If you’re just tuning in for the first time – Breeding Season was cancelled a little while ago. It was a successful Farming/Sex game on Patreon. The entirety of the initial Breeding Season news post was published with the facts available at the time from HBomb, the founder of the project. Vladimir Sandler has since made his own side of the argument public, providing a rebuttal to the points presented.
Before you jump into this – the following is a bit of a long read. Even my summarizing of it drags on a bit. The shortest answer I can give you is that Vladimir Sandler’s rebuttal was that HBomb is allegedly a terrible manager, and that’s what led to the project’s downfall.
The start of Mr. Sandler’s involvement differed from the description given by HBomb, who expressed regret to having Sandler on board. The counterargument provided is that Breeding Season was allegedly “dead in the water” before Sandler showed up, with minimal updates and people asking for refunds. His strategy was to give consistent updates along with art improvements, in order to restore donor confidence.
In order to support his own claims (as well as lay to rest what HBomb first mentioned), Sandler posted his Breeding Season contract.
When it comes to Sandler’s time at the company, he admits fault in some of his decisions. Despite this, he asserts that HBomb’s majority control of income made him the lead person when it came to project responsibility. This outlines a major foundation of what Mr. Sandler sees as one of HBomb’s biggest flaws – failure to be a good manager. The argument would come up in Skype chats, one of which dates back to October 2015, and is presented by Mr. Sandler.
Sandler goes on to state that HBomb tended to disappear for excessive lengths of time, forcing the Breeding Season team to survive on their own. He links a series of 8chan posts, which appear to be HBomb lamenting on his own failures as a manager. Although this could have been posted by anyone and easily faked, due to the lack of a tripcode. Assuming the person who posted on 8chan is indeed HBomb, they go into detail saying that the public should blame him for the project’s shortcomings because he was the director. He didn’t come from a game development background, and he dealt with crippling ADHD. When Breeding Season‘s funding blew up, they had more pressure to do a good job at meeting everyone’s demands.
The leading animator on Breeding Season was Vanilly, who was mentioned in HBomb’s original post as having departed from the team. Mr. Sandler points to a Tumblr post by Vanilly, which details her exact position in regards to leaving the project herself.
There has been little to no direction in regards to running the art department. I’ve been responsible for scheduling work assignments, and maintaining a steady workflow despite not being the head of the art department. I’ve had to chase after coworkers to finish their jobs, often met with apathy and untimeliness. In addition, I was pushed into the responsibility of PR, a position I was not hired for, and ultimately led to me having to constantly lie and cover up the absence of work and content. This has made for an incredibly unprofessional environment, but unfortunately there are even more reasons it has been unprofessional. Lack of consistent work hours, people not showing up for meetings, lack of direction from programmers for what assets are needed, and a disregard for reaching milestones in development. Especially in the case of our lead developer who consistently promised milestones and would fail to deliver. That same lack of initiative has also led to financial issues, because of your reluctance to make me an employee rather than a contractor I was forced to file a 10-99 MISC despite the fact that I do not meet most of the requirements of a contracted worker, and in fact am more of an employee, without the benefits. ( https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/p15a.pdf ) Finally, because of all these issues to ensure content was produced on time I was constantly forced to work extremely long hours each week. On top of that, the number of hours I had to work was extended further by having to fix, redraw, recolor, and cut up animations. I simply had far too much work that I needed to accomplish each week. Ultimately I do not feel that these issues are correctable nor do I feel that my opinion has been given credence on the subject numerous times, and as such my resignation is final and irrevocable.
Sandler goes on to state he won’t drag Vanilly into this dispute any more than mentioning that response.
The theme with HBomb, according to Sandler, was that he would take credit for a lot of the work the Breeding Season staff did. Bug fixes were generally taken care of by their coder, someone named Fleet. The actual content updates, such as animations, were generally done in the public eye via livestream by the art department. Sandler goes on to explain that HBomb took frequent breaks and vacations, for up to half a month at a time. He’d then appear shortly towards the end of the month, compile everybody else’s work, and ship it out.
Sandler provides another skype log from HBomb, which contextualizes his disappearances over the course of almost an entire year (August 2015 – 25th of June 2016).
The final stretch of Sandler’s response to HBomb is going through everything on a point by point basis. He expresses concern at the “Call Out” to the game’s backers and to the public that HBomb put out, listing Sandler’s Tumblr and email address while making the implicit suggestion that people dox him.
I’m not going to dwell long on this point, except to state that whatever moral highground HBomb might have been able to claim is ceded by the fact he has gone out of his way to break our contract and attempt this underhanded method of attacking me.Instead of taking peaceful solution, complying with the agreement we signed at the very beginning and being professional about this (hiring new artists, animators and general staff members), public slander was HBomb’s solution, and while I was unsurprised that he did not take the sensible route, I am shocked at the degree he has decided to lash out against me when he had more than enough resources to rebuild and prove me wrong with his own work instead.In the end, it was HBomb’s unprofessionalism, absence and lack of productivity that drove away the team members, and ran this project to its current state. Despite my best efforts to salvage it with constant PR and multi-hour week long streams, I was unable to continue working on a project where where I felt the money was wrongfully being wasted.I want to say I never intended for it to play out this way. When the rest of the team decided it was time to bail on the project, that was when I decided to begin work on Cloud Meadow, and withdraw my contributions from Breeding Season when I did. I always knew that HBomb would take it badly, and if I had announced even earlier that I intended to leave, he would have done everything in his power to sabotage me, and I’d have had even less evidence of my intentions than I do now. The original plan was to announce the game, give him my resignation, and confirm that I wasn’t taking my payment for the months I used to set up Cloud Meadow, but HBomb somehow found out earlier, and went ballistic on me, leading up to the current state of events. In an ideal world, you guys would have heard about my releasing Cloud Meadow, my resignation from the Breeding Season team (likely at exactly the same time as the other members who intended to leave), and my reasons for both actions, all at the same time.
Sandler decided to leave Breeding Season because he thought the issues with it were unfixable. He made Cloud Meadow on the foundation that he believed he would be able to build the original vision of Breeding Season as a complete experience. Sandler says he was absent from meetings for the past month because he wanted to make Cloud Meadow happen. He admits he didn’t tell HBomb, but the other members of the project were made aware of Sandler’s plans. He didn’t sell his own assets back to HBomb because Sandler didn’t think HBomb would be straightforward about the project’s future, and wanted no part in helping that apparent ruse. Any allegedly stolen money was taken out of a joint account the two had made in order to purchase an actual studio for Breeding Season. Sandler says he was later paid back a lot of outstanding debts he was owed and tried to give back any excess money. The end of Sandler’s rebuttal has him admitting some partial guilt in what he calls “enabling” HBomb’s behavior for as long as he did.
Whether or not you side with either party, the truth of this situation is somewhere in the middle of both their testimonies.
