Thread by @dsmart

{thread} The Mandate, a space combat game which I backed in 2013 and which raised $700K via @kickstarter and which raised $700K - is dead.

According to sources, it was an absolute scam.

kickstarter.com/projects/19644…

@kickstarter Perihelion Interactive was formed in Luxembourg solely for this project.

It was formed by Matus Kirchmeyer, a Slovakian businessman and former programmer. He is also head of Matsuko (a VR/AR co that does corporate promos)

The original team of mostly freelancers worked remotely.

Robert Chill Halvarsson, the designer was previously an FX designer and associate producer at Funcom.

Ole Herbjornsen, the CEO/CCO was also from Funcom.

Most of the devs were based in Kosice where they had worked on other projects with Matus.

None of them had much game dev experience.

At some point in early to mid 2016, as there was near-zero progress, let alone a game to show - almost a year past the 2015 delivery date - Matus fired Ole.

Ole went back to Funcom.

Matus started looking for people to work on the game.

Matus eventually hired some people who were previously laid off from Travian, Cyanide and Wargaming.Net.

Bear in mind that during this time, most - if not all of the KS updates - were blatant lies.

kickstarter.com/projects/19644…

At the time they hired these people, one source said that there was nothing to the project - let alone anything to play.

"There was a static scene with a star field and a ship that moved around it in a really janky fashion. No physics, very rough looking assets, no gameplay."

At that point, they didn't even have a clear vision for what game they were making.

That was THREE years in btw.

Original vision was a Romanovs and Imperial Russian court intrigue in space. Then they decided they wanted to roll in Firefly, Battlestar Galactica etc into it.

Then they brought in some "consultants" to discuss the vision for the game.

Apparently that went nowhere rather quickly, and the devs had to come up with a coherent vision for what they were planning on making.

They still had no game - of any kind.

So at that point, they ultimately decided that the gameplay vision would be like Frozen Synapse, with the visuals being like Battlefleet Gothic.

Not even joking.

"We found that none of the systems that had previously been shown to backers actually worked, the demos had been hacked together and couldn't be used in production. Many features basically didn't exist either as designs or as implemented features."

It's hilarious that they hired David Bradley to do VO for a "game" that neither had the scenes or story that he was recording for.

Similarly artists were said to be creating assets for non-existent features. Which is what you show to backers.

Nope - not kidding.

Those same artists had no access to a "game", so they had no clue what they were creating assets for.

Artists Garret Armey-Johnson and Greg Mirles in the US were supposed to go there in the Summer that year, but Perihellion couldn't afford their airfare until Sept.

According the source, three years in, they decided to reboot the project.

They planned an Early Access launch in Q1/2017.

At the point, all 3 yrs and $700K amounted to about TWO WEEKS worth of actual dev work.

Nope - not joking.

After pitching the new scope to backers, and a pro community manager was hired, everything went downhill quickly because most of the questions (inc. legal exposure) being asked, couldn't be answered.

And their publisher, EuroVideo, was also having internal issues of their own.

The pro community manager and others eventually quit, shortly after invoices stopped being paid.

Greg, who was asked to move from US to Kosice and continue work, made those plans, got an apt etc.

Then he had to come to US on a family emergency.

You know what happened next.

While he was back in the US, they informed him that they could no longer afford to pay him, nor afford his ticket back to Slovakia.

Apparently he never returned, and someone had to ship some of his stuff back to the US.

Then most of the key devs exited the project.

Sources say that currently only a handful of local Slovakian devs working off and on, remain on the project.

Then they tried to pitch it at GDC as a console project in order to get more funding.

Nope - not kidding.

Even after raising $700K, a source said:

"At no point was there ever a playable game or anything except hacked together scenes for specific demos."

Sound familiar?

For my part, there goes my $75.

For more info, check the KS page or the game's official forums (dead).

mandategame.com

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