- Thread starter RedKing
- Start date
- Feb 9, 2017
- 254
- 458
Whoa. I don't think I knew this dev is the owner of LewdGamer.com... Now I see it was mentioned back on page one.
Nice to hear this game still has a pulse. Moar Lasterk!!!
Nice to hear this game still has a pulse. Moar Lasterk!!!
Last edited:
- Sep 7, 2017
- 3,217
- 18,853
I was about to mark this as abandoned but then saw this post. What a schmuck. If you can't be arsed to post updates you don't deserve pledges.
- Mar 11, 2017
- 744
- 1,442
Can you believe this asshole is still pulling down $500 a month on Patreon, and hasn't done a goddamned thing since releasing a demo over a year ago?
- Dec 23, 2017
- 660
- 366
- Jun 15, 2017
- 25
- 11
- Sep 7, 2017
- 3,217
- 18,853
So. Been lurking on this site for some time. . . And this is the first post and a negative one at that.
Demo, yeah. BUT why are both the male and female choices the same? Gosh a waste. D;
Demo, yeah. BUT why are both the male and female choices the same? Gosh a waste. D;
- Jul 24, 2017
- 393
- 2,023
You must be registered to see the links
Sooo...
Apology for delay (again and again)
Artist (Lasterk) quit the game
New artist (anime flux) join the game and redraw all the art
And now a word from the creator
"While I'm not on the verge of having hate for this project, I more than anyone wants to get this debut out of the way. I have so many interesting plans for the twins and future projects that I ultimately can't approach without accomplishing this title first. While WMNAD isn't my dream project, all that I want from it is to be a game that 10 years from now I can look back and say: "Yeah, this game wasn't my best work, but man did I start out with a BANG!""
Yay
- Feb 9, 2017
- 254
- 458
- Jul 25, 2017
- 50
- 111
I’m going to clear up some things here.
You have heard nothing from this game because it is a scam. The developer Critical Bliss is a scammer and a con artist. He is quite literally the Yandere Simulator Developer of western erotic games.
The information in this post comes from me watching the way Critical Bliss operates for the past three years. Over time, developers have cut ties to him or blacklisted him because of what I am going to tell you below. My developer group (Kyungeki) has absolved all relations to him last year but kept watching to see what would happen. Nothing has changed or improved.
Critical Bliss consist of one person. He is a former professional marketer with the goal of taking the money of everyone he encounters with minimal effort on his part. Those side games he is “publishing” are an attempt to get Patreon and Kickstarter money off of their work, and then run away with it. He will not allow any of those games to release on an expected schedule. If a game looks like it will soon be finished, he will convince the creator that something is not done right, which will cause to game will tank so it is better to never release it. This method of continuing to push back deadlines allows him to suck up as much Patreon money and Kickstarter money as possible will stringing along expectant fans.
Any developer he partners with, he will do everything possible to control the Steam account, Kickstarter campaign, or whatever method that will make the money goes to him first. Then he can “allow” the developer to have a cut. To get the initial trust of a developer, he will scout naive ones. He will promise “I can get [blank] artist to work on your game!” Or “I have [blank] developer that can do [unfamiliar] part of your game for you!” Or “I can get you a ton of marketing! Look at these other games my fingers have touched!” Never mind that these other games had cult followings before he even knew about them. He does the bare minimum of marketing if any at all. You can even see how devoid of updates his own Patreon and Kickstarter page are for WMNAD. He does not do email updates, or reach out to forums, or mention the game anywhere outside of his own Discord.
If you have a complaint or concern, and you are a backer, he will usher you out of the public eye of Twitter or Patreon or Kickstater and into his Discord. There he will direct message you with empty promises and “proof” that the game is still being worked on. In reality, he is doing everything he can to make sure the game never makes progress. If you dare to bring this up in a public channel of the Discord he will give you warning and then a ban, or just an outright ban and messages removed.
If the developer he is “publishing” is keen enough to push their game to completion, he will immediately insist on a “marketing percentage” for all of his hard work. He will fight tooth and nail not to have this in any kind of contract. He will insist on a verbal agreement because “you can trust me right?” Otherwise you are a racial slur. If the developer looks to have particularly high potential he may cave and allow a written agreement. If you show any uncertainty in this process he will offer to write it himself. For “free” as he will convince you you can’t afford a basic contract lawyer. He will then type up a “contract” with the legal power of a wet noodle in Microsoft Word over the course of four months, so as to delay your game as much as possible. In a verbal agreement or a written contract he will go back on it. He will suddenly decide to stop paying you because of “personal money problems”. That will then be backed up with a sob story of how hard his life is right now, so he needs your promised money to make up for his own terrible budgeting practices.
By the way, if you talk to him for any extended length (because he insists on voice calls and no text communication, likely since there will be no written transcript that can be saved) you will see his personality to be the most un-ironic caricature of a Dave Chappell sketch. He has a loud hatred of anything resembling professionalism and a love of anything sleaze. Most people rightfully take his presentation as a running joke. But it is not. He really is that kind of person.
When WMNAD was early in development a number of skilled individuals volunteered to help. If anyone made something substantial, their contributions would be taken and then they would be sidelined with a promise of future tasks to work on. No one would get future work. But they are just volunteers, it is no problem right? Well not everyone was a volunteer. More than one artist would be hired to make some graphics for the game, and then he would give that artist less and less work until nothing. This is because they were moving too fast for his tastes. Any of those amazing artists could have finished this short 2D visual novel in 3 or so months. Instead it has been drawn out to three years. But he “hired” them right? He paid them a lump sum once, and then promised them a cut of the profits when the game sold. Unknown to them, the game will never be sold. These artists would check in every week or so expecting another assignment. They set aside larger and greater projects to be ready to work on this with the expectation of a nice payout. He will give them an excuse of “next week”. There is always another week. He does this just to gleefully waste their time and stop them from focusing on something that may take attention away from his never-to-be-completed game.
Art is only one major part of a 2D visual novel. The other part is the game/engine itself. He has refused to use a proven and community supported visual novel engine like Ren’py or RPGMaker or Visual Novel Maker or even Unity. Instead, it must be made with the most low-powered and out-dated software he could find: TyranoBuilder. For one, this allows him to blame any delays on legitimate tech issues. Two, he can claim he built the entire game from scratch by himself, since he can’t find anyone to do it. The reality is that this is a lie. CB’s sister entity is Lewd Media, which runs the hentai and eroge review site Lewd Gamer. The developer behind Lewd Gamer is phenomenal. That developer has skills that would make multimillion-dollar Silicon Valley engineers worried about their positions. And that developer is barred from touching the (atrocious) source code of WMNAD. As is any outside developer that offers assistance to the game’s technical issues. Much like YandereDev, when legitimate progress is made or possible, he scrambles to kill it, since that would make his scam come to an end.
Similarly to how he would push back the release date of his “publishing” games indefinitely, he has done the same to WMNAD on Steam. He did this to stay at the top of Steam’s “Coming Soon” algorithm of recommended games. This is part of why you have seen WMNAD on the bottom scrollbar of recommended games when looking at similar erotic games on Steam. Steam made this a bannable offense for Steamworks developers last year.
Why did it take so long for a post like this to be made? Because my development group (Kyungeki) began to get seriously taken advantage of and antagonized by him in April 2019. Since then, we wanted to build our case with as much facts as possible and hoped something changed before exposing this behaviour.
What can you do about this? Take it off your Steam wishlist. Report the game’s Patreon. Report the game’s Kickstarter for fraud. Don’t support scams like this. It makes every independent erotic games developer look horrible. It is already a niche genre of games and unsure developers. Behaviour like Critical Bliss’ erodes the trust of everyone and guarantees that the genre never grows.
Happy Mother’s Day, 2020.
Stay safe.
You have heard nothing from this game because it is a scam. The developer Critical Bliss is a scammer and a con artist. He is quite literally the Yandere Simulator Developer of western erotic games.
The information in this post comes from me watching the way Critical Bliss operates for the past three years. Over time, developers have cut ties to him or blacklisted him because of what I am going to tell you below. My developer group (Kyungeki) has absolved all relations to him last year but kept watching to see what would happen. Nothing has changed or improved.
Critical Bliss consist of one person. He is a former professional marketer with the goal of taking the money of everyone he encounters with minimal effort on his part. Those side games he is “publishing” are an attempt to get Patreon and Kickstarter money off of their work, and then run away with it. He will not allow any of those games to release on an expected schedule. If a game looks like it will soon be finished, he will convince the creator that something is not done right, which will cause to game will tank so it is better to never release it. This method of continuing to push back deadlines allows him to suck up as much Patreon money and Kickstarter money as possible will stringing along expectant fans.
Any developer he partners with, he will do everything possible to control the Steam account, Kickstarter campaign, or whatever method that will make the money goes to him first. Then he can “allow” the developer to have a cut. To get the initial trust of a developer, he will scout naive ones. He will promise “I can get [blank] artist to work on your game!” Or “I have [blank] developer that can do [unfamiliar] part of your game for you!” Or “I can get you a ton of marketing! Look at these other games my fingers have touched!” Never mind that these other games had cult followings before he even knew about them. He does the bare minimum of marketing if any at all. You can even see how devoid of updates his own Patreon and Kickstarter page are for WMNAD. He does not do email updates, or reach out to forums, or mention the game anywhere outside of his own Discord.
If you have a complaint or concern, and you are a backer, he will usher you out of the public eye of Twitter or Patreon or Kickstater and into his Discord. There he will direct message you with empty promises and “proof” that the game is still being worked on. In reality, he is doing everything he can to make sure the game never makes progress. If you dare to bring this up in a public channel of the Discord he will give you warning and then a ban, or just an outright ban and messages removed.
If the developer he is “publishing” is keen enough to push their game to completion, he will immediately insist on a “marketing percentage” for all of his hard work. He will fight tooth and nail not to have this in any kind of contract. He will insist on a verbal agreement because “you can trust me right?” Otherwise you are a racial slur. If the developer looks to have particularly high potential he may cave and allow a written agreement. If you show any uncertainty in this process he will offer to write it himself. For “free” as he will convince you you can’t afford a basic contract lawyer. He will then type up a “contract” with the legal power of a wet noodle in Microsoft Word over the course of four months, so as to delay your game as much as possible. In a verbal agreement or a written contract he will go back on it. He will suddenly decide to stop paying you because of “personal money problems”. That will then be backed up with a sob story of how hard his life is right now, so he needs your promised money to make up for his own terrible budgeting practices.
By the way, if you talk to him for any extended length (because he insists on voice calls and no text communication, likely since there will be no written transcript that can be saved) you will see his personality to be the most un-ironic caricature of a Dave Chappell sketch. He has a loud hatred of anything resembling professionalism and a love of anything sleaze. Most people rightfully take his presentation as a running joke. But it is not. He really is that kind of person.
When WMNAD was early in development a number of skilled individuals volunteered to help. If anyone made something substantial, their contributions would be taken and then they would be sidelined with a promise of future tasks to work on. No one would get future work. But they are just volunteers, it is no problem right? Well not everyone was a volunteer. More than one artist would be hired to make some graphics for the game, and then he would give that artist less and less work until nothing. This is because they were moving too fast for his tastes. Any of those amazing artists could have finished this short 2D visual novel in 3 or so months. Instead it has been drawn out to three years. But he “hired” them right? He paid them a lump sum once, and then promised them a cut of the profits when the game sold. Unknown to them, the game will never be sold. These artists would check in every week or so expecting another assignment. They set aside larger and greater projects to be ready to work on this with the expectation of a nice payout. He will give them an excuse of “next week”. There is always another week. He does this just to gleefully waste their time and stop them from focusing on something that may take attention away from his never-to-be-completed game.
Art is only one major part of a 2D visual novel. The other part is the game/engine itself. He has refused to use a proven and community supported visual novel engine like Ren’py or RPGMaker or Visual Novel Maker or even Unity. Instead, it must be made with the most low-powered and out-dated software he could find: TyranoBuilder. For one, this allows him to blame any delays on legitimate tech issues. Two, he can claim he built the entire game from scratch by himself, since he can’t find anyone to do it. The reality is that this is a lie. CB’s sister entity is Lewd Media, which runs the hentai and eroge review site Lewd Gamer. The developer behind Lewd Gamer is phenomenal. That developer has skills that would make multimillion-dollar Silicon Valley engineers worried about their positions. And that developer is barred from touching the (atrocious) source code of WMNAD. As is any outside developer that offers assistance to the game’s technical issues. Much like YandereDev, when legitimate progress is made or possible, he scrambles to kill it, since that would make his scam come to an end.
Similarly to how he would push back the release date of his “publishing” games indefinitely, he has done the same to WMNAD on Steam. He did this to stay at the top of Steam’s “Coming Soon” algorithm of recommended games. This is part of why you have seen WMNAD on the bottom scrollbar of recommended games when looking at similar erotic games on Steam. Steam made this a bannable offense for Steamworks developers last year.
Why did it take so long for a post like this to be made? Because my development group (Kyungeki) began to get seriously taken advantage of and antagonized by him in April 2019. Since then, we wanted to build our case with as much facts as possible and hoped something changed before exposing this behaviour.
What can you do about this? Take it off your Steam wishlist. Report the game’s Patreon. Report the game’s Kickstarter for fraud. Don’t support scams like this. It makes every independent erotic games developer look horrible. It is already a niche genre of games and unsure developers. Behaviour like Critical Bliss’ erodes the trust of everyone and guarantees that the genre never grows.
Happy Mother’s Day, 2020.
Stay safe.
Damn that here I found out my hope for an awesome game is shattered. Well nothing I could do. Thank you for this information.
- Jul 22, 2017
- 11
- 27
Please don't assume this post is accurate just because it exists Polisummer was a ex member of the team but he is also aggressively trying to ruin the company at this point. If you care about it every developer connected to critical bliss would tell you, lots of these apparent abuses are not true. Poli's developement group is just (himself) and that's how he was involved. I don't want to have to complain about him myself as we were rather on good terms but as someone that sees a lot of false information in this post. I just have to point out that very little of this is factually true beyond kickstarter taking a long time. Rightfully so since the artist basically died if you want to look into it you can find tons of people online asking what happend to "Lasterk" Have you never seen a project on this site where the artist quits or you have to change artist because they can't do the work this is what happend. There was no ongoing big patreon to keep this going heck on this site we have honeyselect asset projects pulling in $15k a month how much money does that cost to make when you can just pull the assets from the software. Are we to be prudish about $20k for a project that takes years to develop.
Furthermore logic when on to post on his kickstarter recently.
to tell his story of how he lived in a car for several years to focus on his work.
Tyranno Builder was chosen at the time because it supported html as renpy at the time of its choosing did not support html and it was unknown when it would. So the web demo on newgrounds would not of existed otherwise.
About a marketing percentage for publishing you mean the actually % cut a publisher takes for publishing a game in the first place? Do you publish a game and expect 0% return for publishing a game. All of critical bliss's partners make good money from selling with cb and are happy to allow a % cut some are even so impressed they gave up more. If people were not happy you'd think they'd leave but who has left ?
You know we used to complain about publishers causing a game to rush out buggy but when a publisher says delay your game a little to make it higher quality and fix them bugs is there a problem ? Polisummer was working with another dev/artist who didn't want to rush out a project with them and now its doing great without them and they are happy for the extra polish the time has given them. Who in their right mind would want to rush out a buggy and unpolished project unless they were desperate for money as a finished game. If you intend to early access that is another matter entirely.
Poli was involved in several projects and has left most for various reasons probably because they didn't make money fast enough to have a sustainable living everyone has different costs and needs for their livelihood. You might feel shafted if you work for someone that goes onto become successful but they couldn't afford a full time salary at the time and you feel shafted because you were there early on. But you just don't take it out on them because they succeeded and now you are angry you didn't stay on. Poli left CB on apparently good terms citing he was getting a full time cushy well paid job. We all still had him on our friends list/on his server and so on but now hes back with a vengeance he did not talk to any of us but instead posted this everywhere he could find and to everyone that would listen.
If you are a fan of any works being published by cb and are alarmed about the above post and feel that it could be true just ask the developers if you feel the need to of the projects you like and they should tell you otherwise. Other brands elsewise are already trying to attack cb because its Competition so be aware that not every part of business is friendly. As much as we just want to make hentai games.
Furthermore logic when on to post on his kickstarter recently.
You must be registered to see the links
to tell his story of how he lived in a car for several years to focus on his work.
Tyranno Builder was chosen at the time because it supported html as renpy at the time of its choosing did not support html and it was unknown when it would. So the web demo on newgrounds would not of existed otherwise.
About a marketing percentage for publishing you mean the actually % cut a publisher takes for publishing a game in the first place? Do you publish a game and expect 0% return for publishing a game. All of critical bliss's partners make good money from selling with cb and are happy to allow a % cut some are even so impressed they gave up more. If people were not happy you'd think they'd leave but who has left ?
You know we used to complain about publishers causing a game to rush out buggy but when a publisher says delay your game a little to make it higher quality and fix them bugs is there a problem ? Polisummer was working with another dev/artist who didn't want to rush out a project with them and now its doing great without them and they are happy for the extra polish the time has given them. Who in their right mind would want to rush out a buggy and unpolished project unless they were desperate for money as a finished game. If you intend to early access that is another matter entirely.
Poli was involved in several projects and has left most for various reasons probably because they didn't make money fast enough to have a sustainable living everyone has different costs and needs for their livelihood. You might feel shafted if you work for someone that goes onto become successful but they couldn't afford a full time salary at the time and you feel shafted because you were there early on. But you just don't take it out on them because they succeeded and now you are angry you didn't stay on. Poli left CB on apparently good terms citing he was getting a full time cushy well paid job. We all still had him on our friends list/on his server and so on but now hes back with a vengeance he did not talk to any of us but instead posted this everywhere he could find and to everyone that would listen.
If you are a fan of any works being published by cb and are alarmed about the above post and feel that it could be true just ask the developers if you feel the need to of the projects you like and they should tell you otherwise. Other brands elsewise are already trying to attack cb because its Competition so be aware that not every part of business is friendly. As much as we just want to make hentai games.
- Jul 25, 2017
- 50
- 111
Making a single post after five months is “aggressively trying to ruin the company”? No, I’m not particularly interested in the company. I don’t hold grudges. I made the post because I felt it was right to the people following the game for so long. I haven’t thought about the company or really cared outside of that. Hence the five months of nothing since doing other things at the end of December. I have long moved on, but that post was an afterthought in the event LewdLogic’s infinite development of the game was still going on. I don’t need to or really want to ruin anything. LewdLogic (Critical Bliss’ owner) can do or not do that with his own actions.
The content in my post is unfortunately true. I don’t want it to be, and seriously questioned each bit before compiling it together and posting it. I realize you my have taken it as a personal attack but it wasn’t. I don’t feel particular animosity toward anyone. I can’t control what LewdLogic does or decides to do and don’t really care. I have taken note of the events, posted it to a fanbase in the dark, and moved on.
The content in my post is unfortunately true. I don’t want it to be, and seriously questioned each bit before compiling it together and posting it. I realize you my have taken it as a personal attack but it wasn’t. I don’t feel particular animosity toward anyone. I can’t control what LewdLogic does or decides to do and don’t really care. I have taken note of the events, posted it to a fanbase in the dark, and moved on.
- Jul 22, 2017
- 11
- 27
But you posted more then just here and you tried to email the press with this "story" also thats more then just posting it in a fanbase in the dark. You don't casually make a decision to post one place then spam that elsewhere to get as many eyes on it as possible. You dmed other developers with warnings. You encouraged people to report the kickstarter and patreon pages with a what can you do to stop this kinda vibe.