This has to be one of the most unfortunate game cancellation videos I've heard.
The primary developer behind Ant Simulator, Eric Tereshinski, has revealed that the game has been canceled and that he has resigned from ETeeski LLC. Prior to its cancellation the Ant Simulator team was attempting to get on to Steam through Early Access and a Beta version of the game was made available.
With such a promising game in development, why was it canceled? Well, apparently Tereshinski's partners blew all of their money on booze, restaurants and strippers.
The team at ETeeski set up a Kickstarter a while back to create both a game development tutorial, with software included and the Ant Simulator game. The Kickstarter campaign raised little over $4,000 with options to further support development through PayPal (an unknown amount was raised).
Tereshinski was the only one of his teammates (who were also his friends for 11 years), Devon Staley, Tyler Monce and Corey Peterson, to be actually working towards the game's development – probably because the strippers and booze kept them so busy.
What makes it worse is that Tereshinski lost everything to his "friends," as they owned everything he created for the Kickstarter – including the game.
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! It helps out so much to see everyone's comments of support. I've been in a really dark place for over two months because of this, you all have really made a difference for me. I was afraid to go public with this information, but it's really good to be able to talk with everyone here again.
