"In his blogpost, Mr Dakan apologised for how Haunts has turned out and pledged to refund any backer who wanted their money back out of his own pocket."<p>Well, at least he's saying he'll do the right thing about it.
The source code for the game (Go/Lua) is already on GitHub: <a href="https://github.com/runningwild/haunts" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/runningwild/haunts</a>
I don't mean to bash the guy, but when it comes to small software projects on a shoestring, that seem more like a side project than a stable income, I'd have been worried about any in which the project's owner and visionary isn't a coder himself. It's not that he could have kept the ball rolling the hard way, all by himself (though he could, had he been the lead programmer instead of placing that weight on a volatile hire), it's more about the morale in knowing the biggest stakeholder is also knee deep in the guts of the game. It does wonders to programmer employees, and might not have ended up with them quitting so early on.<p>I've been noticing this trend on Kickstarter that more and more people seem to be coming up with coding projects and then waiting on the money to solve their core problem: getting the project coded, since they can't code themselves. I don't know if it's good or bad, it's definitely good that designers can bootstrap a coding project this way, but then coding is becoming increasingly easier that I'd rather see these people learn to do it and then bring their full vision into a product. Otherwise they deny software projects their biggest advantage; that they can be done on the side with no resources but your own time, which you are more than happy to spend doing that wonderful hobby which is bulding things and seeing them work.
It would nice to see all crowd source projects have a clause that if the project fails or is mothballed, then the project code and assets are released open source.
Haunts: The Manse Macabre and all assets could be place on github for the users to continue.
Here's a proper and more holistic overview.<p><a href="http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/2066438441/haunts-the-manse-macabre/posts/331425" rel="nofollow">http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/2066438441/haunts-the-ma...</a>
Label them (those who left) as quitters without ethics or loyalty and make sure it comes up high in google searches. Do you think it would work ? I know potential employers google my name.