violating the privacy and anonymity of a dev (whose account only existed to be in the dev server because he didn't want to be found) to attempt to steal him for his project.
Greetings everyone, this is a document retort of a recent drop of a brain-dead retarded e-drama documents that will "totally pwn Cavemanon", Kotaku-style. It has been written by some of the worst orbiters we have with contributions from the literal dumpster-fire developers that were so shit they had to be dropped from the hell-pit that is a 4chan-based video game development group. In this document, we will be dissecting everything important in this 28k word-long trash fire.
99% of this surrounds Discord drama, discord dramatards should be castrated (though they usually do it themselves by being gay incels!). If you value your time, don't read this. This is stupid and dumb drama. This is an objective waste of your time for most people. Instead of reading this travesty, go and do something nice for your family, plant a garden, get a job, or any other tasks that are the opposite of what Wolf Nanaki does on a regular basis.
This document, as you can clearly see, is going to be very personal and unprofessional, because the drama in question here is personal and unprofessional. The hit-peice on us made by this group adopts a saccharine, patronizing "do-better" tone against us, while claiming neutrality, and while also throwing slanderous half-truths at us. We're not going to dress this up as anything more than it is: an interpersonal drama shitshow with elements of business involved. So, for our non-4chan audience, our crassness may come as a shock, but it should be expected for these reasons.
If you are a fellow game developer, do read this as an insight to our mistakes so you can never make them.
Here's the original hit-piece, if you care: https://files.catbox.moe/qr900l.zip
"Delete README because it's inaccurate" with no further information provided
Michael here, also known as /dev/non. The README incident was my doing.
I wanted to show appreciation to the /lit/anon who helped guide the early project, but I was actually a later addition to the team and never saw how specifically the comments made by /lit/anon effected the project.
The guy on /lit/ literally commented on a greentext, and the rest of the team worked with it to make the four endings.
What I wrote was an overly-sappy, arguably homoerotic, statement in praise of him just commenting on a greentext. This was useful, but not as nuclear level impactful as my README file. I did the README thing entirely on my own whim, without it getting reviewed by others, so the opinion reflected there was from a guy who wasn't even around for the event, commenting on the event.
This has lead to some believing that "CAVEMANON LITERALLY DIED IN WRITING ABILITY BECAUSE LITANON WAS GONE!", an uncommon opinion, but I've seen it before. This isn't the case as /lit/anon was just a random poster on /lit/ who commented on a greentext. We appreciate his contribution, but compared to the other, more active developers, his work was minor.
it was revealed that several of them were in fact lifted in their entirety from other artists who released them under free music licenses, or into public domain
Putting this matter around the topic of Snoot Game may make the readers believe that the music plagiarism incident hit Snoot Game as hard as it did Wani, which to our knowledge, isn't the case.
Snoot Game's OST primarily is built off pre-defined music loops from Mixcraft slapped together, while not the peak of originality, it was not the deception that happened with the Wani OST.
To our knowledge, this is how the incident played out, if anyone can provide us 1-to-1 tracks (not just using the same samples), we'll kneel on this point.
However, like we said in our original post about the plagiarism incident, the person who was responsible for it has been removed from the team.
the lead developer and de-facto "business owner"
We're not obligated to talk about how our business is structured, but given this article's author's object permanence problems, due to conflating "I see Nerd, therefore only Nerd exists!", we'll do so anyway:
Cavemanon is a business owned (on paper) by three people, all members of the old-guard, one of whom is Nerd, and contentious operations come to a vote. Internal structure is much less formalized than this, but generally follows a departmental structure, where one person leads and organizes one specific task (art, writing, programming). These leads then meet in the middle for all things that can't solely be handled internally and haven't been handled by individual contributors just talking to each other (i.e., accounting, multi-departmental issues, settling disagreements, etc.).
A user and editor by the name of WolfNanaki also mentioned she...
she
LOL. LMAO EVEN.
We find Nanaki's involvement in this situation rather amusing, since Nanaki isn't someone who likes Snoot Game. He's a devout hater of the project, and far from any "community member" that the people who wrote this hit-piece claim to be speaking on behalf of. More info on who this person is can be found on the Snoot Game Kiwifarms Page. He's a rather unpleasant individual from what we've read.
a spurious DMCA takedown notice from a community member named Eztil
This happened, we want to sit down and get it back when we can, since you can fight these by sending a counter-notice.
Narija was an artist during the /snoot/ sticky days who found his way into the fan discords as they were coming to a close. He's the sort of militiantly gay furry that was so insecure that just him getting a whiff of disapproval would be enough to get him to begin using social games to remove you.
At first he and I(Nerd) got along fine enough. I could tell we wouldn't get along, so I didn't do anything to instigate and kept interaction to a minimum. One day early in the /snoot/ server days, Sli and I were in the same VC as him and a group of others. The first thing we noticed was that his voice sounded like that of a man two twinkies away from total heart failure. Although of course we don't know for sure how fantastically overweight he was, we have heard he is a construction worker and suspect he's got a stable career as the wrecking ball.
I mention this for a specific reason, to give extra context to the extreme hilarity of what followed: Imagine you are in a voice chat with a bunch of strangers, you're generally well liked and you're answering questions, having a nice conversation about an accomplishment of yours, and then one of them says between labored breaths that they'd just looove to pounce on you~.
This is what happened to Sli. We kept our poker faces on at the moment, but we were laughing our fucking asses off in our own server. I still give him shit over this to this day. Getting hit on by what sounds like a 500 pound gay furry is fucking hilarious.
Nari didn't seem to think so, though. He caught wind of us laughing about it and talking about it with other devs and decided this was why he must HATE us. This is the 'original sin', according to Caliber.
This isn't why he ended up waging a blood war over us though. Some time went on, and he started picking up development for his own project, the reed mod. I have my own disagreements with it, as is more or less thoroughly stated elsewhere, so I contacted Caliber and gave some suggestions on how to make something everyone would enjoy. This is what made Nari decide I needed to die:
What followed this was one of the most headache-inducing bouts of gay, pointless internet drama most of us have experienced and, God willing, will ever experience.
In the time between ~a month after the sticky ended up until he left, nari was guilty of:
What a good guy!
one moving violation
Put short, Nari was one of the most lecherous bastards to ever grace the community. An insecure and unpleasant person so self-destructive in his hatred of the creators of the thing he'd become obsessed with it ended up sinking his entire project. And his art was bad.
...If you want to demonize a particular sect of people, it is entirely doable here, and using them as the set dressing for a story about finding agency will do that effectively if framed right, but it does not ultimately change the point, here...
Much of the entire paragraph here is just "author's opinion on social issues", and just a critique of the game's narrative as a whole under the same guise, by pointing out that Fang not having her agency in identity is a narrative form that can be applied to just about any other scenario. What something like this is doing in a piece talking about how Cavemanon's back end development team is corrupt and bad? I don't know.
However, it is true that you can just substitute words and get the same form of story. This is why Wani works as a story where Olivia, being denied her agency as a person because of a characteristic she has no control over, is worse off for it. It's just that Snoot Game and Wani have primarily focused on the subject of personal agency.
Snoot Game in particular focuses on Fang using her identity, egged on by Trish, as a cope. Ultimately, she is still choosing this cope. She is unhappy with this cope as well, and in the better endings she leaves it.
What I, Michael, find most funny about this is that there are people who then demand that Fang be happy with non-binaryism because it fits their worldview. They cannot handle a reality where someone is just genuinely happier in focusing on who they are as a person rather than who they are as a label. They NEED Fang to be apart of their in-group, and she cannot walk away from it because she wants to, even if she has sincere convictions. These people are just as agency-denying as Trish.
Snoot Game did not speak of the anti-natal nature of homosexuality, transsexuality, MGTOW, inceldom, or any other similar group that wishes to separate the sexes, hence why the "Snoot Game" format can be applied to just about any other agency-denying system. We're not against talking about such a subject in a game later down the line, however, it's just that the gender label identity was one of the areas where we saw this pattern of agency-denying arise, and wished to talk about it there.
Making gay characters straight or straight characters gay shouldn't signal anything but people having fun, or just writing the characters how they want to see them... There's quite a lot more than just this quote, 3 entire paragraphs, so if you care about his argument, go to the section that starts with "Outside of the immediate group known to Cavemanon"
No one is using legal force or violence to stop you, however, no one said we have to support it or that you're immune to criticism.
Art is society talking to itself, in an effort to create mass movement of some kind towards or against something. Snoot game succeeded in this, as we have been sent many warm messages from people telling us how they've taken control of their life, gotten into hobbies, or in some way honed themselves towards success through our art. We are happy to see this, and believe this kind of celebration of agency and life is good for humanity.
Video games can be art, and thus, we should treat it as such. The Reed Route team wanted to make bad art that Cavemanon's core developers do not stand by for its effects on society, and thus should be criticized for it. What good is a gay fap material mod except for enabling society's eunuch class to jerk off more?
Cavemanon's parody of KO_OP's plot was pure social commentary, we did so for the furthering of a point that we wanted to make to society, a point that many took to heart and improved their lives with. We had fun doing it, but fun was secondary to the point: to aspire for something greater.
If you really dislike us and our stance, what's stopping you from making the Reed Mod? You can cut yourself off from Discords, like we did, and work silently for a year to put something out. You don't have to associate with us, listen to us, or even be involved in the same spheres as us. Block us if we anger you so much.
it is very common for people in the developer discord to use "Kill Yourself" as a joke response when someone says something they do not agree with
Kill Yourself.
[Telling someone to kill themselves] typically understood to be meant with complete honesty, and is not typically said lightly.
Kill Yourself.
many of the remaining developers opting to stay out of the public servers altogether
Yes. Cavemanon encourages people to stay out of the cesspit of e-drama, bickering, fighting, passive-aggressiveness, and internet shittery that is a 4chan-trash based furry discord server. These places, largely, are not good for the mind or good for your time. For now, we permit people to be involved with these groups, so long as there isn't a conflict of interest.
Orwell-esque informant culture[121,122,123,124] and a zero-trust environment among developers[125].
Firstly, what a faggy description of our group asking for details that concern us. "Orwell-esque"? This is private business in game dev mixed with Discord Drama, not some mass political censorship by the NKVD.
Secondly, yes, we do ask people, when they're comfortable, to obtain information for us, because ultimately, they want to help us handle whatever mess that's about to happen. We try not to pressure anyone into handing over information since we want to keep good relations with our collaborators. They're good people that we don't wish to lose. They provide information on their own, because, they ultimately want to see Cavemanon as an endeavor succeed.
Can't keep this short, so here's the whole paragraph:
One day prior to the situation with Androcles, on September 21 2021, Caliber gave one of the devs' discord tags to Narija, as it was believed this dev was the one who did the original Reedroute mod, available on Archiveanon's mega folder. This was not the case, the dev mentioned it in the dev server, Caliber admitted to this, and was reprimanded, being put into a 'lockdown' role, which prevented him from seeing certain channels in the server - though not banned outright. Nerd at this time tried to prevent further issues by telling users to contact Sli directly if they had questions for the developers, designating him as one of two official PR people[163], since he was in the public server and could be easily reached, alongside Nerd. This seems to have either not been communicated properly to the rest of the team, or was not applied equally, as Pshy, who was openly part of the Reedroute mod, reached out to Sli[121,127] to ask which dev did the music, only for the same response to happen, with the developers claiming the Reedroute team was harassing them and trying to "poach" people from them[126], which was against one of their internal rules for developers to oblige, according to Nerd[162]. This later led into the suggestion that people should contact the devs via email[128], which goes primarily through Joybuke[164], but other team members have discussed them previously, when required. This has been the developers' preferred method of contacting them, moving forward[128].
Caliber, one of the writers of this 'expose', who we will call "Whiny Bitch" from now on, was a programmer brought on after the initial release of snoot game. He was a fine enough worker for what little he did work on before fucking up royally by passing a dev's info along to a friend. Given the extreme breach of privacy we restricted his server access, but allowed him another chance by having him program for the budding Olivia project.
After four months of development, Whiny Bitch made a total of 15 commits to the game's source code repo. Wani, as of Feb 28th 2024, has 1873 commits, most of which came into existance during 2023, after Whiny Bitch departed from the team. Commits are the merely the act of adding code, and can be arbitrary in size, so it isn't a good view of the amount of work done per se, but a decent estimate assuming normal conditions.
To give the benefit of the doubt, I (Michael) will describe the >ABSOLUTE STATE of Wani's repo 4 months into development:
and that's it, for comparison, Snoot Game, A game of comparable size had:
Now of course, it was early snoot game so it all sucked, but it was something. Whiny Bitch's work was basically nothing.
What little interaction we had was us walking on eggshells around him so as not to hurt his feelings, as he would frequently come crying to Nerd about how different the dev server is from his furry goonsesh servers.
The real reason Whiny Bitch has such a chip on his shoulder is because of our Yoko Ono rule. Shortly after an incident in which multiple devs were involved in a catfishing scheme (Eztil), we began to enforce a rule that devs may not interact with fans in romantic ways. At the time, Whiny Bitch was already in one such relationship. We weren't going to just tell him to break things off or fire him, so we accommodated him and told him to simply not bring it up in the server, at all. A condition which he agreed to.
It only took until the rule was enforced once for him to write Nerd a pages long diatribe about how he is just like a liberal lawmaker signing hate speech bills into laws by not letting him talk about his gay discord admin lover. Now he purports this is proof of how Nerd is 'willing to infringe on people's rights'.
It should be noted that it is now known that the lover in question is also directly responsible for kicking off the events that led to most of the drama mentioned in the document. This wasn't known at the time, but does retroactively make it a bullet dodged.
Although it is worth pointing out how strange it is this critical information was omitted from their own document they claim neutrality on, while demanding transparancy from us. It's also worth noting that Whiny Bitch wiped his own DM's in an attempt to keep us from gathering 'recipts', despite demanding transparancy from us.
Shortly before the publicization of the document he was helping write, Whiny Bitch wiped his DMs with Nerd, assuming that he was stupid enough to not archive everything relevant beforehand. He was not.
Nerd ended up making a deal with Whiny Bitch near the end of his collaboration with us, where Whiny Bitch just felt so attacked by anything Nerd did when it was unintended. They made a deal that Whiny Bitch should contact Nerd whenever he felt threatened so they could talk it out and reach a better understanding of each other. Yes, this was serious. Only proof that exists is the conversation around the agreement, since Whiny Bitch purged his DMs as previously established.
Unfortunately a few days later the proton incident happened, and Whiny Bitch left the dev server. He was so high maintenance and had so little output, we just decided to let him go.
As of recent, Whiny Bitch claims that he left because he was afraid of Nerd, which given the above information, is clearly bullshit.
There has, as of yet, not been any word on where the money donated to this project actually went, though at least one individual has asked for a refund up to this point and has been denied[a38].
We have it and it's sitting in a bank account. Wani's development cycle was a total disaster, partially due to working on two games at once, and partially because the original Wani team was beyond incompetent. We still intend on working Exit 665's proper Demo, and the project is still in the works behind the scenes.
We would like to share more, but we don't wish to over-promise and pull a No Man's Sky. However, rest assured, we will be returning to our original obligations soon enough, once the Wani detour is finally over.
The game was also originally going to release for free, alongside the Steam and Itch releases, on the game's official website[a41], which did not happen.
Yes, we toyed around with the idea of releasing the game for free as a torrent, but this was way earlier in development, when scope of the game had not yet been realized. Nobody expected Wani to be 1.5x the size of Snoot Game with as much polish it had, and so the idea was shelved so that we as a studio could continue existing. To our knowledge, we never made public promise of this.
There was never an attempt to create a mutual understanding.
We are a game development studio who prioritizes in making high quality art that's also profitable. We owe gay modders on Discord.com nothing, especially if their work is bad.
This isn't to say that people are incapable of producing kino through modding. The translations of the game are ultimately mods, the vast revamps to Snoot Game's choreo started as mods, and we're sure that some talented people are using our code as reference when making their work. This is to say, however, a lot of what we've seen from the Snoot Game modding community is pure, unfiltered autism that we don't wish to get too involved in.
...chose to go after spidey, treating this seemingly as some kind of betrayal, because Spidey did not tell anyone where the character came from
Yes. Spidey may have plagiarised a character and put it into our game. We have every right to be upset with him violating our trust.
Not to mention, he knowingly did it for malicious reasons:
Ironic considering Spidey's opinions on trans individuals:
it was discovered that one of the artists at Cavemanon[a24] had specifically changed Lunara's sprites to give her larger breasts, and extended her legs for some reason[186,187].
It was to make her look more feminine and not like an AGP clown with a girl-dick. Our audience is mostly men, and they want cute babes with wombs and boobs, not some dude with a dress.
Funny thing is, the sprites weren't even edited after the fact, they were rolled back to Mono's original linework for them. Linework that Spidey edited to better suit his "vision".
Although we probably should have realized exactly what was going on when Spidey of all people reduced a characters' "all naturals".
This issue seems to have even affected internal developers, with users like Joybuke becoming less willing to communicate outside of the server, or to disagree with Nerd on anything, and overall being a meaner, more money-minded person[221,a33].
I was never fond of Discord shit in the first place, and have always denounced our involvement in such groups from the very beginning, even before there was e-drama. I chose to not engage with outsiders on purpose, as to isolate myself from their corruption. Clearly, given that this document is 99% autistic discord drama, I was right to do this. So please do a flip off the Golden Gate Bridge.
I do disagree with Nerd on a lot, but I have enough decency to not make it a shouting match in front of people. Behind closed doors, we discuss the state of the company, the project going forward, and internal strife that comes up. Just because I'm not on the "Nerd hate bandwagon" and personally sucking your cock doesn't mean that I'm some Yes-man. We have disagreements at times, and I have critique at times. He's not perfect, but he's a good man who's done right by me for the past four years. Oh also, I've heard the Golden Gate bridge has suicide nets now, so please do a flip off those too.
Wani was a commercial project from the day it entered Cavemanon's influence, with a deal being brokered out (then ass-raped) by Loan because he quit on us (MULTIPLE TIMES). Many other people who contributed refused payment as well. Also, of course I'm fucking money minded, why the hell would I dump multiple years on my life on a project that returns nothing? For your personal ideal of "community enjoyment"? We did Snoot Game because we had something to say. We did Wani as a way of reaching out to the community and being nice, and we got bit in the ass for it, but now we can at least fund our next projects which will be more in line with the social commentary and feels that made Snoot Game interesting.
Love goes out to the real bros who enjoy our work, maybe talk a bit about it, and them move on in their lives instead of becoming obsessed discord dramatards. A large chunk of the shit here, especially from the Reed Route, is FOUR YEAR OLD DRAMA. You're obsessed.
This is likely due to the various instances discussed in the dev server where they collectively shit on the community for reacting poorly to their decisions[106,303], causing him to truly not give a shit about anyone in the community, even active developers who hail from it, creating their "us" and "them."
Citation 303, or image 2023-09-28_04-34_2.png, is a banger of a vid, let me share it with you:
In the screenshot itself, I say at the end that the sincere people concerned are tolerable. This is in relation to the Booru drama, where some stuff on a public Cavemanon image archive was changed. I don't mind people saying they disagree with a change, but ultimately we decided to stick with it since GVH content was genuinely off-topic for the site. I.e, You wouldn't put art of Mario on a site that isn't about Mario, so you wouldn't put GVH content on a site that's about Cavemanon's Snoot Game.
Also, I've always been a jack-ass, just a cordial one due to choosing restraint in the name of the greater good of the project. Everyone who worked on this document is a passive-aggressive, overly-shaming faggot who should take a razor blade to their dick-hole (or girl cock for you, Nanaki). Go fuck yourselves. You namefags on /snoot/ are the bane of my existence, please stop buying our shit and fuck off forever. I hate you (personally).
Nerd complained about OCs and background characters being written by community members after the fact, saying it should be "gatekept."
Yes. A lack of gate keeping invites AIDs into your community. Do you want a community full of AIDs?
Most of the Background and OC stuff is very autistic, not all of it, but a lot of it is.
Eventually, these NDAs evolved into full-on "contracts"
Yes.
We're a fucking business, we want things agreed upon and stated. A large part of issues earlier on were the lack of these things that dictated who gets what, and how, and their obligations. It's part of the growing pains of formalizing from literal anons on 4chan.
If you work freelance for any other person, almost always they'll have a contract dictating obligations between the two sides, why are we being demonized doing the same?
The main concern of his at the time appeared to be legality, as nerd and the 'top' / original members intended to handle it in the context of an LLC
Yes, we floundered early on, since we're new-to-business guys and wanted to do everything right as to not get in trouble with the IRS, any state regulatory agencies, or banks.
We're in a position now where we have most stuff sorted out, to the best of our legal ability, and can continue forward relatively unimpeded.
it was mentioned they would likely be requiring users to submit tax information, as if they were properly employed, for them to send out any sort of payment
The people who work with us are freelance, independent contractors. We have a legal obligation, as per the IRS, to collect information on our contractors. We are paying them for business, for-profit work, and because of that, if we were audited and DIDN'T have the information, we would get fucked by the IRS.
We're complying with the law. The complaint against us in this document is that we're complying with the law. You can read what the IRS says about this subject here as well: https://www.irs.gov/businesses/small-businesses-self-employed/forms-and-associated-taxes-for-independent-contractors
No matter what transfer is used, if we used paypal, monero, gold, steam gift cards, or what, that is a payment on a contract job, and we need to have the necessary documentation about it on stand-by in case of an audit.
Yes, this does mean we have to collect sensitive information, sensitive information that's covered under an NDA that both parties mutually agree to sign and keep confidential, an NDA that has been stomped all over by those who have collaborated on this document, de-anonymizing various internal members, while also putting the entire agreement of silence related to the important stuff (doxes) in jeopardy.
But you didn't need to collect anything if you paid less than $600!
Sure, that may be true, but it's dishonest about how we work. We wanted to keep people on board for longer, when we actually made some bank off our projects, to pay them more. We would eventually have to collect this info if they had stayed with us.
Again, big text wall, since all of this is important:
At that time, in late 2023, the discussions that were had ultimately ended with most people being signed on to the project with a 'gratis contributor' contract, i.e, they agree to work for free. This document also acted as an NDA / Mutual Confidentiality Agreement, which (if it was actually enforceable) would have barred users from sharing anything the devs decided they didn't want at any arbitrary point in time, as the list provided was marked as non-exhaustive (see contracts cited above). It is critically important to note that this contract was also presented retroactively to existing contributors who had already done work for the project, they did not join on initially under the promise or expectation of working for free, as one anon on the Wani trailer thread attempted to make fun of (post ID 666401274)[241]. At most, users were introduced to the project without explicit mention of payment, but were similarly not told outright they would not be paid at all. Anyone who joined the project after December 2022 would have known the project was commercial and would make money, as the game already had its Steam page up at that point[329]. At least three users were offered sums of between $50 and $100 USD, with a couple others claiming they were offered between $200 and $320 at different times[104,249,255], though most we spoke with report being captured under the "gratis" contract, meaning they would not be compensated in any way "express or implied"[156] for their work. The developer in charge of getting members to sign contracts and discussing payment info has also used the NDAs themselves as an excuse to not discuss or reveal payment terms for other members of the company[253], even when the contracts did not include any clauses for this, unless they intended to enforce the NDA individually against their developers rather than preventing them from sharing information to the public, which makes absolutely no sense, and is not how NDAs are handled in actual business.
Yes, we did dole out contracts after the fact to better reflect the state of Wani as a project. Loan had already quit as project lead, Cavemanon put their name on this disaster project and publicized it in a trailer, and Workanon, the heir to the project, also floundered and left the project. Wani was either going to need a direct take-over by Cavemanon's old-guard or Wani was not going to happen despite being promised to the public, a situation that would have ruined our reputation.
One part of this ordeal is that, since the revenue split agreement with the Wani team was very loose, and headed by Loan, someone who had quit the project, the entire thing needed to be re-done on an individual level (as it should have been done during the first days of the project). A lot of the people who contributed to the project simply denied payment after the fact, annulling any obligations to pay them from before. Others wanted payment, and we offered it under terms they agreed to, maybe terms you personally, as an outsider, don't like, but terms they accepted. The goal was to formalize as much as possible to get Wani out of the weird flux-state that it was in payment wise, something that was greatly complained about in previous sections of this document.
As to try to emulate the old deal as best as we can, Cavemanon has a mandated budgeting split: 50% of all profit from Wani will be going back into the company as funding for future projects. This gives us budget to pay people properly for our next project, which people internally have faith in us to make good on. We want to make good on this deal, as the people who stuck around are talented and good people, who very well could start their own studio if they went out on their own.
The "NERD IS POCKETING THE MONEY!" line is just flat-out false, but people are right to say that the money situation is quite trust-based and messy. Perhaps not something you personally would associate with, but those that stick with us trust us to do so. We're not going to fuck them.
As for other topics here: No, we did not intend to use the NDA to suppress people talking about pay once agreed upon, however, I, Michael, avoided disclosing to others what people made as someone in a position of authority. They're free to talk about how much they've been compensated.
The Gratis contract is for people who wish to contribute to our projects but not be paid. Low stakes stuff, no need to collect as much information, and they get any other benefits from being around us in a more social way. Some people opt for this.
The primary goal of the contracts is to settle problems of copyright, which were left up in the air due to the Wani's original deal being highly informal. The NDAs were primarily put in to protect sensitive information, prevent any internal people from having their identity exposed, and to attempt to bring back the old Snoot Game-era mantra of "Loose lips sink ships". We don't want to over-promise, say too much, or anything else about what we're working on to build up expectations. We rather sit quietly and work until completion.
though this was not from anyone "officially" acting on behalf of Cavemanon (the company), and was instead paid by Rangto out of pocket.
This is incorrect. Spidey was a bumbling idiot who couldn't send an invoice to someone and needed to be hand-held through everything. I, Michael, attempted to send him documentation on how to do this via PayPal so I (Michael) could pay him, he didn't do so. Eventually, Rangto intervened and offered to pay him on our behalf so long as I reimbursed him. I did so. Rangto paid Spidey, and I paid Rangto to reimburse him. It's a scuffed way of doing things, but it's what happened.
Spidey (deadassspider) was removed from the team prior to being paid due to leaking chat logs.
Spidey is a longtime GVH/snoot adjacent artist that developed an obsession over Naomi, which eventually led to the creation of a recolor OC now known as Mia. We ended up asking him to help with wani, unknowing that it would be one of the biggest mistakes we've ever made.
After Wani started, Spidey was admitted inside the dev server along with all the other characters whom would comprise of that first year of Wani's development. This entire first year was defined by the aforementioned poor direction, bad writing and bad concepting. Spidey contributed to this dire situation by refusing (I repeat: REFUSING) to work within the pipeline estabilished by the devs, created especifically to speed up the art-process.
Spidey had once stated he had industry experience, but never once in the two years spent producing assets for Wani proved that to be the case. At least three sets of character sprites were made early on and then scrapped completely for not being up to quality standards, which made the lead artist step in to revise the sprites into something useable. All this was necessary because spidey also resisted against simply drawing the characters to be on-model with the artstyle. This is all before getting to the issue of writing.
Writing was fucking hellfire with him around. Even the initial Wani writing team hated working with Spidey, as at the time he legally held the rights to Mia and used this fact to impose impossible constraints to write around. Frequently spidey would immediately crash in on writing sessions and demand asinine changes to how Mia is portrayed ranging from all sorts of mandates, including:
and most annoyingly,
This rule came about because Spidey got so assblasted by someone anonymously accusing Ben of being a self-insert for Spidey he demanded we change the entire story we were going for.
This greatly limited what could be done with her character, and made the devs walk around eggshells throughout the entire 2-year development cycle, and it was because of these repeated outbursts, threats and sabotaging writing sessions that the upper management started looking into copyright law to gain rights over Mia. We thought we had our backs covered but we inadvertedly had a Duncan Roo dictating how we should make our game.
Nobody liked working with Spidey. Eventually the first lead artist stepped down purely to not have to deal with him any longer. He was constantly picking fights with fans and other devs would have to put out fires he would start. Eventually we got the rights to use Mia and Spidey's other characters when he signed a contract.
Eventually, Spidey had it with our team. He saw something so outrageous he just couldn't keep his cool. His hands shook, steam blew from his ears, and it sounded like a train whistle. He saw something so infuriating he threatened IMMEDIATELY to leak our entire server and spoil wani.
He got pinged with a ms paint drawing.
Of note, Spidey only backed down AFTER he was severely warned over being fired for it.
He refused to cooperate with the art team, he terrorized the writing team, he refused to help with the animation process even when the most basic tasks were thoroughly explained to him, and he resisted against helping with any assets that didn't involve Mia, even long after he was taken off any character-work because of his refusal to keep the characters on-model. His assets made for the game were subpar at best and hinted at a deteriorating artstyle, to the point where whole assets had to be entirely redone or entirely scrapped or adjusted by other people involved, with his outside presence consisting of him colluding with nanaki (in his mind a girlboss goddess with a sexy girlpenis) for unknown purposes, being a chronic masturbator IRL and posting horrifying snoot-related incest porn.
Never once he acted out of goodwill towards the wani team or cavemanon despite the great opportunity, and up until the very end tried to punk us by making Lunara trans. Fuck you if you think we didn't pay spidey enough, for all the shit he put the entire fucking server into for whole two fucking years of development we essentially paid for
Loanshark left and rejoined the team several times due to aforementioned stress and IRL issues
Loan is your friend, waiting on you to screw up. It is slightly dishonest to say he quit 'multiple times', as it omits the sheer scale of his absense. He quit six times. He would completely abandon all responsibility for finishing his project we already promised our fans would exist, leaving everyone else to finish it. He would return because I would ask him to, if only as a friend, and the process would start again.
Loan was constantly depressive and high-maintainance, using anyone who would listen as an emotional bank and joking for a year how wani should just be cancelled directly to people working on it for 40 hours a week. One compromise management came up with was to refer to Loan for redlining (a process in asset creation in which a sketch is adjusted by another artist to be refined and made on-model before inking). At least then it could still feel like he had some influence in his own game. These redlines tended to be awful to the point that the lead artist simply ignored them. But more often than not he would deny these requests because he was in one of his moods, telling devs to 'ask someone else'. So we had to, someone else picked up the slack.
Things came to a head mere months before release when Loan finally found out about a joke we wrote into his script he hadn't read half a year prior. In the arcade scene, there's a gag where Inco 'realizes' Olivia's opponent is a virgin. This line originally read 'incel', which made Loan so furious that he tried to pull his authority over a creative matter. Ultimately we changed the line as a personal favor.
After he found out that he was not, in fact, getting 5% royalties for a game he did not work on, he went and cried to several devs about it, including one dev who was working tirelessly to finish and perfect one of the hand-drawn animations in the final game- loan's game. He went and cried to someone working to finish his game that he should be careful of cavemanon, otherwise they won't pay him what he's worth either.
This dev had no idea who this guy was.
Loan also attempted to poach a different developer as well.
Yes, we offered him $100 bucks for an exe icon and some steam store assets. What a ripoff, right? We offered to pay him extra than what was budgeted out of pocket for no hard feelings to a dev that resulted in a net-negative amount of work done. This was so insulting to him he burnt every bridge he had with this group of devs that would have continued supporting his work.
To be fair, he did contribute early on with beta assets (that were scrapped for being bad) and that red-line work we mentioned before (which he was a flake with). However, for this guy's own project, the output was abysmal for the pain endured.
Now after all this, imagine you, Mr. Cavemanon himself, were contracted by this guy, who quit 6 times and then demanded 5% royalties from you, for a deal...
and what he contacted you with was a deal of a lifetime: A deal for Wani DLC, DLC which he (who failed to manage the last project) would lead.
Now keep in mind, this was before the release of Wani, and Wani could have been a total flop, so discussion out of this is already retarded in concept alone, but we're going to ignore that for now.
What shouldn't be ignored is the fact that he, someone who flopped the last project (a project he started), is offering to do another project with you, basically under the same terms, but this time it'll be different because...
...he'll have a contract and because he complained about the booru situation (very useful while people actually working on the project he started are working their ass off).
Now this goofy goober's deal of a life time fell through because we rejected it for being pure retardation. We would have been stuck with this flake of a person, cleaning up his bullshit for even longer, a pain that I wouldn't wish upon anyone.
Now, we aren't saying that we'll never do bonus content for Wani, nor are we saying we will. What we're saying is that we'll never do it with Loan, under these bullshit terms, because he's a low-output flaker who can't get his shit together.
In the end, Loan decided to just drop the pay question completely.
A different member, who was later removed from the team, was at one point in 2023 asked to purchase Clip Studio Paint's EX edition[358,359], out of their own funds, or their work already done in their existing program would be cut[357], despite being able to be transferred over with zero issues.
That member was Spidey. We did suggest for this person to use Clip Paint Studio, primarily because of its ability to produce CLIP files (however, any other system that provides CLIP files would have been fine). However, this was done out of a business necessity because the content that was given was subpar for usability, hindering output on the project.
Direct quote from an internal member, who shall go unnamed, about the subject:
The workflow in Wani was cursed, but the one common strength of the artists is that everyone was using the same program, CSP. This made the workflow easy as artists can work on other artist's assets without issues, but Spidey uses Procreate, which can't open CLIP files.
The only way for Spidey to work on assets from and to other people is to have them stored as PSD documents. Procreate can open and export PSD documents, which CLIP can do as well. If PSD and CLIP files supported the same features, then there would be no problem with Spidey's involvement with the workflow, but not only is that not the case, CSP's conversion process from CLIP to PSD drops features that PSD otherwise supports.
On conversion, certain features like un-rasterized text, vectors, layer metadata, rulers, anything involving animation, and any other CLIP exclusive features get thrown out. For instance, vector layers that characters had lineart for are rasterized on conversion and, if subsequent changes are made to that lineart, it cannot be brought back without recreating the changes made to the lineart in vectors. This was fine in some cases, but some artists used vectors as a helpful tool for their workflow, and on occasion become useful for assets (Such as the closeup of inco's face in Wani ch.1). Ideally, there shouldn't be any loss of information to begin with, but it's the tradeoff made to compensate for Spidey not using the same program as us.
Where it became unacceptable to make PSD conversions is animations. The workflow was concentrated mostly in CSP, which while not an ideal program to make fully fledged animations, it was what we knew, what everyone else had, what we had time and patience for, and what worked well for the most part. Animation could then only be done in CLIP files because PSD documents threw away animation timelines and merged all animation layers into one. At the time, animations were the highest priority assets to get done since they needed to be competently made and were severely time consuming, which necessitated most artists who weren't already occupied with something to pitch in, including Spidey, which meant he needed to get CSP or he couldn't be useful.
The real kicker though is the claim that his asset files were usable with "zero issues", which is an outright lie. Spidey became notorious in the group for having the shittiest possible organization and work flow, often rendering assets nearly UNUSABLE, meaning he sent us what amounts to high-effort garbage. There are too many times where his layer organization was non-existent, completely flattened character sprites or baked in colors that made them hard to make edits and additional sprites to. He was told time and time again to fix these issues, but he only marginally obliged, making the process of sprite creation inefficient the entire way through.
The worst case came with Mia's sprite, where her tier 1 sprites (The default sprite of her hand on her hip) were all one layer. He had been making adjustments by padding the sprite with some smudge or fingertip tool, and making additional sprites by making cut outs of those sprites. Utterly rancid. I had to go in and spend whole days of their life recreating Mia's sprites, and some of Spidey's other sprites like Lunara from almost scratch, just so there was any semblance of elements being separated for easy workflow.
Workanon left due to creative and personal disagreements with Cavemanon's writers[234] before the project was completed, and before the more 'official' contracts were drafted, and so received nothing. His name was removed from the credits[256], after the team wrote over or deleted most or all of what he wrote for the game's script[252,254].
The original lead writer for Wani, Workanon took charge of the original wani team after Loan had abdicated all responsibility for the project. An absolute mistake because his personal work hours being completely incompatible with the rest of the Wani team, and also his abysmal skills in writing, leadership, and cooperation.
At his best he was an absent leader, only available once a week for a meeting to discuss how poor the project was progressing. In hindsight these meetings served no purpose aside from giving Workanon a chance to talk endlessly about his vision for Wani. They were a massive waste of time which could have been better spent actually working on the project.
At his worst (and most usual) he was an arrogant old bastard who thought his age alone gave him the right to try and dictate how Cavemanon as a whole should operate, going as far as to openly state trying to socially engineer and openly shame members into compliance.
The original Wani script can't be shown here, but to give an idea of how fucking awful it was, Whiny Bitch's poorly written mess of a hit-piece was written better. Workanon's skill level could be estimated to be that of someone who found all their humor from abridged series and Comedy Central. And their understanding of drama too. Every few lines he'd waggle his singular braincell in order to just invent another Flintsone-esque pun, as though those alone would carry the weight of his writing as he filled dead air with ill-aged lines found from the comment sections of youtube and reddit. An egregious example was the creation of the Arcade chapter of Wani, a chapter by all rights that plays out as overall light fluff with inferences of Olivia's past and the budding feelings between Inco and Olivia. This chapter alone took up a majority of early Wani developement because of fighting game autism(entire pages filled with how fucking fighting games worked with jargon included), and the lead writer only around to give a fuck for his own fucking writing.
Workanon's methodology, since he wasn't available to work on the script except his own personal time, was to write out full garbage chapters and then expect the rest of the writers to editorialize what he had written after the fact with nary a note of what was to happen next. He would then continue on writing where HE left off, ignorant of what had been edited. This lead to numerous errors throughout the script and entire sections consisting of nothing but worthless chaff. During the rare (it happened maybe five times total) occasions where Workanon could work alongside the rest of the writing team there was always arguments between him and other members of the writing team, usually because someone had alternative ideas to what to write. It was ONLY Workanon's vision that mattered, regardless of how bad that vision was. Even after receiving heavy critiques, Workanon believed his script was worth continuing, so the decision was made for the Wani writing team to start a fresh new document for easier editing, while allowing Workanon to continue on his own script.
This led to his second biggest meltdown (the first being the shitty document he's disgraced us with) to date. According to him, this was Cavemanon usurping Wani from him. It couldn't be that the vast majority found it a pain to constantly have to make allowances for his own personal life. It couldn't be that he was just a trash fucking writing who left us nothing of substance to truly work with. And it definitely couldn't be the absolute lack of ANY real leadership on the original Wani team, a team made up mainly of fucking ideas guys who had no clue how to actually make their ideas work!
Workanon, with all the sincerity I (Sli) can muster, with all the sympathy I barely have left for you, just fucking quit. Go back to your wife, and give her the attention she rightfully deserves. Don't waste it being a petty little bitch because the younger generation is doing something you couldn't.
...greatly muddying the water for anyone either just trying to make friends, or just trying to make money, commonly seen in cult settings, if only replacing friendship with religion.
This is a primarily internet-based business and networking group, one that anyone can leave at any time, for any reason, and people have done, and we have no substantial qualms with them. To say we're some kind of cult, in earnest, is insulting.
We're a group of friends trying to do business together to the best of our ability, who have been hurt by bat-shit insane people and poor organization. We're far from perfect, but we're not the demons that we're being made out to be. We have our reasons for our actions.
People stick with us despite this. The internet is a place where it's easy to leave, you can right click, leave server, and block people. We can't really do anything to you at that point. If people with such a low barrier for leaving stick with us, I think that says we're not all that bad.
refused to pay users via normal methods for person-to-person transfers, like PayPal
False. We have paid people through PayPal if they invoice us using it. We just have to have all the paperwork lined out to do so. The citation is of LoanShark, who we would have been willing to pay with Paypal if all the paperwork was done. He opted out of payment.
There's an entire paragraph making a call to action that starts with:
To Nerd, Joy and friends directly: What would prove us wrong...
transparency
Very funny given the people who wrote this' lack of it:
We're pretty sure that the people involved in creating this document are from the Naomi Mod discord server (and the orbiting people around it). Samantha, Spidey, Caliber (posing as Snek), Diz, and our wholesome, valid, trans kween WolfNanaki.
This entire document here is a hit piece to try to make us look as horrible as possible, alleging we're scammers, con-artists, and criminals, implying we have an intent to harm everyone who comes near us, dragging our name through the mud. At worst, we're shitty business men, just like anyone else starting a company with no experience. Poorly defining deals, picking bad people, and attempting to lawyer your way through life without a law degree is unfortunately the hell that needs to be put up with when you have the budget of nothing. We tried cleaning it up as much as we can and the people around us are happy with the situation at hand.
Most of this document is spent going over old discord drama about a literal gay fan fic mod, while the other fifth actually concerns something of merit: contract law & taxes, which earnestly should be the only thing that's even discussed since it's the only thing in this document of substantial importance. Even in these sections, when the document's authors aren't spuring on unbased legal threats against us, inching ever so closer to the threat of LOLsuit, they're making complaints that we, in earnest, attempted to collect necessary information for the IRS and admit that tax law is complex and that we have substantial reasoning to make mistakes.
Allow developers to talk as they please, about internal and external goings-on.
That's not good, some things need to stay internal. If every little lover's spat got its own @everyone ping in some retarded snoot game drama channel, bad blood would form, and problems clearly wouldn't be solved. Silence is golden, and largely what got Snoot Game even to a point of release. We stayed away from everything and just focused on making quality content as much as possible.
If people have problems with us, they can simply not associate with us.
Show the same group who has read this document exactly, without a shred of doubt, how everything went down. Show everyone where the money went- web hosting, background assets, translation, bills, whatever.
What do you want? Bank statements, with doxes on them? What else can we provide except for testimony?
Everything before Wani's release has been out of pocket. The Exit 665 Indiegogo money hasn't even been touched, since it's not for Wani. We paid people out of pocket, with our own cash. Servers included. The only minor exception is the cryptocurrency donations at the start, which paid off web hosting.
Wani's profits are governed by a 50/50 profit split: Half goes back into the company to pay developers who stuck with us so they can continue working, the other half goes to the administration who put in up to 40 hours a week on this project. There, you happy? We're still going to need to get everything in individual agreements with people working with us, but it's our plan to not let a fuck-up with money like Wani to happen again.
Divulging financial information like this isn't even something we should be obligated to do, in the same way that we're not asking you to divulge your information about how you spend your cash.
Most businesses don't do this, it's only requested from us because seething losers who suck ass at everything are mad at us about dead e-drama and screaming on behalf of those who quit our team or was ousted for good reason. A lot of the original Wani team was flat-out incompetent, unable to bring us to the finish line (hence why the game took so long). The old agreements we had with Loan failed because of him quitting (MULTIPLE TIMES), and we did our best to help who we could, and some people got fucked, because they didn't contribute as much as others, and in some cases, offered negative value to us.
Show everyone what the money for Exit's development is going to.
We want to. Exit was put on hold to clean up the disaster that was the Wani project. We couldn't do two projects at once, and attempting to do so was a total mistake. We blundered, but, Exit 665 isn't cancelled. In fact, we have quite a lot going on these days as Wani winds down on development. We would like to transition into talking about the game more, but we're still playing clean up on Wani, getting the last bits of translation done, and dealing with garbage drama like this.
Whoever "the community" is. Whoever the enemy your side has created in your head is, the same as the community has created their own caricature of you. Talk to the community about how you truly, really feel[301].
Okay, we will:
We like the fans: they come in, they play our stuff, they may like or dislike it in a constructive way, and then perhaps create a little bit of original content of their own (translations, art pieces, nice fan mail, etc), and, when they're done with the product, they move on with their lives. These are normal people, they populated the original /trash/ sticky, they populate the now bustling Spanish community around us, they're cool guys who want to talk about what we made, and then go back to living their lives normally after they get bored. They're the majority of our fan-base. We love and appreciate them. Some of them may even come to join us down the line, or are inspired to start their own studios. We're always happy to see this kind of stuff.
We loathe the cretins that make Journalist-tier expose's like this. One fucking fifth of that document had any genuine merit at all (stuff regarding contract and tax law), and even that they fucked up because they fail to understand that, yes, we are working to become a functioning game studio which means having to navigate the nightmare of government bureaucracy while also managing a piss-poor team of worthless hacks. These venomous creatures who have slithered their way in, and are now trying to act as though they're speaking for the 'snoot community' as a fucking whole.
Everyone knows these situations, "the fandom sucks" type stuff, but it's never your passive fans who get a fandom its reputation, it's the sociopaths (like the ones who took the time to write this drivel of legalese trash) that wish to intervene and control their little communities, even the very people who provided this fandom to them to the first place. We're flawed, we understand that, but we're not evil. To be made out to be evil by these types, who are posting this publicly to try to undermine our reputation, is disheartening to say the least.
They may meet us, and then they see that we aren't some idolized perfect image in their head, we're opinionated and flawed people just like then, and then they spend the next 4 years of their finite life seething in anger, contributing to gay-ops, and looking for opportunity to attack. They can't just dislike us, take those who we have "wronged", and start their own group, they instead try to tear down our little empire that we build to try to help people around us. This massive document, if it does damage, will be hurting those who still work with us as much as it hurts us. It's not going to do anything good for anyone involved.
It seems you are on the wrong side of their fence, here, burning what little faith you have left in the community with every action you take that sparks another unreasonable reaction from people
No, this is just you and your Discord clique who have little faith in us. Most people don't actually care about behind-the-scenes e-drama relating to lousy developers and dead modding projects. What they care about is getting a good product and knowing that their contributions to us will go to people who are capable of making more quality products for them.
Largely, the people defended in this document are not those who can pull their weight to get a project done, and instead needed to have their project man-handled by Snoot Game's original development team. They were flounderers who burnt an excessive amount of time making low-quality trash at a slow rate when they were most productive, and throwing tantrums that had to be wrangled at their absolute worst.
The members of our team that pulled through, we love them and they're going to get what they've earned. The normal fans who support us and enjoy what we do are amazing and built us to the point where we are today. However, the attentionwhore, namefag vultures in 4chan's /trash/'s Discord servers are the rejects of rejects of rejects. Society doesn't want them, so they go to 4chan, 4chan doesn't want them, so they go to /trash/, and even /trash/ doesn't want them, so they end up congregating and scheming together to get revenge for old e-drama of years gone by, by pretending to care about "justice" for those who have offered negative value to us, and our customer base.
Find a different niche.
We're not abandoning this little piece of paradise we've carved out of blood, sweat, and clay behind because you're upset at us. Jump into a wood chipper. Go fuck yourself.
