedicated to the indie fighting game graveyard. I was sucked into the skullsgirls forum about beast fury, watching Mike Z and a beast fury programmer go at it for pages. You never get to see that kind of interaction.

When Mike Z called out their battle design guy know as the guy who finished 9th in SFxT at evo for not knowing his shit I lost it.

105

That guy is a friend of mine and is actually the one that brought me in on the project. He was working on the frame data and hitboxes and asked me to assist with the frame data part of things.

He’s a good guy, but not a very good designer. The guy I mentioned that I was working with though, had a lot of good ideas for re-designing the game…if he had gotten onto the project early on, things might have ended differently. Or maybe not, considering how Ryhan acts…

106

Yea I thought it was a bit rough on how he was called out, didn’t think it was fair basically as Mike had only based that on the one conversation he had with him. I have no doubt he is a good guy but this project seemed doomed from the start, and when your friend got brought onto the project it was already a sinking ship. I feel really bad for those involved. Hopefully your friend wasn’t discouraged to much and will try and take a stab at another project again.

107

I wish there was a documentary about failed Indie projects. All of this stuff just sounds like GOOD TV show material.

But goddamn, William, you sounded like you went through some hell with that. Surprised you didn’t just flip out and slugged the wannabe CEO fucker.

108

Seriously, any one kept a full list?

109

hmm, I would be willing to help with the editing, audio commentary if anyone wants to start planning to throw one together.

110

I wouldn’t call it hell, but it did suck not getting paid for the work I did. As I mentioned, I got off lightly since I wasn’t on it that long. That said, it did lead to another project with the guy I was working with, so it wasn’t a total loss.

As for the latter part, I’m way too slow to anger to end up doing something like that. Though admittedly it’d probably be a different story if I was involved earlier on…

111

What is it you do for a living? Is it primarily game design? Or freelance work in some other field, but you have knowledge and skills that can work in game design?

112

Unemployed at the moment. The Beast’s Fury work was supposed to be something to do while I continue to search for something full-time (while getting paid), as is the current project I’m involved with.

113

Oh that sucks. But like what are your skills that you went to school for?

114

Good.

115

Anything programming, really. C#, VB.NET, Java, HTML, so on and so forth.

Game programming I do in my free time.

116

Ah OK cool. So they were right. It is better to learn computer sciene and progrmming as oppose to just straight game design. because the former gives you the skills for game programming while being able to do other stuff.

117

This. Taking comp sci keeps things broad so you can have something to fall back on if game dev fails or just loses its appeal for you. I recently finished my university applications and almost applied to UOIT’s Game Development program. Then I read that it was too narrow of a program and that game companies would rather you take something that isn’t so specifically focused.

118

Well, I never said “fighting game player”, I said people in general. Although, from the posts here, I can discern that about serious fighting game players from the previous posts in this thread. Although, your right, I didn’t consider the point that they brought in big names to give the game the look of being legit.

For those who are freelancers, it is best to use trusted third parties to manage who you work with. I’ve been a freelancer for 5 years, never got jipped by client met through a legit third party. Only time was for $20 worth of work over skype since I blindly trusted the dude the way people blindly trusted this guy without checking their background more closely. Good will and trust will not be repaid if done blindly, theres the chance it will be taken advantage of. Make sure the person you work for deserves that good will and trust. Which is why you should never do work with a client you don’t already know or is able to prove their payment or business history in a legitimate way. The third parties I’ve used take about 10% of the work pay, but it’s well worth it to receive guaranteed payment from clients that have the money to pay people to work on their projects.

@LordWilliam1234 Sorry you and the others had to go through such horrendous stuff.

I’m surprised at how much attrition and long work was really put behind skullgirls. They really gave it their all with that game to go as far as to do years of unpaid.