This is the big post from the Patreon at the beginning of this year when they switched projects:
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Hello everyone.
Very important and urgent post. It's from me, the creator of this project
Son_of_Agrabah (
REDPANDA)
I rarely started to write posts by myself, because I hired a person who was supposed to be in charge of social media But now this person is gone, as well as the rest of the team.
But let's talk about this in more detail.
A Brief History of Our Team and the Forbidden Fruit Project.
If you don't know the history of the project, then I will let you know. 4 years ago, a friend suggested that I should make a game and I agreed (after some time, this friend left the project).
I invited my another friend, who studied with me at the same university, to work on the project, we were good friends. She began to draw, and I wrote the plot and thought out the world and characters. Then I called a programmer to the project, who began to collect all the material for the game. This is how the first episode of the Forbidden Fruit appeared, in which there were many bugs, very little text and all 18+ content was only Raj without a bandage on his belt.
As time went on, our project became better. I gave the artist the task of what to draw. I gave the programmer a task to do. I myself wrote the script, made posts on social networks, made animation, communicated with subscribers, promoted the page, communicated with other game developers, and did many other parallel works.
When our project grew to such an amount that I can afford to hire another employee, the first thing I hired was a screenwriter, because I had a lot of work and I could not do everything efficiently and on time. So we became 4 people in the team.
Then I hired Smm, then I hired additional people who did odd jobs. Then I hired a marketer. And now we already had 10 people on the team.
I paid everyone a salary with my personal money that I earned in China, and I kept part of the money in my wallet. The artist and the programmer had access to this wallet. Because I trusted them and thought that if something happened that I could not get access to the money so that other people whom I trusted and with whom I started the project could withdraw money and pay the wages of other employees. But then this happened...
It turns out that all the time I had rats behind my back, who were discussing a plan on how to take my Patreon page away from me and steal money.
Two weeks ago, I had a quarrel with the "main team" (as they called themselves). This is an artist, programmer, writer, and SMM.
They demanded that I resign as a leader and give them all the data from the Patreon page. At the same time, they changed the password from the wallet with my money and brought them to their bank card.
They started blackmailing. "Either you give all the data to us, or we demand that your Patreon page be blocked, and take all your money for ourselves"
We agreed that they would withdraw some of my money from me. And then we will sit down for negotiations.
But a day later they wrote that we cannot withdraw our money because the bank blocked the bank account of the programmer who kept my money.
Then they wrote: "We take your money for ourselves, and we leave the Patreon page for you, you can earn more with it. And we will continue the game on another Patreon page."
At the moment all my money is $500. I'm in Bali, thousands of miles from my home, where there's a war going on right now. (I am from Crimea).
But I'm not going to sit and feed you promises of a new game and ask for donations.
I created a community in Bali, with guys working in different game development professions. There are already 120 people in the group, I told them about the situation with the theft of money and experienced game developers said that they would help me put together a new team that would be much better than the old one.
In the next post, I will tell you my next plan of action. Because I've been working on a game that you like for 4 years. And I'm going to do a second project, which will be even better because I will no longer have rats behind my back.
If you have the opportunity, please support the project next month so that I can hire more professional people and make a game that you will definitely like.