Turns out this game has some signs of it still being worked on. It was pointed out to me that in the Cube World discord there is a post confirming this. So, I can't really say it's abandoned just yet. Big error in the video which I hope this comment can clear up a little.
@@TeamPuzel " disagree with certain decisions." no, i disagree with getting tons of money, building up hype, vanishing, and removing the game for sale, then making a different and worse version, posting it on a platform many people use, and vanishing again, only to start building up hype the same way before but on a different messaging platform. humans have pattern recognition for a reason. i really hope im wrong and wallay does start making a good game, but ill keep my wallet closed and warn others to close theirs until that day.
@@20tigerpaw20 You aren't entitled to change the direction of the entire project just because you paid money for it. In a perfect world everything would be free, but in this one people need to eat, so charging money is the only way to make working on something worthwhile. That doesn't mean that the project now belongs to those who sponsored it, it still belongs to the creator whether you like it or not. You aren't a stakeholder in his company, you simply gave him a bit of cash so he can make his game, some people do that kind of thing for free. If you don't like what he's made, either mod it or go for something similar, doesn't mean you get to demand him to make changes. Just because he couldn't make his game without you doesn't mean he owes you anything, as if you demand changes its no longer his game and that's not why he asked for money, he needed money to create HIS game, and if he knew no one wanted what he had in mind he just wouldn't have made it, and you wouldn't even have this to be mad about. Money is worthless, it's something we made up even if we now can't live without it, it's literally a social construct, and it's not like he intentionally scammed anybody, releasing a game you dislike isn't a crime nor was it done intentionally. This capitalistic entitled mindset really grosses me out. So much ado about nothing.
@@genyakozlov1316 its one thing if that product is moved in that direction over time It's another thing if the project goes unfinished only to be repackaged and sold as something else even though it says it's the original.
@@genyakozlov1316 You're right we don't get to change the direction as fans. But we have the right to say the direction that came literally out of nowhere and was entirely different is a steaming pile of shit and the dev wasted his time for years on end after taking all of our money. We have the right to call out a scam when we see one. We have the right to critique the godawful gameplay. We have the right to show other games that are better. We have the right to tell the dev to fuck off again because he took our money and ran before releasing an entirely different game than we paid for. Your whole 'money is worthless' shtick is hilarious. Try living life without money because it's worthless. Get your faux-deep bullshit out of here.
I would love to see someone develop a game similar to Cube World with the same game core, I know that would only contribute to say that it would be a plagia of the game but we all want to see a finished product as we all expected it. I don't think we can really afford to flagellate Wolley because he's been through a very difficult time, and we can't blame him for that. I still hope there will be updates in the future in any case.
@@lydierayn I do still wish the best for Yndere Simulator. While I do think the developer has some issues. Particularly with his obsession with doing things himself, including emails that most devs just get a manager for, and bieng a bit of a perfectionist in his own right. It does seem he still cares about releasing a proper game and the 1980's mode which is techncially a full game dressed up as an optional mode that acts as a kind of prequal to the main game was a great move IMO to give followers something real to chew on even if he's stuck in a development hell partly of his own making. He definitely has an issue with taking criticism although part of that might be simply losing patience from the shere volume of criticism. Overall the only thing I feel I can really fault him on is not taking in more outside help to speed up development. As I'm sure with how much support the game has seen he could have put at least a temp volunteer team to help with certain hurdles. But it does seem he's still doing actual work on it. although it seems the "Lovesick" title was mostly forgotten as Yandere Simulator was just too ingranded at this point.
@@deadmeme5485 Well, normal game development takes a long ass time. Just because some studios can sell the same game every year and act like it's a new game each time doesn't mean that it's easy or quick.
This Game could have been GIANT. Minecraft-Levels of Giant, eventually. So the Wasted Potential is Awe-Strickingly Insane. Alpha and Beta Versions are entirely different Games and the Alpha is worlds better: Has such ever happened before?! Apparently, and i say that with all respect, Wollay has gone literally clinically-insane and his Wife did nothing to stop him from """apparently""" deleting the Progress we know (thx to Twitter) he IN FACT DID MADE. In what can only be described as an Act-of-Madness, he did actually improve on the Alpha and created the Game that everyone wanted, then started-all-over cause of """Perfectionism", ruined the Game like i havent seen before and then, in a stroke of Madness, deleted the previous version even from his own Computer. This only gets more maddening cause we actually dont know and have to assume he did remove it, as its never mentioned again. All this is insane. I have never seen a Content-Creator rip CORE-Mechanics out of his game... rip... rip... rip.
@someone I've been there, multiple times actually. In the midst of such a crisis, you're not aware of it at all. Even afterward it's kinda fuzzy. Without an exterior force, quite literally, you won't do anything about it. Since... You know, you simply cannot act on something you're unaware of. With time, you can learn to detect it but, and that's why I cannot blame his wife for it, it just doesn't do much until it pushes you to wreck everything around you. Then it's too late.
Dude just needed an actual team. Think about it; he clearly can’t handle the pressure and his best efforts combined with much needed breaks created impossible hype and unavoidable resentment. This isn’t no man’s sky, his fans clearly loved the game already
The thing is that he was also a perfectionist. he may have thought about it but also the "I don't need help I can do this all by myself". Yeah, the guy needed help
Yeah, I was also feeling like "Wow, relatable work schedule." I would have liked more info about people "losing money from the alpha" - was it an investment they were betting on or was it a pre-order? That would change everything imo. I remember when I was a teen and active on Etsy/Ebay with my own little shop, but pre-ADHD diagnosis, I had to stop. It was just too much, and I didn't know how much I depended on a school-like structure to keep me accountable. I would need to ship items out but I would just not be able to, putting it off for longer and longer. At the point that I was issuing refunds for packages that I had all ready to go from weeks ago, I had to quit. I don't remember having any kind of problem customers or unreasonable demands - I did the refunds even when I had already shipped because the guilt was so crushing. I guess my experience on UA-cam is more similar, where I had been doing it for fun for years and accidentally struck it big. Suddenly there was a lot of pressure and a lot of hate. Now I upload maybe once a year, once every two years? Testing the waters. But for a while I had to just stop going on UA-cam at all because I had been getting panic attacks in the break room at work lol. Too much success all at once, without being able to figure out how to keep everything sustainable and have healthy expectations/distance, are a great project killer. I admire the guy for coming back to this over and over despite how much the dev clearly has had a bad experience and could just leave it all behind so easily.
At the very least he needed someone to keep the community updated, and possibly persuade him to stop being so hard on himself and just release builds so people could play them and give feedback.
He really needed therapy as well to sort out his anxiety and mental well being. But it seemed that all he does is do things alone (aside from his wife).
just the fact that this game looks pretty good, that it run smooth like butter shows you that this guy is a pretty competent and passionate game dev. the fact that there were only two people behind it is pretty amazing. really hope the guy is ok and that this didnt discourage him for the future .
this guy is an idiot, he had the opportunity of a lifetime and blew it. stress be damned, whatahell are you doing when you don't catch that lighting in a bottle, that's literally the final goal of life isn't it! fuck this guy.
When "constant DDoS attacks" was immediately followed by "he just vanished for months" I knew exactly what this guy was feeling. Who wouldn't quit in that situation?
What kills me is there was probably an almost perfect version of cube world that only ever existed on wollay's computer before he decided to kill the game's progression. Imagine being able to play the dev version of the game directly before he made that choice.
yeah, unfortunately wollay seemed to play himself in this situation - he just kept making unnecessary changes and reworking systems that weren't broken to begin with, all while feeling anxious and questioning himself, instead of moving constantly forward toward a coherent, predetermined goal... my professional advice to anyone thinking of beginning a long term project is the following (from experience) : make a plan, spend weeks or months simply in the contemplative stage of your project, and create coherent, well tested, and well informed goals that you're happy with, and which are also realistic and within your skill set, and then don't fundamentally question those goals moving into the future of your project. be sure, from the start, of your end goal, and the general methodology which will allow you to reach that goal. that way, you always have a waypoint to move toward, and you have pre-established methods to get to your waypoints, and you won't spend years starting over, or making enormous changes to your project which force you to rework everything, or feeling lost. if you have new ideas, write them down and save them for future projects. everything in your head does not have to go into one project! your ideas are great, but they may not all work well together. every good idea needs its own space to shine. if wollay had just stuck with the core gameplay mechanics in his alpha version, and simply perfected and added to that fundamental gameplay system, instead of making unneeded changes and reworking systems that already worked perfectly, he would have ended up releasing, as the OP said, a nearly perfect game that would have no doubt become a cult classic amongst fans of this genre. also, know your limits! taking time off is necessary, but so is honestly and communication. just because you love your work, that doesn't mean that you don't need breaks to restore your sanity and get re-inspired, especially if you're dealing with negativity from within your circle of family/friends/coworkers or on the internet. but honesty with yourself is key - if you're not happy anymore, reassess and figure yourself out. it's also super important to establish a timeline on projects like these - and make the timeline realistic. in all honesty, how long do you think this project will take? are you going to need outside help to finish your project? create a schedule of tasks to keep you on track, and be honest about taking time for yourself when you need it, without abandoning your project and followers, or you may end up like wollay - spending nearly a decade on a project that should have taken less than half that time, disappearing, suffering from anxiety and releasing a final game that doesn't line up with expectations, or initial goals. before finishing your project, ask yourself: does this final product line up with initial goals and expectations? does this final product have the desired quality? is this the product that I intended to produce from the start? if the answer to these questions is 'no', take a moment to think before releasing. Also, keep a Design History File which contains documentation of all the changes you chose to make, and your reasoning, and the amount of time that it will take you to make this change, including the cost of making this change, if applicable. I find that first time developers of projects, for example, often make a change to their product's design in year one, then change it back to the initial design in year three, spending weeks to make both changes, all for nothing, without even realizing their mistake. keeping records of your thought processes over time is very helpful, and will allow you to re-align yourself with your goals. A great resource for developers, and project engineers, is the U.S. FDA's Design Control literature, and I'll provide the link below (there are multiple versions of this literature online). This is a set of documents for professionals created by the FDA which helps with meeting initial design criteria, following through correctly, managing expectations, and making positive changes to your product through standardized decision making processes that provide accountability for those changes. It's a great resource: www.fda.gov/inspections-compliance-enforcement-and-criminal-investigations/inspection-guides/design-controls see specifically the Design Control flow chart if you're interested. this literature was written for engineers, however, the concepts are very applicable to game development, and other similar projects as well. just advice from someone who develops products for a living 😊
This might be the first Cube World video I’ve seen that actually started off somewhat positive towards the original concept, and not just immediately accusing it of stealing from a certain other voxel game.
Looking into it, I don't think there were any DDoS attacks at all, but the devs not being prepared for the amount of people playing the game and overloading his servers. Too many requests on a small server can easily cause it to slow down to a halt or crash.
I feel bad for this guy, he’s clearly not greedy, lazy or stupid like many project leads featured in web-series like this. I just hope that the modding community surrounding the game is able to pique enough interest for him to still get some income for him and his wife’s hard work.
Same, even when the video was detailing his "disappearances" I sighed thinking the wizard was going to fault him for not giving a demanding social media crowd more attention. It's important to remember that with small developers, it isn't like a company on a deadline trying to appeal investors, these aren't people on regular salaries, the workload isn't nearly as divided up, and all that can wear a person down. Plus the "open world" genre makes everything else a small dev tries to do exponentially more difficult.
IMO he needed to hire a Project Manager to handle the business/release side of stuff. If I have completely open deadlines I don't get anything done, but if set a due date it'll get done on time 90% of the time.
hes 100% lazy, i dont really know about the whole "tramatized" stuff, but before that he was still extremely flakey when it came to social media updates.
@@ryanslack2666late to comment but come on yes he did. No matter what you think of the guy, if he had good intentions or bad intentions, he still took the money and cashed out for years. His reputation is the dev who promised too much and was unable to take any criticism constructive or otherwise while ghosting his player base on a whim. At best he’s someone who mentally couldn’t handle success. At worst he cashed out and came back when the well dried out to push out a game that still isn’t finished.
I bought the game back in 2013 and adored it. Wollay being a perfectionist was a blessing but ultimately a curse. The alpha that came out of nowhere was nearly perfect to me. It was fun, I even made a song for it since it didn't have bgm lol. I loved running around and exploring, battling and leveling up. All it needed were some feature updates making the leveling more fun, more biomes, and quests would have been cool too. The game had building systems so you could make your own weapons so naturally... what if wollay added a settlement feature? There were these promises, and while we ocassionally got updates on progress, we got nothing hands on. Wollay was such a perfectionist he never released an update until completely remaking the game. But it wasn't the game I bought; it wasn't the game I had fun playing. Wollay's mental illness stopped him from realizing he had something great, and all the fans just wanted more of what was already there. The worst thing about perfectionism and depression, is no matter if you create a masterpiece, you think it's ugly and have to tear it down to try again. I'm sorry for wollay, I hate that a vocal and cruel minority were able to tear him down. I'm sorry for all the other fans. I haven't gone back to the game yet... I knew that mods were being made but the disappointment was too much at launch. One day when people mod it to hopefully be how it should have been I will get back to it. Until then tho... I saved the alpha I downloaded 9 years ago. Last good version :/ Looking at the pinned comment... hopefully it is gonna be fixed and updated. I don't have much hope lol. Being a fan of this game from day one really got me jaded.
@@AeroLXI Piracy (oh and there are mods that make the new version playable, remove region lock, introduce level scaling, but ultimately I'm not sure if they bring back weapon upgrades and stuff)
He's not a perfectionist, he's a con artist lmao. He made tons of money off the alpha and he bailed with it. Likely set for life (had they not blown it on who knows what). Why work on the game? He came back when he needed more money with a sob story and some crappy changes he made to existing content.
Perfectionism is a tragic self fulfilling prophecy. You get so obsessed with what's wrong and what needs to be fixed that it becomes the only thing you can see. And once all you can see is that everything is broken it becomes too overwhelming to tackle it. I feel bad for Wollay as this whole experience is probably still fresh on his mind and still eating away at him.
This whole thing is sad because it's a self feeding cycle. Developer feels that people won't like the game, he stops communicating to perfect the game, people find the changes jarring and don't like them, and the cycle repeats.
I get this guy was a small time developer but even indie developers gotta look up basic game design. He would have found out pretty quickly region locked loot was a big no no in game design, it doesnt incentivise exploration I just dont get how he dudnt see that, poor chap
@@braydonattoe2078 Was about to write the same thing. Unless you lock yourself away and haven't played a game in your life. A lot of decisions should be pretty clear. To say he attempted to "perfect" the game is honestly to me quite laughable. It's very clear the game is far from perfect, and even the developer would have been able to realize this. (Maybe i'd be more understanding if all this happened in a much shorter time frame but over years you can make a significant amount of progression). As the video said he was suffering from anxiety and depression. I hear that so often as an excuse it's honestly lost most of its meaning. However maybe that simply was the case here. It makes the most sense. The state of the game does not reflect the works of a perfectionist. It however does reflect someone struggling to the point they just release the game to get it off their chest.
Whats sad to me is that if he had released these updates in smaller chunks, he would have gotten the feedback he needed to realize that this isn't what the players wanted. His mental health issues are unfortunately what really ruined the project, as hard as that might be to say.
@@StevesTutorials this was a single dude who dreamt of being a game dev working on a passion project, we're not talking about a professional dev team working on a triple a game here. He wanted everything to do with his passion project to be perfect and positive, so the development took longer and negativity(such as yours rn) affected him heavily causing him to cut himself off.
@@jonathanpilcher337 Ok....so why did he not take the money that people spent for the beta and GET A DEV TEAM. Literally the entire point of getting early support for a product. It's basically kickstarter except he got to keep all the money instead of using a platform that takes a percentage. You support a product with the assumption that money is going to put into making the product. At the end of the day defending developers who essentially take the money people give them for development and then do not spend it on development are essentially just taking the money and leaving. May not be the original intent but it is, what it is. You can't learn a lesson if people are only positive even when you do wrong. Negativity teaches you that you made a mistake. You have your right to be positive about his actions the same way I have the right to be negative about his actions.
Criticism is very difficult to accept when you're working on a project dear to you. I believe Wol_lay when he said the reason he disappears is because of the anxiety these negative interactions caused him. I think he would've been better off if he had someone act as an intermediary, like a social media manager, and been more open about everything he was doing with the game. BUT at the same time, I think it's easy for me looking in on him to be critical and "logical" when it's not me who this all is affecting, and it so easy to plan for things that have already happened. I don't think Wol_lay did anything wrong, I think things just fell apart because he was gaining a lot of attention very fast for something he probably didn't think anyone but he and his wife would care about.
Yeah thats a very fair point, people only see it logically and dont really care about the situation or context, thinking that because they paid for something they now own him & his game i can imagine how seeing all the negativeness would affect someone, after all, we naturally perceive negativeness 3x worse than positiveness, i remember reading something about buffs & nerfs in games, and a 10% buff for most players will just be 'okay nothing much' but a 10% nerf would cause uproars, the positiveness is nice but lasts way less and affects humans way less deeply than the negativity, now imagine how many horrible comments he got because not making the game as people wanted, a game *they* choose to support before it was done
@@numnuts241 i hope i did get a your point right but i guess that ddos attack has become an entry point of negativity for the dev while people were waiting for update there were some good moments so he kept on and when game came out (after all of this guys trials and tribulations (in his mind i guess)) game got so many negative over positive like while he put those images on twitter everyone were exited but when those images became real everyone got angry for some reason, he was already not in so well mood because he was a "solo" dev and he was a begginer (don't forget about ddos on day 1) but all those negatives that he got over those years, i guess they just ruined him and his passion for his work, i hope you understood me and i understood you, well have a nice day
I think it's valid to be upset at criticism, but Wol_lay, as an artist, needed to have a different mentality about it. I'm an artist as well and I LOVE feedback. Feedback is great, it makes your art better. People who cushion themselves with only positive feedback don't grow or learn valuable lessons.
That's totally fair but if you can't handle the anxiety then don't put yourself in the position in the first place. It could have stayed as a personal thing and didn't have to go online. It's mean to say for sure but that is the nature of the internet and everyone who's used it knows this.
@@SonicMaster519 It also doesn't help that one of the most popular overhauls for Starbound is made by a rather toxic lad, so it took years and killing the modding scene for people to realize, "wait, there's probably a better way."
Being an artist who's kind of a perfectionist myself I think I know what happened here. He probably got burnt out. And sometimes you'll rework a whole project just to fix something earlier in the project. What I've learned about perfectionism is sometimes you've just gotta realize you're not going to make it any better. With my work I'd get to a point where I want it to be better but idk how and end up making it worse.
@@theKashConnoisseurit's one of those curses that come with a good work ethic, but it becomes even more exaggerated in creative pursuits. You want to always deliver on your dream, and always show up with exactly what you envisioned. Thing is, things rarely turn out that way. Even in a 9-5, you can't realistically give your 100% every single day. When you apply that same ideal to creative endeavors, it becomes quite obvious where the issues arise.
@@theKashConnoisseur It's hard tho, I make VRChat combat maps and won't settle until I make the quest release run at 60+ fps idle and I will work on it until it does, even rework my gun system n shit. It's impossible for me to even release one at 50 frames because the way that particles work in that game
This is a bit advanced seeing that nobody has (or at least for me) tried doing this before not even the biggest of devs considering it looks great although understandable why.
I can almost guarantee that the community response permanently scared Wollay off of this game. If he was anxious about the initial situation, such a gigantic deluge of negative feedback would have just ruined it for him. It reminds me a little of what Sean Murray went through with No Man's Sky on release, though obviously their responses couldn't be more different.
This is what I despise about the gaming community. People are acting like they wrote well mannered, thoughtful, constructive reviews, but I know damn well 99% of it was unconstructive bitching and moaning. People act like they own him and his game because they put money into early access, but it was THEIR decision to do so, Kickstarter and early access projects go awol or defunct all the time, it's part of the deal. Too much entitlement, not enough empathy. A lot of us need to sit back and approach things from a different perspective, but apparently getting people to stop being cunts for 12 seconds is too much to ask.
Virgin Wol_lay: Disappears and abandons game after a disappointing release angers the fanbase. Chad Murray: Botched one of the most hyped launches of the decade, went through death threats and bomb threats. Diverted all the negative feedback and hate to his personal email, takes all the criticism to heart, and works tirelessly to fix the game.
@@spinyslasher6586 Exactly: one person was an adult about it, and the other used it as an excuse to take as much time as he wanted since he was flush with money. Respect for NMS for digging itself back up, none to wol who nearly took a decade to do nothing. Hypixel is taking a page from his book, but at least I don't see them releasing garbage when Hytale comes around.
@@DxBlack I honestly wouldn't use the comparison as a slight against Wollay though. What Sean did must have taken incredible mental fortitude, especially since it was on an even bigger scale. Both of them strike me as the kind of guys that are (or, were, in Sean's case) wholly unused to being the spotlight and suffer from anxiety stemming from it. If Wollay is any bit the perfectionist he says he is, the situation must have been a nightmare for him. And without a team of people depending on his leadership, there was nothing to keep him going once his personal drive for the project was gone. The key difference between Cube World and NMS here is that Cube World was developed by _a husband and wife, alone._ They had every right to walk away after the game's full release, even if it were a disappointment to the fans; there's no company that needs to be kept afloat and add additional responsibility.
As of today, Wollay has announced “Cube World Omega,” which is supposed to be a return to the Alpha style while improving on the good features of the release. I’m skeptical after all these years of nothing and then the release being meh but I’m still hopeful.
I hope he receives some positive encouragement and that this new project works out well. Cube World could still be successful if it gets the right treatment.
@@augustday9483 He has gotten a load of positive support, at the beginning way back when he released the original Cube World Alpha he was praised for how amazing the game was, but then he started to make promises he couldn't keep, and made changes to things that just didn't need to be changed, and once the negative shit started flowing in, he dipped. You just can't do that shit because not only does it give him and his studio a bad reputation, but it will give any future projects he works on a bad wrap and people won't trust it. You can't blame people for being pissed off at his lack of "give a fuck" for the fans of his game.
@@haxonprime1243I'd say folks were a bit more then pissed off. They were kind of awful. I don't blame the guy for dipping. Gamers are the worst when they feel entitled to something.
I enjoyed Cube World alpha more than anything, and to be honest, I felt a little let down with the release because of the progression system changes. That's really what deterred me from playing Cube World until the first couple community mods started coming out. I feel like if there was a system that allowed you to have old progression vs. new progression, I would imagine a lot of the negativity and backlash from the community could've been avoided. Though, if I ignore the progression and new leveling up system, it's a damn solid game and I can see myself playing for months without getting bored. Though, I can't help but feel bad for Wol_lay. I consider perfectionism to be that of a plague, and I experience it myself way more than I care to admit. What started as a passion project, gained a large following, which probably overwhelmed Wol_lay and put pressure to keep updated with people who're interested in the game around the world. At the same time, if the DDoS attacks were enough to break a piece of the heart on the inside, I cannot imagine what all the negativity is causing to him now.
Oh its you i actually never thought you would comment on a video like this. Btw keep up the amazing content man its great! Also i subbed and notifs on :D
I know I've had the say dream to make a game but I know I lack the skill to make as well as I know I don't have the creativity to make it what it could be. I respect Wol_lay for his dedication. It only suchs that this amazing has been abandoned when it had a lot of potential. If not for the region thing if clearing a region or the like gave you a boost to your overall power then maybe people wouldn't be so harsh.
@@jaye4157 I truly believe the game isn't abandoned, it's just being worked on in the background out of the public's eye. I believe there is a Discord server that has a channel named "Signs of Wollay" that has any signs of him being active. Still, it's more of a question of when the next update will ever come out.
This is why small indie game devs don't choose to show small prototypes or ideas to a huge audience until they are almost done. It just becomes massive pressure and having a huge fanbase watching your every move and anticipating your game to come out any second (which, as opposed to what AAA game studios will tell you) takes a huge amount of time, effort and passion to make.
See how Silksong from Team Cherry is handling it, they have not shown pretty much anything anymore and we are just waiting for release, the problem with Cube world and it's dev is that he is pretty much a two man army, neither him or his wife will give constructive critisism to the game for masses, everyone has different opinions on games and that is why you at least need a group of playtesters and actually take feedback which I really doubt the developer does
Yes, and no. That's overall true, but at the same time that's not what happened here. The problem with CubeWorld wasn't people had unreasonable expectations. The problem was that Woolie is a perfectionist who also doesn't have thick enough skin to handle interaction with the general publc Thus, he had nobody to reign him in when he got caught up in the hype and started developing outside the reasonable scope of his capabilities. People weren't expecting something that was going to take the gaming world by storm. Just more of the same of what they had already been given (and sold). Instead, somewhere along the six years between reveal and release, he forked into a new development path and had nobody to tell him "No, that's not what people actually like this game for." Thus, the end product was barely relatable to the game that everyone had bought into and fallen in love with. If the game hadn't been released into Alpha, it would have released after 6 years of development, gotten mixed reviews and fizzled out without really being noticed, assuming that the end result remained the same compared to what we got. The lowered expectations would not have helped the end product because the release version's flaws are foundational elements incorporated into the re-focus that he did while he had cut himself off from the general public with no input. If anything, Cube World is indicative of the importance of communication with your customerbase. If you're going to put a product out into Early Access, you don't really get to renege on it.
I remember NerdCubed playing this so many years ago and thinking, "Once this game is fully released, I am totally gonna buy it!" As someone who just couldn't get into Minecraft, this actually seemed like a really fun alternative.
From my point of view; I can understand the concept, the execution is just bad. I think what Wollay was trying to do was to basically make each individual region its own large dungeon. You would acquire the gear you needed in each region that was temporary, and then at the end when you collected the artifact you'd get a more permanent character upgrade. The idea was probably to encourage thorough exploration of each area of CW instead of just reaching a point where you glide over everything and reach a certain level where you can just steamroll every challenge. It's very unique compared to how a lot of open world RPGs operate. Like I said, it could work, the execution was just bungled pretty bad. Having the only permanent upgrade to your character be movement speeds (in very, *very* minor percentage increments) is super lame and basically destroys any feeling of progression. Having your gear lose ALL of its value upon entering a new region feels way too aggressive as well. I understand Wollay's conundrum, but even with that as a factor I really think he needs to communicate with his community more, because the current PR model he's chosen has done nothing but create a lot of angst and worry. and keeping people clinging to threads of hope through sparse correspondence really isn't helping anyone. Even just a "hey, I'm still working on the game, it will take a while, thank you for sticking around" would be enough for lots of people.
I think NerdyBunny hit it on the head, yeah. That alongside his development process being... as insular as it can get, alongside the endless anxieties of "oh I have to make a _product_ now" He wouldn't have had any feedback over what would inevitably be tunnel-visioned game design, _and_ at some point he probably just had to stop himself from rewriting the entire game and just... force himself to launch what he had, flaws be damned. For his own sake.
@@co7769 it's not easy consider most people are having a break down from this. It's a mom put in her best effort to make the most delicious food for her child, and her child throw the food on the ground and tell her how trash she is, how she shud put in more effort, how the food is horrible etc etc. And she need to continously keep up with it. If the game are small and not very popular, u dont get this level of negativity. But once it popular reach a certain point,u will get many many toxic people. A solution for this is to have a team with leader who are learned to cope with this, a leader with strong mental stability, or move in to a corperation. Ignoring it WILL NOT BE A SOLUTION Beside, how can u create something for people to play, and actually not reading comment from user about it. I think that wud be the first thing that ppl do, and u dont know if a comment is negative until u read it. Even most content creator need someone to moderate their comment section, to reduce negativitt
That's what happens when you take people's money and then faff about for years making nonsensical excuses along the way. The moment he saw the money was coming in and that he couldn't do it all he should have realized he needed to hire some help for the site, and if that wasn't what he wanted then he shouldn't have taken people's money to begin with.
I've seen a lot of videos covering Cube World and the story surrounding it, but yours is the first that kind of digs into the mindset behind the creator. I think it's fair to say this game didn't 'fail' because of the game, as is the case in so many similar stories. This was absolutely a case of a guy trying to share something of himself and spiraling into darkness because of the expectations and pressure from the monolithic internet opinion. Very sad and I really feel for the guy, it's not an easy way to be remembered.
Except he didn’t make himself look innocent either. He never had effective communication with the fanbase which not only resulted in several bad choices for the final game (Like Stripping your stuff from you whenever you enter a new area) but also made people think he took the money and ran.
I feel this guy. As an introvert with my own small passion project I can understand his anxiety: facing any reaction to your work at all(or even worse - lack of it) is terrifying, and even if 99% of reviews are positive, that negative 1% will devastate you.
That is more of a sign that there is a lot of room for growth as a person. If you're bothered by 1% then you don't understand how the world works. No matter what you ever do, you will never please everyone. Never. You cannot change that, nobody else can change that and that is just something you have to live with. You can make the most perfect thing ever, absolutely revered by 99.9%... but you'll still find 0.1% to despise your work, mostly for selfish reasons. Everyone needs to be able to take criticism, and part of that is being able to tell what criticism is valid and what is not. You shouldn't be taking somebody seriously that complains that the car you sold to him does't drive faster than a plane.
@@spugelo359This is absolutely true. Something that helps for me is mentally acknowledging the fact that- Most likely, the majority of that "1%" aren't doing it out of some dramatic Disney villain malevolence. That being said, I also understand why and how simple things like criticism can make people just go... Haywire. It's not rational. And someone can *know* it's not rational. Yet still easily be influenced by it. I don't think what's happening with the developers is fair to the people who paid for it. But on some level, I have some sympathy. I just wish for them to grow from this and do better in the future. But who knows.
It feels weird seeing this game again. I was one of the people that tried the Cube World Alpha back in 2013. I even found the original PayPal receipts for it all the way back from 2013-07-11. Time sure flies.... I remember playing this with my friend. It was very fun to just run around and kill stuff. I liked the upgrade system where you got small elemental voxel pieces as boss drops that you then used to upgrade your gear. And it was not just that you needed 30 wind pieces to upgrade the weapon the get some attack speed upgrades. You inspected your gear and you placed the voxels wherever you wanted on the gear. So your weapon slowly turned bigger and bigger. And the different elements had different colors and upgrade effects so you could make some beautiful weapons :P Sad to see that he dropped the ball a bit. He really should have formed a proper studio and hired more developer and artists. This could have turned into the next Minecraft and not just another perpetual early access Steam game :(
It could've been the little brother of Minecraft. Mojang offered free help with him joining them. But he'd still keep full ownership. He has chances for free help with people that loved the game too.
As many people might have said already: What I immediately took note of was that a lot of core features had been removed, like with region locking etc. It was like he worked backwards instead of elaborating on what he already had. I don't think what he added to the full release was bad ideas, but I'm just surprised that he took away features that weren't issues with the design to begin with and replaced them entirely. That being said: All love to Wallay.
It's weird because if you follow his progress posts, it's clear that he *had* elaborated on what he had and made great changes that the fanbase really wanted. Then there was a certain point where it was as if he threw all of that out and started from scratch.
@@_S_P_A_C_E_M_A_N_ exactly. Like, if this was the first release then people would probably have been ok with it. But "alpha was better" became the standard response, since Alpha release set the expectation and "formed the mold" so to speak.
yea, i never played the game but all the videos i saw of people playing the alpha i can say that if he had just expanded the alpha and built upon it, he would have won. but he seemed to have dumped it at one point during one of his manic episodes and went pre alpha and redeveloped it into a region locking ?>???>>? mess. who thinks "yea everytime you move ot a new area you lose everything" is a good idea.
The region lock & pointless progression system really killed it. I don't know if this ever gets another update, but if it does I hope he goes back to the roots of what this game was & what made it great and rather expands on that. I don't even know how he could think that this was a good idea to do. Nobody cares about a bit of additional boat speed. Especially if your boat is gone in the next region and your gear only valid for the one you found it in. You couldn't even go backwards and be stronger. No. Your gear would be crap again and so would you be crap again. But at least you might sail 2% faster if you find the boat again, not that you'll have a lot of reason to use it, because whoop, it's gone! Ugh…
"all love to the scammer taking peoples money for years before destroying the project in the official release so people would call it a flop and forget so he can add it to his resume and people would stop asking for their money back" lol no
I used to really like this game when it first came out, and then me and a friend decided to play it again after we saw it got a "full release". The way that all the best features got removed is beyond me. Never saw a game get this much worse before or since. My favourite feature the game had at one point was actually the weapon customization, where you could add a voxel to the weapon model which upgraded stats, and also enabled some really great fashion for your swords. Elaborate hilts or spikes, everything possible, super creative system
Sometimes, I catch myself wishing some people just redo this game based on the alpha build, and develop it further from there. I just wonder how copyright laws would handle that.
@@marcar9marcar972 Where's your proof of this, man? The guy posts like once a year. He's not exactly an autocratic dictator, he's a guy who made a mediocre game and then vanished.
@@infinitemausoleum721 Cube World Alpha wasn't mediocre, far from it. What's a real shame nowadays, is the fact he released it almost a decade ago, if he didn't flake so much, by the time it could've been a wild success story and maybe, maybe, inspire so many others.
@@marcar9marcar972 You make him sound crazy or something. He was dealing with a lot of shit so give him a break lol. I don't like how he handled his game but it doesn't make him a wackjob.
I still wish he would release the game's Alpha as beta branch from within the settings of the game on steam. So people can access and play both versions. That way people who bought the Alpha can still access it to play, and those new to it, have a legit way to access and play it. Plus, two games for the price of one is a win.
@@gollumbeutlin5646 he can ask a fan for the alpha build, until someone puts a virus in it. he would have to ask many fans and cross check each one to find the one true version, with no viruses
@@rainyafternoons7003 you can literally just use a virus scanner on some old laptop to test that, i dont think if he picks the project back up ANY sane person in his community would want to ruin it
I think he might have anxiety or his perfectionism makes him not trust others to do what he wants. I say that because I relate. It’s bad, like it’s a character flaw, I think he needs a therapist. He seems like he deals with problems like stress and guilt.
@@user-sf9gs2pg1b He should have made a smaller game, this feels like you'll need a team and dedicated servers. He did well for a Two man team but he's not Notch, and I'm pretty sure even Notch had a team.
@@juicy342yt4 Difference being, Stardew was lovingly worked on for years with dedication and a sure vision. It was also a complete package at launch. Cube world lacks such... dedication, let's say.
This is the problem with waiting to update. You change a game a ton all at once and it’s definitely gonna cause problems. You implement changes in small batches, and take criticism little bits at a time. Then you can actually craft something amazing
the thing is hes probably taken alot of criticism through out the years but you have to realize self doubting yourself can cause a problem to your art or craft
There is a similar game to Cube World called Veloren. It is free and open source, currently under development and it has singleplayer and multiplayer. I would recommend it. It has great music as well.
I just looked it up and it looks amazing! I’m definitely going to have to give it a try after the grind I’m currently on. While we’re giving out recommendations, Necesse is pretty amazing too, $10 on steam, it’s a mix on Terraria, Rimworld, and Stardew Valley all rolled into one.
@@Jarvalicious thank u for the recommendation bro :) also if anyone that sees this wanna play veloren hmu cause the higher tier dungeons are a pain if ur alone 😅
@@hazydodo8253 I have a high "level" character and i helped many new players but I stopped playing for some months. They have changed the map so it's always randomly generated whenever people leave the server and I'm basically lost in a forest without finding anyone :^)
@@ryanclemons1 well, I like many genres but i usually like like games like this one: exploring, magic, castles and stuff. I used to enjoy Nosgoth a lot (different genre, similar to left 4 dead, team deathmatch vampires vs humans) medieval stuff... but they closed it because nobody was playing online. Maybe this channel will upload a video about it. The funny thing is that it was made by the developers of Rocket League so they probably had money but didn't find it profitable.
I remember having so much fun playing this game with friends back in alpha. so sad to see it come to this. poor developer as well, he truly had a good game on his hands
I often hear about games that were "better in beta" (or any previous versions) but GOD DAMN, as someone that played the original alphas, I can attest that the alpha was indeed so much better, even in its heavily unfinished state that it really boggles the mind to see how much they've fucked up on this one, and how long it took them to fuck it up. It's a shame really, the alpha game was very, VERY solid, fun enough to play dozen of hours, it could have become the next minecraft (and I'm not even hyperbolic here) had they just released it in EA on steam and just kept rolling content updates bit by bit. Sadly they waited way too long, and delivered a new version that had just bad design all around, not just compared to the alpha, but just objectively.
I really wanted to love this game, but to touch on my steam review of it - it's all random and absolutely unbalanced. It is random what mobility options you get each zone - which yes, may mean you won't get the glider or ability to ride the ENTIRE zone if you don't happen to get the quest for it - it's random what loot you get, it's random whether the enemy you have to tackle is even beatable. Try fighting a witch type boss as a caster. You literally can't. The beam attack will hit you even if you dode out of it, the remaining damage will always be enough to take you out. Bosses have the same runspeed as you, making kiting impossible, since after the first couple shots you take, they will remain RIGHT behind you indefinitely unless there is terrain to cheese. Even then, casters are so vulnerable that one or two (often rapid, back-to-back) hits will KO you and you have to restart a 10 minute fight. Crafting is utterly pointless, I played for a couple hours, gathering everything in sight, and still was far short of crafting even one item - that is assuming you can even FIND the craft book for your level. The concept was fun, but it was very poorly put together, balance was nonexistant, and boss fights were utterly annoying, until you hit a boss you literally couldn't kill. There just.. was no strategy. You can't kite, you can't tank, some of them you cannot dodge to avoid attacks. And you often only get to take one hit, if even that, or you fail and have to retry the fight from scratch. You can't even get enough distance to take a shot via rolling away from bosses since that doesn't get you far enough to turn, hit and run before taking a hit and potentially being KOd.
The game is awful. Wholly and truly. It sucks. This just makes it more sad not only that you have to pay 20 bucks for it but also that Wollay is clearly a person who let his negative mental health get the better of him.
I love Cube World, and while I never got the chance to buy it back when it was released, I find the alpha version incredibly fun, and I just started playing it again. While it was probably disappointing for fans who paid for the game and waited for the updates, I feel like the experince the alpha provided was well-worth that 14 or 15 Euros it costed. I just stumbled accross this video and your youtube channel, and I gotta say, I like what I'm seeing here 👀
Yeah, I bought it back when it was alpha and considered to have got my money's worth out of it. Buying early development games is always risky, so consider what the game is like right then, because that may be all you'll ever get. Any future development is uncertain.
@@Sonnet. Perfectionism and pressure. He feared players would be disappointed at release. Impatient fans break you, like when he got DDoSed. They make you scared of really committing the game, or stepping further into it.
Thanks for the video. Sadly a lot of passion games go this way. Starts off great then goes down hill because just one person is deciding it and often changes their mind as they go through producing it. With the internet making things worse and worse for them emotionally.
This feels like a Jurassic Park: Trespasser scenario. Although DreamWorks wasn't DDosed, they promised alot almost too much to magazines, fans, and other sources. What we were told was a 3D open world environment where we could explore and interact with everything. But when you throw all your cards on the table, 2 things happen 1. People start to have higher expectations for what they'll be getting, and 2. People begining to have some their doubts. With things rushed out the door due to limitations, lack of resources, lack of communication which resulted in more promises not being kept, an entire level being removed because the puzzles were just unplayable, and time becoming less and less, in 1998 people got a broken, half finished game. Trespasser could have been one of the best Jurassic Park games ever released, but what we got was a shell of what we were promised. This person promised alot, and kept the gig up for almost 7 years, but when the veil was revealed, we got a completely different game than what was introduced. Cube world is just another example of why you should never lay down your cards at the start, because people will expect all you promised, or call your bluff as quickly as you showed it off. Maybe triple AAA games like Bethesda and EA/Dice will understand this one day, but as long as they keep getting money...the future looks as bleak.
i mean it a little bit like No man's sky the reason why people where mad was all the promised stuff not in the game and the fact that it costed the price of an AAA game it was not that bad but was way overprice and really empty but at less No man sky got an Happy ending
@@aoki6332 agreed, nms is now a fantastic game, but it took a MASSIVE amount of effort, and frankly that entire dev team has earned massive respect from their fanbase, myself included, for proving that they would stick it out to finish what they started
He needed a team to support him, not just in development but in emotional support. He needed people to take over the social media when his anxiety got to him, to talk him out of second guessing himself and delaying from fear, being a backboard for idea development to prevent badly executed mechanics, and to take on criticism about bad mechanics and work on fixing them instead of freaking out and running.
sometimes the community are better devs than the devs themselves. look at guitar hero, activision let it die and Ubisoft bought freestylegames leaving the community with no more games in the series after GHL. Thus came clone hero
I really like this series, very good video! Also its highly appreciated that your putting in a lot of your time and effort into your videos. The game actually looked kinda good, sad it didnt go well. Bye!
Veloren is a real gem I found recently, that has me excited for a new Cube World experience. Just from the two people developer team behind Cube World I did not have a lot of hope, but Veloren has a active community and bigger development team behind it and has regular updates.
It's open-source too and the devs and community are very passionate and communicative about it. The game is already quite good and playable despite being in pre-alpha.
Oh! I remember this game! I watched let's plays of this game back in 2013 and I loved it. But suddenly, this game dissapeared from my eyes. And every time, I see a cube RPG game (for example, Trove), it reminds me of Cube World.
Honestly as an outsider to this situation who only heard about cube world maybe in 2016 and hasn't kept up with it or heard about it since, this just sounds like one man's personal tragedy. A passion project turned into a burden and a target on your back. What he went through sounds like a nightmare scenario. For a lot of creative types I know, that would be their personal hell.
If Wolfram has truly serious chronic depression or recurring episodes, no one can blame him who doesn't know first-hand what that means. I wish him cope both with his depressions, and with the game. *_Addendum:_* Since the opinion that is repeatedly expressed in the following comments is that one should pull oneself together with depression and with a little self-discipline would be able to lead a normal life and this statement is also made by supposedly depressed people themselves, I would like the following excerpt add from the Germans to describe a *_real_* major depression: The serious, often momentous illness cannot be influenced by *_willpower_* or *_self-discipline_* on the part of the person concerned and, due to its disproportionate duration and severity, can be distinguished from mourning and from dysphoria, i.e. a temporarily depressed mood. Depression is a major cause of disability or early retirement...
@Zog Zog We don't know the severity of his depression. With severe psychiatric depression, you may not even be able to process a packet of instant noodles or tie your own shoelaces. We're talking about The Depression here, not being depressed in the sense of having a low mood. The second is vastly overdiagnosed as true depression, which it is not. If you've never experienced major depression yourself, you have absolutely no picture of it. It's easier to imagine standing on the moon than it is to comprehend a true depression. Even doctors specializing in this direction are not able to do this. This is not a mood, it is misprocessing in the brain due to a disorder and nobody is able to leave this state behind by their own will. You could also try to stop breathing or say to a wheelchair user, get up you lazy bastard, we'll walk around the block, it'll be fine. Invisible illnesses can be far worse than visible ones and have a tremendous impact on you and your loved ones. It is precisely this attitude, full of prejudice and suspicion, that makes it all the more difficult for those affected and then actually ends in suicide, unnecessarily due to the pressure. And not to mention that you're busy all day trying to figure out the right way to commit this suicide.
I paid for the game 2 times and of course I'm upset about it. I don't know if he's really depressed. But if that statement is true, then you can't blame him. Put it this way, would you be just as adamant if he had a brain tumor and was so severely neurologically damaged after surgery that he couldn't continue working on the game and want your money back even though he couldn't even take care of it? If he's not depressed (although from the unfinished released game it at least seems like there's something wrong, because he behaved differently before) then he's an asshole. But you cannot blame someone with a depressive episode or an ongoing condition for his behavior. You could also ask someone with dementia to do your bookkeeping. When I read such comments, I would like to wish you this disease. You always make the mistake of thinking it doesn't happen to you and that you can deal with it. This is as wrong as death is certain.
@Zog Zog _a schizo having an episode comes and kills your friend, you could be like "he wasn't himself, it's not entirely his fault"_ And that is exactly the case law in my country. There is no conviction under the Criminal Code for an offense in this state.
@@JohnZombi88 Sorry, but if you're severely depressed, you won't go to work anywhere. You don't even get up and you can't do anything about it. If you had been depressed for years, you would also be an absolute exception. This condition is extremely rare. I would seriously question the diagnosis.
@Zog Zog I have no empathy for the guy. I don't even know if he's really sick. I only deal with severely depressed people, sometimes with significant delusions, i.e. psychotic ones. They cannot face everyday life alone. They are subject to compulsions and behavioral disorders. I would also like to add that SCHITZOPHRENIA as such does not exist. A wide variety of psychoses are summarized under this and, depending on the degree of severity, the person concerned is no longer of sound mind and cannot be held responsible for his or her actions.
For everyone who loved the original Cube World Alpha, i'd highly recommend Veloren. It's basically a CW clone in active development. And iirc (unless i completely forgot that i bought it), it's completely free.
I downloaded this despite the mixed reviews at the 2019 release... I must have started a new game on five different occasions, and never could figure out how to progress at all. Everything was too hard to fight, and when I actually managed to kill something it seemed to provide no benefits (no XP or drops). Hearing your explanation of how they messed with progression makes it make a lot more sense now, but I can definitely testify to how unintuitive it is... I wanted to love this game but it just wouldn't let me even understand it.
too much hype on a mediocre developer, well at least he still have a small community that are always protecting him, with white knights being passive aggressive when someone ask questions or give some criticism, so thats something i guess ?
I honestly feel sorry for the guy. He worked like two years on his big project, put so much love into it, then he releases a alpha and even though its received really well, the ddossing just destroys his confidence. He feels the need to redo basically everything and after 6 years of nothing, he finally releases the game, just to get bashed by poor reviews. I can't really blame him for going silent again. Releasing a project that consumed like 8 years of your life, just for people to say how disappointed they are.
You know, if you do something that almost everybody wouldn't like and don't even try to ask your community if it's ok, you clearly do something wrong and should be blamed. It's just lame...
@@QuantumConundrum Was this guy a expert? Releasing an Alpha and then disappearing for 6 years? Anyone with common sense would do a better job. If he has mental health issues, get a therapist.
@@vahahadziev What does that have to do with the guy spending almost a decade developing the game only for people like you to immediately criticize him?
Man, if the developer got traumatized from the DDoS attack I can't imagine how F'ed up he his now. He's probably deleted the internet and moved to a deserted island.
Was it confirmed if the DDoS was even maliciously intended? Or was it just he didnt have enough capacity to hold all the fans up? DDoS is the LEAST of someones' worries on the internet nowadays.
@@zariarogers2846 from what I can tell, the developer said it was a targeted, hateful attack. My first thought was that the fans crashed the website, but Im not sure.
@@zariarogers2846 No, there was never any proof it was a DDoS. I'm still convinced to this day that he just didn't realise how much traffic he was going to get and somehow convinced himself it was a coordinated attack.
@@MooseCastle we don't have his traffic logs to say what was happening, it's definitely not impossible it was a DDOS, people can be arseholes especially when it comes to highly hyped games, or just ones with a problematic relationship between the community and the devs ie Phil Fish and the 4 year fight between him and the expectant and then outright abusive community.
Don't matter what initially set it off. When he came back, he was met with such hatred. Everytime he tried to come back he was met with spite. Even when he opened up about his anxieties with it he got it all thrown back at him from his perspective. Obviously no way of actually knowing, but the internet probably killed this man.
Feels weird to say but i appreciate this series hasn't done just bad dev cases. There are games that failed from due to lack of funding, passion being too strong and more It's oddly refreshing to hear not all flops were without good intentions all along. Still hoping Wallay is doing okay. This is such such adorable game. Shame to see it left like it was
This happens a lot with passionate game devs. At some point, they stop feeling passionate about it and money isn't enough of a motivator. The more donations they accept, the more pressure is put onto them. It's also why many games are developed in silence, and there's little to no communication. Players are greedy, and the indie developer is always the target.
I used to watch this game on yt all the time and I enjoyed it so much. I wish Wollay kept close to the alpha version, which is much better than the new version in my opinion. Could of been a great game. Nice vid btw! You explained things well 😄
Another thing that personally disappointed me was that the steam version didn't have multiplayer anymore I really miss the good old alpha days of the sheer chaos that was king of the hill on a server with 20 people
Back in 2013, alpha was pretty fun. Played with a couple of friends for about a month and this simple game managed to keep us entertained. Taming mounts, traveling to find rare resources, even an object editor that allows you to change in-game furniture. Sometimes I think about this project, but didn't return to it for a long time. Now it became clear the fans indignation after the Steam release.
Yeah, I remember comming hone from school and just exploring as my skelebro, and then my brother deleted the savefile lol, Cant remember if it was intentional or not, i just remember it happening. So of course i buy the Steam version day 1, and played for about a day and havent touched it since then, i was so hyped told my friend he should get it too, luckily he didn't. Shame
Damn this is heartbreaking. The guy made a very appealing game, anticipated by a lot of people, and because of one gameplay decision, destroyed everything he worked for years and he had to face his biggest fear : public dissatisfaction. This is... Just sad.
All I can say to him is "Welcome to the world of consumerism", and if people don't like your product, their going to be blunt and honest. If you can't take the heat, get out the kitchen, simple enough. He honestly should have branched out and talked to other game devs to find out what baggage came with being a developer. Also his depression is just an excuse, he comes back when the bank is drying up, then leaves once its full. Rinse and repeat. Mark my words he will be back in a few years with some garbage DLC no one asked for to snipe some more money before again vanishing back into said bush again like Homer Simpson.
@@haxonprime1243 The guy is not Phil Fish to deserve that kind of threatment. It's that kind of mentality why people are afraid to show off their passion projects. Being cynical doesn't help anyone, it encourages complacency and repetition rather than inovation. Don't be that guy.
@@kankeydong2500 You are obviously not a long time follower of this game. He keeps making false promises. Disappears for years at a time once his bank account is stocked up and only comes back when they need more money. He deserves every ounce of hate and criticism he is getting and I don't care what the 1% have to say about it. It's not a good sign when more then 70% of the Cube World community are witch hunting the guy. Says a lot about him...
I don’t think Wollay expected the game to get so big. I want to make a game, just to be a small dev, might sell said game for money but with a warning to not expect much. I have a lot of anxiety and can’t take criticism, I criticize myself enough as it is, so I’m not expecting it to be like a job, just a fun side project to maybe make some cash on the side. I think he probably underestimated how people would be or how much expectation impacts his development. I would’ve just not sold it at Alpha, and him pulling it from the store tells me he probably wishes he did not.
If you take criticism so poorly then you really just shouldn't be a creator. That's not something to be proud of, you should work to accept criticism before you take on artistic endeavors or you're just gonna suffer
I remember buying and playing the alpha just a little after it came out. It was a good and engaging game, but playing it I always felt a little aimless as the game didn't give me anything to work towards. Then when the updates stopped coming I was really disappointed, but given what I learned about Wollay in this video, I feel nothing but sincere sympathy for the man, as I know first hand what shitty mental health can do to your desire to create. I hope he someday will find joy in working on it again, or at least get some closure on it and find another passion project.
To me, this feels like what happens when you don't take care of yourself enough and let your work control you. Wolly spent a lot of time reworking this game because he felt like it had to be perfect. Not to mention the DDoS attack. DDos attacks can be a really scary thing, especially if you are small business, or even just one person. But it sounded to me like he didn't ask for help when it came to his issues. I feel like one of the first things he should have done after that is get professional help. Therapy is a tool that everyone can benefit from in some shape or form. You can't help others if you can't help yourself.
Yeah this, it's very sad that Wollay ended up too depressed and anxious to develop properly, and it shows, but I see a lot of people blaming the community for his mental state, and that also doesn't sit right with me. If anything, this is a tale about how asking for help is essential when making a product, since developing something in your own insular vaccuum will always end up with you making strange decisions that seem good to you, but not to others. When his following got too big to handle, or when he started getting put down by feedback, he should've ask for help and hired a community manager. When his website got DDOSed, he should've asked for help and hired a site manager. When his mental state started to decline, he should've asked for help and gone to a therapist. All that said, it's easy for us to say looking in after the fact. There may have been many things that deterred him from doing so, but still, the lesson is ASK FOR HELP!
Not just therapy. He should've hired another person to handle things like the website & server. He made a lot of money from the initial sales but outright refused to hire anyone else (something that didn't got mentioned here).
It's a bit easy to say Wollay should've just asked for help, mentally and development-wise. For a lot of people, it can be really really hard to ask for help. How do you even ask for help? Who do you even ask for help? From the outside it's easy to say, "Uh, a therapist and another developer, duh." When you're already in a crushing depression spiral, simple questions with simple answers transform into terrifying monsters ready to crush you even further.
This is pretty standard for a "one man band" project, ie, they only do what they think is right and only do what is interesting to them. I play with other people's DIY EFI projects, and they are all OMB projects, ie, they decide everything. You can even look at MacOS, there is only one developer with no competition, ie, no incentive to make it better, and it's only Apple that decides what you get, eg, Apple block nvidia drivers in MacOS so you can't add a better graphics card to their slow $50K workstations. Basically you get what you get, unlike a group project where people with different skills steer your project to more profitability.
I played the first release with some friends and it was so much fun to run around and try to find the hardest boss. When the updates fell off we all thought it was over. We wish it was. He could have released the last updated version and said something like 'I got really depressed the last 8 years heres what you wanted' and people would love it. The mods would be super fun. No one wanted region locking.
There is a mod you can get for this game that removes the resetting of your character between regions. I used it, I can say that that one aspect of the game was it's biggest failing point. Once that was removed, the game became much more enjoyable. The alpha was still better, but not THAT much better. Here it is if you want to try it: ua-cam.com/video/5-30AJhvIrc/v-deo.html
Good documentary on a game that I helped donate in the Alpha version. I still love playing it but the official release is just embarrassingly bad compared to the Alpha. There are some features in the Official release that are better but the big downside is the zone lock gear. That was a huge mistake. Other than that, the official release would have been very good.
Well, i dont know if you'll even care to do so, but someone made a mod to remove region lock, so i'd say give that a test & see if you enjoy the game more then
As someone who has very intense anxiety issues that have - and still do - prevented me from following through with projects of my own, when I saw the dude vanishing from Twitter so many times with no explanation, my instant guess was anxiety. I sometimes vanish from social media for weeks at a time with no notice too. I’ve been wanting to create a youtube channel of myself for so long now, not as a career but as a passion project to showcase my playthrough of the games I love - especially simulator-style games, but my crippling anxiety issues have always steered me away from it. I really feel for this dude because I know exactly what it is like to tell yourself you’re gonna get to doing something “later” just to notice it’s been months since you last talked to that one person or did that one thing you had to do, and then you just convince yourself that it’s not even worth it anymore. If it’s with people, they’ll all be mad at you and will never forgive you, because you feel like such a shitty person for not giving them the attention they deserved, and think they will feel the same way about you. If it’s about projects, you keep telling yourself it’s never too late, with that last dim light inside of you slowly dying and all hope going away every time you don’t accomplish something you wish you had. It sucks. It’s the worst thing in the world. I hope he managed to get over it and I hope I’ll get over it someday.
I remember that TotalBiscuit(god rest his soul) had to stop engaging with the comments section of his youtube videos, passing off the running of his account to someone else precisely because he would focus in on the negative comments and ignore the overwhelming amount of positive comments. It eventually started to have a negative effect on his mental health and I think for his case having a more hands off approach was the correct call at that time. In saying that however you should totally start that youtube channel my man, I know there's man people that enjoy that kind of content. You could try to find your own steps to limit your exposure to negativity but regardless I wish you luck and hope that you someday find the resolve to follow through on your own project.
I’m the same way. It has only gotten worse, but I’m taking Zoloft (it helped me before, so I hope it’ll help me again) and quit adderall. I hope you pursue making videos, maybe just don’t allow comments, or allow comments but get rid of ones with negative keywords. You could also have someone close to you look through the comments and get rid of rude ones. The thing is, it’s hard to not want to reply to the rude comments, isn’t it? To prove them wrong? But they won’t ever stop coming, and you could spend an infinite amount of time dwelling on it, instead of living. I always dwell on things I can’t change or the past, I get it.
I vividly remember Cube World back when I was still in high school. I followed development closely and looked forward to buying the game when it would eventually come out. Never did buy into the alpha since I was still extremely cautious with online purchases at the time. Told all of my friends about it, we were excited. The silence that followed hit pretty hard. Cube World is another example to me about why clear and consistent communication between community and developers is extremely important, especially indie developers. Radio silence is almost always a red flag that something is going horribly wrong. Even got to see the other side when I briefly became a tester for an indie horror game, which ended exactly as I expected it would. Even got thrown out of the project when I dared to try and clear things up afterwards. Thankfully the developer seems to have cleared up his act since then, but it will forever stick with me as a reminder of why communication is so important.
10:45 Hey look its me! As an alpha player I really enjoyed the procedurally generated world of Cube World and fell in love with its combat. I would play it along with some friends of mine. I was one of the people who got the beta test. I tried my best to not judge to harshly to the changes but I just didn't really see a point to the new leveling system. All it did was increase a few stats like swimming and not by much. And the reign locking thing. When he first tweeted about harder difficulty areas I thought it was gonna work like my items are even more affective in that region but less affective in the region over there. But how it worked was my items are only affective in this region. There are items with a + on them that our multi region but they only work for neboring regions around their origin. And there was the fact that the skill tree was gone witch made progression all about the weapons & armor you collect. But the game was overall a lot more fleshed out and fun especially with the questing system but it wasn't as long lasting as the original due to the region lock.
I remember getting hooked on this game because of the weapon customisation. I just wanted to go out there and find components to make the most busted sword.
As a person who only just came to know the existence of Cube World. I must say, waow this game looks really good; the design, the animation and the action all looks so polished, I can see why he is a perfectionist. I hope the dude is ok and get some well needed help... but damn what a shame because this game looks and feel so good, if only he can pick himself up together with the supports of his loved ones and find the confidence to re-engage with the community transparently... I must say, this game has so much potential!
My friend and I played Cube World when it came out way way before it hit steam. They were doing updates slowly but all of a sudden the game died and then released on steam and then died again. The Alpha version of it was really fun and the modded version of it was even better. The steam version was sadly a let down. But even with that being the case, I had fun over the years with it for the low price of it all those years ago. I never wanted or requested a refund for it. It absolutely sucks that his passion project went down the way it did. I just hope the guy is doing better these days.
I remember following some youtuber who played a lot of this game, and was avid about making content every time it got updates. As the releases became more sparse, his content of it was too, and my attention in regards to Cube World have always been a sort of "Oh yeah, that was a cool thing I saw in my teens!" Even to this day, watching footage of the game, I feel like the game has a lot of really good parts to it, it's an open ended RPG with smooth combat and a worthwhile skill system. What baffles me is both the decision to change the skill system in such a way, and then restrict item progression to regions? The first could be to either pad out game time since some skills allowed for much faster progression, etc. And perhaps an argument could be made for it considering it had multiplayer, which makes one want some semblance of balance (I guess). The item-Region lock thing though... Why make an open world if that's the kinda progression you want? That's counter intuitive. A part of me wonders(fears) what Wol_sey will end up doing, but I'm very glad the game exists, an that it exists in a fashion from which fans can mod it and address the quirks of an otherwise very good game.
I feel the pain, I'm also a profectionist and been working on my game for 6 years, also reworked a lot I wasn't happy with. I wanted to shoot for a release 2 years ago but rework after new feature after changes and still to this day being tweaked lol. It is very hard being a single developer wearing many shirts, programming, music and sound, play testing and debugging, it's a huge drag for sure. But I'm not giving up so easily.
Dude I seriously wish you the best of luck with your game! Yes perfectionism can be a pain, but I hope you can find a way to make it work for you and not against you! I know I'm a stranger, but I'm gonna root for you because heck yeah! You are doing something most people would never get to that first step, I hope it doesn't discourage you too hard on the days its less rewarding! Good luck!
As game modder, I know this feeling. Constantly reworking stuff, being unsure if other people will like it, seeking for imperfections, ideas oftenly popping up in your head, sharing with ideas in public and fear that you might actually not implement them and it's such a mess. Developing in team much easier since you don't need to hold that weight on your shoulders alone. Good luck to you pal.
I've tried my hand at game design too, and this is exactly how I am (except for this guy's obvious talent): release paralysis, constantly rethinking, failure to communicate (both ways). In my case I was lucky to never get others involved past trying it out once or twice: I never got into a position where I risked letting a lot of people down. A lot of this can be managed, e.g. by other ways of paying for content, making releases less dramatic; finding someone to manage the project, etc. I have given up, but I think not everyone whose brain works like this needs to do that.
This did happen to notch though, the popularity of minecraft is what got him to quit because he could not do his own projects anymore without a massive following around anything which comes with expectations that prop themselves up. He wanted to make a space game where people programmed their own ships instead of directly flying it but in the end that never happened, just an example.
You should also mention Veloren. It's a spiritual successor to Cube World and developed as an open source game. Anybody who likes the idea of Cube World should check it out.
I remember playing the Alpha with a group of friends and playing a giant quest for months, fighting massive bosses that could take 30 mins to an hour to defeat. The game is fully released, we all buy the game day 1, log into our server, realise the game is completely trashed for no reason and none of us touched it since.
This one really was not a case of expectations vs reality. Once the alpha was released the fan base had a tangible albeit unfinished game that was good and they liked it. The update that ended up on steam hindered many of the fun features and flat out removed some others the fan base was out spoken about loving. Less expectations vs reality, more what the players wanted vs what the dev thought would work.
Passion and perfection can end in destruction , for both the creation and the creator alike... I'm a blacksmith who restarting from scratch ones again do to such things... I've hit both the wall of trying to perfect to the point of destroying the item with all the reheats and changes till all my work would crumble in my hands....sometimes literally... I've also hit the lows of trying to fix that problem but over shooting and just making mindless garbage in a vain hope of making money to pay for the actual project I want some where in a fake future I sold myself... These both are a horrible way to work, and even worse with major depression problems, to work so hard and it fail can leave one stuck in bed exhausted at life it's self. While "creating" garbage just to try and "fix" where you think your going wrong , can leave you feeling like a soulless zombie feed off others just to shable by in life... I kinda feel though this is what happened here. I couldn't even imagine feeling like this and having so many other people watching and waiting on you... I hope at some point he finds his balance and can use his clear potential he has. And I hope I have learned that middle ground to for my own work... Being a "artist" (I hate how that makes me sound) can be painful and feel trapped in your own mind and life.
Wow this is a blast from the past. I remember seeing this and even people on steam in some community pages talking about it if I remember correctly. I thought it was cancelled years ago.
What really makes me angry about this game, is how an indie dev's biggest problem is finding a community. It doesn't matter how good or bad your game is, if you can't build a community around the game or you, it will flop. Now, Wollay had such a big community, that even after 3 years of no upates, you could still find people talking about the game in its reddit. To have a passionate community like this is any indie dev's dream. I get the pressure and negativity would affect him, of course, but disappearing seems like such a terrible decision in all ways to think about it :/
Definitely wasn't the best decision for him, but also arguably hard to judge him for it, considering how it essentially was *the* passion project that he put countless hours and years into, only to see the majority wind up disappointed and call it god awful. Like I dunno about you, but with the amount of work put in, it's easy to assume that would be a very soul crushing thing to deal with. Either way, this really did turn out to be a sad tragedy.
@@norrecvizharan1177 I'm not talking about after the game actually released, in that case yea, I don't really judge him. I meant like... there were many mistakes way earlier. if he stuck to that passionate (alpha) community, listened to them, wondered what they thought was so great, maybe, just maybe, the game would've gone in a direction that most people would enjoy. It only ended up as a disappointment to everyone because the game was created in a vaccuum, where, I assume, the negativty was floating around his head constantly, causing him to redesign things that most normal players would enjoy. To be honest, I still don't judge him since it must've been scary to suddenly have so many eyes on you, but still, so so sad to see the game end up this way :c
@@minoxs Maybe it was just a passion project and the guy didn't really want the attention? Like I get it, a lot of people struggle to break into the already highly competitive market, but you can't blame him for something he probably didn't even want in the first place.
@@loren5432 That's why I don't blame him. It's just really sad to see this happen, Cube World could've fostered an even bigger community, which would've been lovely.
A key part of being a developer game or not is understanding that releasing often and not being afraid of failure is freeing but also super hard to get your head into. Concept is simple if you release regularly then bugs don't last long as you release a fix pretty soon after its found. Regular beta versions set the mindset of "there will be bugs and that is ok" in the community (as long as you fix these bugs as they are reported **STARES AT STAR CITIZEN and its known issue list longer than changelogs**)
just a couple days ago wollay posted a link for a new blog with screenshots for cube world omega which he wants to develop following the spirit of the alpha version. good luck!
Oh damn, the memories. I remember when that new CubeWorld got released. I was super annoyed those region locked items were introduced. Someone very quickly released a table for Cheat Engine that had a "cheat" to disable restrictions on items.
I've never played this game, but your comments on perfectionist attitudes leading to more time, leading to more expectations, leading to more pressure, leading to more time? Spot on. I struggle with that a lot, but at a certain point you just gotta release something. Good luck to the dev, I hope the game comes along!
Turns out this game has some signs of it still being worked on. It was pointed out to me that in the Cube World discord there is a post confirming this. So, I can't really say it's abandoned just yet. Big error in the video which I hope this comment can clear up a little.
@@TeamPuzel " disagree with certain decisions."
no, i disagree with getting tons of money, building up hype, vanishing, and removing the game for sale, then making a different and worse version, posting it on a platform many people use, and vanishing again, only to start building up hype the same way before but on a different messaging platform.
humans have pattern recognition for a reason. i really hope im wrong and wallay does start making a good game, but ill keep my wallet closed and warn others to close theirs until that day.
@@20tigerpaw20 You aren't entitled to change the direction of the entire project just because you paid money for it. In a perfect world everything would be free, but in this one people need to eat, so charging money is the only way to make working on something worthwhile. That doesn't mean that the project now belongs to those who sponsored it, it still belongs to the creator whether you like it or not. You aren't a stakeholder in his company, you simply gave him a bit of cash so he can make his game, some people do that kind of thing for free. If you don't like what he's made, either mod it or go for something similar, doesn't mean you get to demand him to make changes. Just because he couldn't make his game without you doesn't mean he owes you anything, as if you demand changes its no longer his game and that's not why he asked for money, he needed money to create HIS game, and if he knew no one wanted what he had in mind he just wouldn't have made it, and you wouldn't even have this to be mad about.
Money is worthless, it's something we made up even if we now can't live without it, it's literally a social construct, and it's not like he intentionally scammed anybody, releasing a game you dislike isn't a crime nor was it done intentionally. This capitalistic entitled mindset really grosses me out. So much ado about nothing.
@@genyakozlov1316 its one thing if that product is moved in that direction over time
It's another thing if the project goes unfinished only to be repackaged and sold as something else even though it says it's the original.
@@genyakozlov1316 You're right we don't get to change the direction as fans. But we have the right to say the direction that came literally out of nowhere and was entirely different is a steaming pile of shit and the dev wasted his time for years on end after taking all of our money.
We have the right to call out a scam when we see one. We have the right to critique the godawful gameplay. We have the right to show other games that are better. We have the right to tell the dev to fuck off again because he took our money and ran before releasing an entirely different game than we paid for.
Your whole 'money is worthless' shtick is hilarious. Try living life without money because it's worthless. Get your faux-deep bullshit out of here.
I would love to see someone develop a game similar to Cube World with the same game core, I know that would only contribute to say that it would be a plagia of the game but we all want to see a finished product as we all expected it. I don't think we can really afford to flagellate Wolley because he's been through a very difficult time, and we can't blame him for that. I still hope there will be updates in the future in any case.
Passion projects that get abandoned aren't uncommon. This was just one of the rare cases where the project became popular enough to get a following.
same boat as Lovesick and Loveletter
@@lydierayn I do still wish the best for Yndere Simulator.
While I do think the developer has some issues. Particularly with his obsession with doing things himself, including emails that most devs just get a manager for, and bieng a bit of a perfectionist in his own right.
It does seem he still cares about releasing a proper game and the 1980's mode which is techncially a full game dressed up as an optional mode that acts as a kind of prequal to the main game was a great move IMO to give followers something real to chew on even if he's stuck in a development hell partly of his own making.
He definitely has an issue with taking criticism although part of that might be simply losing patience from the shere volume of criticism.
Overall the only thing I feel I can really fault him on is not taking in more outside help to speed up development. As I'm sure with how much support the game has seen he could have put at least a temp volunteer team to help with certain hurdles. But it does seem he's still doing actual work on it.
although it seems the "Lovesick" title was mostly forgotten as Yandere Simulator was just too ingranded at this point.
@@metazoxan2 *cough* like 7 years or less (still years tho ) in development and still a demo *cough*
@@deadmeme5485 Well, normal game development takes a long ass time.
Just because some studios can sell the same game every year and act like it's a new game each time doesn't mean that it's easy or quick.
@@VelociraptorsOfSkyrim 1 year or 2 years to add ONE rival
When it comes to video games, I can't think of anything that hurts my soul as much as this.
This Game could have been GIANT.
Minecraft-Levels of Giant, eventually.
So the Wasted Potential is Awe-Strickingly Insane.
Alpha and Beta Versions are entirely different Games and the Alpha is worlds better: Has such ever happened before?!
Apparently, and i say that with all respect, Wollay has gone literally clinically-insane and his
Wife did nothing to stop him from """apparently""" deleting the Progress we know (thx to Twitter) he IN FACT DID MADE.
In what can only be described as an Act-of-Madness, he did actually improve on the Alpha
and created the Game that everyone wanted, then started-all-over cause of """Perfectionism",
ruined the Game like i havent seen before and then, in a stroke of Madness, deleted the previous
version even from his own Computer. This only gets more maddening cause we actually dont know and
have to assume he did remove it, as its never mentioned again.
All this is insane. I have never seen a Content-Creator rip CORE-Mechanics out of his game... rip... rip... rip.
@@nenmaster5218 there's definitely something wrong with him that's for sure.
@someone What an infantile Look on Mental Issues.
Wow.
@someone Wow.
@someone I've been there, multiple times actually. In the midst of such a crisis, you're not aware of it at all. Even afterward it's kinda fuzzy. Without an exterior force, quite literally, you won't do anything about it. Since... You know, you simply cannot act on something you're unaware of. With time, you can learn to detect it but, and that's why I cannot blame his wife for it, it just doesn't do much until it pushes you to wreck everything around you. Then it's too late.
Dude just needed an actual team. Think about it; he clearly can’t handle the pressure and his best efforts combined with much needed breaks created impossible hype and unavoidable resentment. This isn’t no man’s sky, his fans clearly loved the game already
maybe, but he was new to all this buisness stuff, and he would need a pretty good ammount of money to sustain a team
The thing is that he was also a perfectionist. he may have thought about it but also the "I don't need help I can do this all by myself". Yeah, the guy needed help
Yeah, I was also feeling like "Wow, relatable work schedule." I would have liked more info about people "losing money from the alpha" - was it an investment they were betting on or was it a pre-order? That would change everything imo.
I remember when I was a teen and active on Etsy/Ebay with my own little shop, but pre-ADHD diagnosis, I had to stop. It was just too much, and I didn't know how much I depended on a school-like structure to keep me accountable. I would need to ship items out but I would just not be able to, putting it off for longer and longer. At the point that I was issuing refunds for packages that I had all ready to go from weeks ago, I had to quit. I don't remember having any kind of problem customers or unreasonable demands - I did the refunds even when I had already shipped because the guilt was so crushing.
I guess my experience on UA-cam is more similar, where I had been doing it for fun for years and accidentally struck it big. Suddenly there was a lot of pressure and a lot of hate. Now I upload maybe once a year, once every two years? Testing the waters. But for a while I had to just stop going on UA-cam at all because I had been getting panic attacks in the break room at work lol.
Too much success all at once, without being able to figure out how to keep everything sustainable and have healthy expectations/distance, are a great project killer. I admire the guy for coming back to this over and over despite how much the dev clearly has had a bad experience and could just leave it all behind so easily.
At the very least he needed someone to keep the community updated, and possibly persuade him to stop being so hard on himself and just release builds so people could play them and give feedback.
He really needed therapy as well to sort out his anxiety and mental well being. But it seemed that all he does is do things alone (aside from his wife).
just the fact that this game looks pretty good, that it run smooth like butter shows you that this guy is a pretty competent and passionate game dev. the fact that there were only two people behind it is pretty amazing. really hope the guy is ok and that this didnt discourage him for the future .
yep. I bought in alpha and the games really good. Depression is a b*tch.
Its all pre set up textures, graphics, terrain construction so its not really a lot of work... trove is made the same way... just moneygrabber
this guy is an idiot, he had the opportunity of a lifetime and blew it. stress be damned, whatahell are you doing when you don't catch that lighting in a bottle, that's literally the final goal of life isn't it! fuck this guy.
@@sonicartzldesignerclan5763 You clearly dont know anything, it is quite a lot of skill and effort to achieve this.
@@MiniTrkker it's you who are so desperate to defend this that will ignore the obvious. Wollay is a hack, always has been.
When "constant DDoS attacks" was immediately followed by "he just vanished for months"
I knew exactly what this guy was feeling.
Who wouldn't quit in that situation?
most teams wouldn’t, but he was one man coding it sadly
@@mark-jf5ik I meant specifically from the perspective of someone who spent all this time and energy on their own project
What the heck are DDoS attacks? The magic wizard man kept mentioning them but he never bothered to explain.
@@co7769 From what I can tell they’re like bots overloading a website to make it crash
@@co7769 people send bot traffic to a server to over run it and crash it, which can result in losing or damaging whatever is at risk
What kills me is there was probably an almost perfect version of cube world that only ever existed on wollay's computer before he decided to kill the game's progression. Imagine being able to play the dev version of the game directly before he made that choice.
yeah, unfortunately wollay seemed to play himself in this situation - he just kept making unnecessary changes and reworking systems that weren't broken to begin with, all while feeling anxious and questioning himself, instead of moving constantly forward toward a coherent, predetermined goal... my professional advice to anyone thinking of beginning a long term project is the following (from experience) :
make a plan, spend weeks or months simply in the contemplative stage of your project, and create coherent, well tested, and well informed goals that you're happy with, and which are also realistic and within your skill set, and then don't fundamentally question those goals moving into the future of your project. be sure, from the start, of your end goal, and the general methodology which will allow you to reach that goal. that way, you always have a waypoint to move toward, and you have pre-established methods to get to your waypoints, and you won't spend years starting over, or making enormous changes to your project which force you to rework everything, or feeling lost. if you have new ideas, write them down and save them for future projects. everything in your head does not have to go into one project! your ideas are great, but they may not all work well together. every good idea needs its own space to shine. if wollay had just stuck with the core gameplay mechanics in his alpha version, and simply perfected and added to that fundamental gameplay system, instead of making unneeded changes and reworking systems that already worked perfectly, he would have ended up releasing, as the OP said, a nearly perfect game that would have no doubt become a cult classic amongst fans of this genre. also, know your limits! taking time off is necessary, but so is honestly and communication. just because you love your work, that doesn't mean that you don't need breaks to restore your sanity and get re-inspired, especially if you're dealing with negativity from within your circle of family/friends/coworkers or on the internet. but honesty with yourself is key - if you're not happy anymore, reassess and figure yourself out. it's also super important to establish a timeline on projects like these - and make the timeline realistic. in all honesty, how long do you think this project will take? are you going to need outside help to finish your project? create a schedule of tasks to keep you on track, and be honest about taking time for yourself when you need it, without abandoning your project and followers, or you may end up like wollay - spending nearly a decade on a project that should have taken less than half that time, disappearing, suffering from anxiety and releasing a final game that doesn't line up with expectations, or initial goals. before finishing your project, ask yourself: does this final product line up with initial goals and expectations? does this final product have the desired quality? is this the product that I intended to produce from the start? if the answer to these questions is 'no', take a moment to think before releasing. Also, keep a Design History File which contains documentation of all the changes you chose to make, and your reasoning, and the amount of time that it will take you to make this change, including the cost of making this change, if applicable. I find that first time developers of projects, for example, often make a change to their product's design in year one, then change it back to the initial design in year three, spending weeks to make both changes, all for nothing, without even realizing their mistake. keeping records of your thought processes over time is very helpful, and will allow you to re-align yourself with your goals.
A great resource for developers, and project engineers, is the U.S. FDA's Design Control literature, and I'll provide the link below (there are multiple versions of this literature online). This is a set of documents for professionals created by the FDA which helps with meeting initial design criteria, following through correctly, managing expectations, and making positive changes to your product through standardized decision making processes that provide accountability for those changes. It's a great resource: www.fda.gov/inspections-compliance-enforcement-and-criminal-investigations/inspection-guides/design-controls
see specifically the Design Control flow chart if you're interested. this literature was written for engineers, however, the concepts are very applicable to game development, and other similar projects as well.
just advice from someone who develops products for a living 😊
@@scarlett8782 I feel like you’re a very hardworking person, but also very chill and relaxed when needed lol.
@@scarlett8782 im not reading all of that
@@darussian705 Right, lol. Has this person never heard of line breaks or paragraphs? Just a massive wall of text.
There was prob a version that had building and tornadoes with environmental destruction like we saw in a clip but never came to release ;_;
This might be the first Cube World video I’ve seen that actually started off somewhat positive towards the original concept, and not just immediately accusing it of stealing from a certain other voxel game.
Remember kids! If it's open world and has cubes, it's minecraft!
@@captaincozmo8529 Lol, So Roblox in 2006 was Minecraft (maybe not open world but cubes tho)
@@fan0 They're talking about trove
@@fan0 roblox was before Minecraft and was more like lego
littlebigplanet
The DDos attacks are absolutely incomprehensible. I can actually not think of any motive for them.
Yes. Seems more like someone wanted to be an asshole and managed to achieve that.
There are just straight up evil people out there
Looking into it, I don't think there were any DDoS attacks at all, but the devs not being prepared for the amount of people playing the game and overloading his servers. Too many requests on a small server can easily cause it to slow down to a halt or crash.
if i had to guess - probably some diehard minecraft fans were annoyed that there is a 'minecraft killer' out there
Why do trolls do anything? They're out to ruin something someone else loves just to get a greedy satisfaction out of it, it's just cruel.
I feel bad for this guy, he’s clearly not greedy, lazy or stupid like many project leads featured in web-series like this. I just hope that the modding community surrounding the game is able to pique enough interest for him to still get some income for him and his wife’s hard work.
Same, even when the video was detailing his "disappearances" I sighed thinking the wizard was going to fault him for not giving a demanding social media crowd more attention. It's important to remember that with small developers, it isn't like a company on a deadline trying to appeal investors, these aren't people on regular salaries, the workload isn't nearly as divided up, and all that can wear a person down. Plus the "open world" genre makes everything else a small dev tries to do exponentially more difficult.
IMO he needed to hire a Project Manager to handle the business/release side of stuff. If I have completely open deadlines I don't get anything done, but if set a due date it'll get done on time 90% of the time.
hes 100% lazy, i dont really know about the whole "tramatized" stuff, but before that he was still extremely flakey when it came to social media updates.
I dont feel bad for him, he release it on steam out of nowhere just for a quick buck and abandoned it again after a month LoL
I hope everyone will pirate the game. No point buying it if you need mods to make the game fun
Don't have much interest in the game, but I hope Wollay is ok. He's obviously very talented and intelligent and even wrote the game engine himself
tobad he destroyed his rep just as fast as he got it
@@Demonsouls1993 how
@@Demonsouls1993 ? What
@@Demonsouls1993 No he didnt
@@ryanslack2666late to comment but come on yes he did. No matter what you think of the guy, if he had good intentions or bad intentions, he still took the money and cashed out for years. His reputation is the dev who promised too much and was unable to take any criticism constructive or otherwise while ghosting his player base on a whim. At best he’s someone who mentally couldn’t handle success. At worst he cashed out and came back when the well dried out to push out a game that still isn’t finished.
Imagine if Wollay just had a really bad internet connection and all his tweets that he made in 2019 were just being processed all the way from 2015
He actually uses internet explorer
i mean that sounds like german internet to me lol
LMAO
Lol
thats the most hilarious take on this 💀
I bought the game back in 2013 and adored it. Wollay being a perfectionist was a blessing but ultimately a curse. The alpha that came out of nowhere was nearly perfect to me. It was fun, I even made a song for it since it didn't have bgm lol. I loved running around and exploring, battling and leveling up. All it needed were some feature updates making the leveling more fun, more biomes, and quests would have been cool too. The game had building systems so you could make your own weapons so naturally... what if wollay added a settlement feature?
There were these promises, and while we ocassionally got updates on progress, we got nothing hands on. Wollay was such a perfectionist he never released an update until completely remaking the game. But it wasn't the game I bought; it wasn't the game I had fun playing.
Wollay's mental illness stopped him from realizing he had something great, and all the fans just wanted more of what was already there. The worst thing about perfectionism and depression, is no matter if you create a masterpiece, you think it's ugly and have to tear it down to try again.
I'm sorry for wollay, I hate that a vocal and cruel minority were able to tear him down. I'm sorry for all the other fans. I haven't gone back to the game yet... I knew that mods were being made but the disappointment was too much at launch. One day when people mod it to hopefully be how it should have been I will get back to it. Until then tho... I saved the alpha I downloaded 9 years ago. Last good version :/
Looking at the pinned comment... hopefully it is gonna be fixed and updated. I don't have much hope lol. Being a fan of this game from day one really got me jaded.
Is there any good way to get the good Alpha version? I don't have access to it anymore, I miss this game a lot T~T
@@AeroLXI Did a quick search and it looks like someone archived it on the internet archive. I'd give that a shot if you accidentally lost yours.
@@AeroLXI Piracy (oh and there are mods that make the new version playable, remove region lock, introduce level scaling, but ultimately I'm not sure if they bring back weapon upgrades and stuff)
He's not a perfectionist, he's a con artist lmao. He made tons of money off the alpha and he bailed with it. Likely set for life (had they not blown it on who knows what). Why work on the game? He came back when he needed more money with a sob story and some crappy changes he made to existing content.
Perfectionism is a tragic self fulfilling prophecy. You get so obsessed with what's wrong and what needs to be fixed that it becomes the only thing you can see. And once all you can see is that everything is broken it becomes too overwhelming to tackle it.
I feel bad for Wollay as this whole experience is probably still fresh on his mind and still eating away at him.
This whole thing is sad because it's a self feeding cycle. Developer feels that people won't like the game, he stops communicating to perfect the game, people find the changes jarring and don't like them, and the cycle repeats.
I get this guy was a small time developer but even indie developers gotta look up basic game design. He would have found out pretty quickly region locked loot was a big no no in game design, it doesnt incentivise exploration I just dont get how he dudnt see that, poor chap
@@braydonattoe2078 Was about to write the same thing. Unless you lock yourself away and haven't played a game in your life. A lot of decisions should be pretty clear. To say he attempted to "perfect" the game is honestly to me quite laughable. It's very clear the game is far from perfect, and even the developer would have been able to realize this. (Maybe i'd be more understanding if all this happened in a much shorter time frame but over years you can make a significant amount of progression).
As the video said he was suffering from anxiety and depression. I hear that so often as an excuse it's honestly lost most of its meaning. However maybe that simply was the case here. It makes the most sense. The state of the game does not reflect the works of a perfectionist. It however does reflect someone struggling to the point they just release the game to get it off their chest.
Whats sad to me is that if he had released these updates in smaller chunks, he would have gotten the feedback he needed to realize that this isn't what the players wanted. His mental health issues are unfortunately what really ruined the project, as hard as that might be to say.
@@StevesTutorials this was a single dude who dreamt of being a game dev working on a passion project, we're not talking about a professional dev team working on a triple a game here. He wanted everything to do with his passion project to be perfect and positive, so the development took longer and negativity(such as yours rn) affected him heavily causing him to cut himself off.
@@jonathanpilcher337 Ok....so why did he not take the money that people spent for the beta and GET A DEV TEAM. Literally the entire point of getting early support for a product. It's basically kickstarter except he got to keep all the money instead of using a platform that takes a percentage. You support a product with the assumption that money is going to put into making the product. At the end of the day defending developers who essentially take the money people give them for development and then do not spend it on development are essentially just taking the money and leaving. May not be the original intent but it is, what it is.
You can't learn a lesson if people are only positive even when you do wrong. Negativity teaches you that you made a mistake.
You have your right to be positive about his actions the same way I have the right to be negative about his actions.
Criticism is very difficult to accept when you're working on a project dear to you. I believe Wol_lay when he said the reason he disappears is because of the anxiety these negative interactions caused him. I think he would've been better off if he had someone act as an intermediary, like a social media manager, and been more open about everything he was doing with the game. BUT at the same time, I think it's easy for me looking in on him to be critical and "logical" when it's not me who this all is affecting, and it so easy to plan for things that have already happened. I don't think Wol_lay did anything wrong, I think things just fell apart because he was gaining a lot of attention very fast for something he probably didn't think anyone but he and his wife would care about.
Yeah thats a very fair point, people only see it logically and dont really care about the situation or context, thinking that because they paid for something they now own him & his game
i can imagine how seeing all the negativeness would affect someone, after all, we naturally perceive negativeness 3x worse than positiveness, i remember reading something about buffs & nerfs in games, and a 10% buff for most players will just be 'okay nothing much' but a 10% nerf would cause uproars, the positiveness is nice but lasts way less and affects humans way less deeply than the negativity, now imagine how many horrible comments he got because not making the game as people wanted, a game *they* choose to support before it was done
Well there's a difference between all that and a DDoS attack.
@@numnuts241 i hope i did get a your point right but i guess that ddos attack has become an entry point of negativity for the dev while people were waiting for update there were some good moments so he kept on and when game came out (after all of this guys trials and tribulations (in his mind i guess)) game got so many negative over positive like while he put those images on twitter everyone were exited but when those images became real everyone got angry for some reason, he was already not in so well mood because he was a "solo" dev and he was a begginer (don't forget about ddos on day 1) but all those negatives that he got over those years, i guess they just ruined him and his passion for his work, i hope you understood me and i understood you, well have a nice day
I think it's valid to be upset at criticism, but Wol_lay, as an artist, needed to have a different mentality about it. I'm an artist as well and I LOVE feedback. Feedback is great, it makes your art better. People who cushion themselves with only positive feedback don't grow or learn valuable lessons.
That's totally fair but if you can't handle the anxiety then don't put yourself in the position in the first place. It could have stayed as a personal thing and didn't have to go online. It's mean to say for sure but that is the nature of the internet and everyone who's used it knows this.
As a teenager I really wanted this game to be huge. It had a lot of promise.
As a kid, I would watch BdoubleO and Millbee play this game, and those were the days. I miss when this game was fresh and new.
As a young adult, I had hope for Starbound. Never before have I seen a game so half-bake itself.
@@XanthinZarda Dang, you didn’t like StarBound either? I thought it’d be cool but it feels unpolished to me.
@@SonicMaster519 It also doesn't help that one of the most popular overhauls for Starbound is made by a rather toxic lad, so it took years and killing the modding scene for people to realize, "wait, there's probably a better way."
@@XanthinZarda Dang, the community seems like a mess just like the fifty minutes of Starbound I experienced before I uninstalled and refunded
Being an artist who's kind of a perfectionist myself I think I know what happened here. He probably got burnt out. And sometimes you'll rework a whole project just to fix something earlier in the project. What I've learned about perfectionism is sometimes you've just gotta realize you're not going to make it any better. With my work I'd get to a point where I want it to be better but idk how and end up making it worse.
Don't let Perfect become the enemy of Good.
Getting perfection before a test drive ensures that your product will fail
@@theKashConnoisseurit's one of those curses that come with a good work ethic, but it becomes even more exaggerated in creative pursuits. You want to always deliver on your dream, and always show up with exactly what you envisioned. Thing is, things rarely turn out that way. Even in a 9-5, you can't realistically give your 100% every single day. When you apply that same ideal to creative endeavors, it becomes quite obvious where the issues arise.
@@theKashConnoisseur
It's hard tho, I make VRChat combat maps and won't settle until I make the quest release run at 60+ fps idle and I will work on it until it does, even rework my gun system n shit.
It's impossible for me to even release one at 50 frames because the way that particles work in that game
That 3d mini map is by far the coolest map design i've ever seen. would be cool if more games had something similar.
This is a bit advanced seeing that nobody has (or at least for me) tried doing this before not even the biggest of devs considering it looks great although understandable why.
Deep rock galactic does have something similar, but it’s a very minimalistic x ray type outlien rather than this cool thing.
@@desmondng5375 fun game
Have you played trove??
@@f8soundman126 I have
I can almost guarantee that the community response permanently scared Wollay off of this game.
If he was anxious about the initial situation, such a gigantic deluge of negative feedback would have just ruined it for him. It reminds me a little of what Sean Murray went through with No Man's Sky on release, though obviously their responses couldn't be more different.
This is what I despise about the gaming community. People are acting like they wrote well mannered, thoughtful, constructive reviews, but I know damn well 99% of it was unconstructive bitching and moaning. People act like they own him and his game because they put money into early access, but it was THEIR decision to do so, Kickstarter and early access projects go awol or defunct all the time, it's part of the deal. Too much entitlement, not enough empathy. A lot of us need to sit back and approach things from a different perspective, but apparently getting people to stop being cunts for 12 seconds is too much to ask.
Virgin wollay vs Chad Sean Murray
Virgin Wol_lay: Disappears and abandons game after a disappointing release angers the fanbase.
Chad Murray: Botched one of the most hyped launches of the decade, went through death threats and bomb threats. Diverted all the negative feedback and hate to his personal email, takes all the criticism to heart, and works tirelessly to fix the game.
@@spinyslasher6586 Exactly: one person was an adult about it, and the other used it as an excuse to take as much time as he wanted since he was flush with money. Respect for NMS for digging itself back up, none to wol who nearly took a decade to do nothing.
Hypixel is taking a page from his book, but at least I don't see them releasing garbage when Hytale comes around.
@@DxBlack I honestly wouldn't use the comparison as a slight against Wollay though. What Sean did must have taken incredible mental fortitude, especially since it was on an even bigger scale.
Both of them strike me as the kind of guys that are (or, were, in Sean's case) wholly unused to being the spotlight and suffer from anxiety stemming from it.
If Wollay is any bit the perfectionist he says he is, the situation must have been a nightmare for him. And without a team of people depending on his leadership, there was nothing to keep him going once his personal drive for the project was gone.
The key difference between Cube World and NMS here is that Cube World was developed by _a husband and wife, alone._ They had every right to walk away after the game's full release, even if it were a disappointment to the fans; there's no company that needs to be kept afloat and add additional responsibility.
As of today, Wollay has announced “Cube World Omega,” which is supposed to be a return to the Alpha style while improving on the good features of the release. I’m skeptical after all these years of nothing and then the release being meh but I’m still hopeful.
Don't count on it being any time soon. The time between all of his tweets and the steam release was 6 years. Better strap in for a long, LONG wait.
I hope he receives some positive encouragement and that this new project works out well. Cube World could still be successful if it gets the right treatment.
@@augustday9483 He has gotten a load of positive support, at the beginning way back when he released the original Cube World Alpha he was praised for how amazing the game was, but then he started to make promises he couldn't keep, and made changes to things that just didn't need to be changed, and once the negative shit started flowing in, he dipped. You just can't do that shit because not only does it give him and his studio a bad reputation, but it will give any future projects he works on a bad wrap and people won't trust it. You can't blame people for being pissed off at his lack of "give a fuck" for the fans of his game.
Thank you for mentioning this, there's still hope
@@haxonprime1243I'd say folks were a bit more then pissed off. They were kind of awful. I don't blame the guy for dipping. Gamers are the worst when they feel entitled to something.
I enjoyed Cube World alpha more than anything, and to be honest, I felt a little let down with the release because of the progression system changes. That's really what deterred me from playing Cube World until the first couple community mods started coming out. I feel like if there was a system that allowed you to have old progression vs. new progression, I would imagine a lot of the negativity and backlash from the community could've been avoided. Though, if I ignore the progression and new leveling up system, it's a damn solid game and I can see myself playing for months without getting bored.
Though, I can't help but feel bad for Wol_lay. I consider perfectionism to be that of a plague, and I experience it myself way more than I care to admit. What started as a passion project, gained a large following, which probably overwhelmed Wol_lay and put pressure to keep updated with people who're interested in the game around the world. At the same time, if the DDoS attacks were enough to break a piece of the heart on the inside, I cannot imagine what all the negativity is causing to him now.
Oh its you i actually never thought you would comment on a video like this. Btw keep up the amazing content man its great! Also i subbed and notifs on :D
I know I've had the say dream to make a game but I know I lack the skill to make as well as I know I don't have the creativity to make it what it could be. I respect Wol_lay for his dedication. It only suchs that this amazing has been abandoned when it had a lot of potential. If not for the region thing if clearing a region or the like gave you a boost to your overall power then maybe people wouldn't be so harsh.
@@jaye4157 I truly believe the game isn't abandoned, it's just being worked on in the background out of the public's eye. I believe there is a Discord server that has a channel named "Signs of Wollay" that has any signs of him being active. Still, it's more of a question of when the next update will ever come out.
I agree also love your videos
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This is why small indie game devs don't choose to show small prototypes or ideas to a huge audience until they are almost done. It just becomes massive pressure and having a huge fanbase watching your every move and anticipating your game to come out any second (which, as opposed to what AAA game studios will tell you) takes a huge amount of time, effort and passion to make.
See how Silksong from Team Cherry is handling it, they have not shown pretty much anything anymore and we are just waiting for release, the problem with Cube world and it's dev is that he is pretty much a two man army, neither him or his wife will give constructive critisism to the game for masses, everyone has different opinions on games and that is why you at least need a group of playtesters and actually take feedback which I really doubt the developer does
@@superbeta1716 it's sadly true
Yes, and no. That's overall true, but at the same time that's not what happened here.
The problem with CubeWorld wasn't people had unreasonable expectations. The problem was that Woolie is a perfectionist who also doesn't have thick enough skin to handle interaction with the general publc Thus, he had nobody to reign him in when he got caught up in the hype and started developing outside the reasonable scope of his capabilities.
People weren't expecting something that was going to take the gaming world by storm. Just more of the same of what they had already been given (and sold). Instead, somewhere along the six years between reveal and release, he forked into a new development path and had nobody to tell him "No, that's not what people actually like this game for." Thus, the end product was barely relatable to the game that everyone had bought into and fallen in love with.
If the game hadn't been released into Alpha, it would have released after 6 years of development, gotten mixed reviews and fizzled out without really being noticed, assuming that the end result remained the same compared to what we got. The lowered expectations would not have helped the end product because the release version's flaws are foundational elements incorporated into the re-focus that he did while he had cut himself off from the general public with no input.
If anything, Cube World is indicative of the importance of communication with your customerbase. If you're going to put a product out into Early Access, you don't really get to renege on it.
No, you just have to be ready and consider what you post and how capable you are at fufilling other people expectations. It's not that big of a deal.
@@Exotac amazing analysis Tophatkiyaki couldn't said it better 👏🏼👏🏼👏🏼
If he got that frustrated with a ddos attack 2013, I don't want to know what happened after the steam release and the negative reviews
i REALLY REALLY hope he is doing fine, cause man, he is still a person that just wanted a good game, nothing behind it
Funny how the servers just couldnt handle all the people and he thought it was a ddos attack
@@tutizx hm different from what i heard the one i heard i think he didnt realize it was from so many people interesting
Frustrated is not the way I would describe depression and anxiety.
This crushes me to think about
I remember NerdCubed playing this so many years ago and thinking, "Once this game is fully released, I am totally gonna buy it!" As someone who just couldn't get into Minecraft, this actually seemed like a really fun alternative.
Same. Dan really seemed to be enjoying himself with it. I really can't help but feel bad for Wollay.
The region locked items thing is so bizarre to me.
Why would you ever believe that people would enjoy that mechanic? In what world?
CUBE WORLD
...I'll see myself out.
From my point of view; I can understand the concept, the execution is just bad.
I think what Wollay was trying to do was to basically make each individual region its own large dungeon. You would acquire the gear you needed in each region that was temporary, and then at the end when you collected the artifact you'd get a more permanent character upgrade. The idea was probably to encourage thorough exploration of each area of CW instead of just reaching a point where you glide over everything and reach a certain level where you can just steamroll every challenge. It's very unique compared to how a lot of open world RPGs operate.
Like I said, it could work, the execution was just bungled pretty bad. Having the only permanent upgrade to your character be movement speeds (in very, *very* minor percentage increments) is super lame and basically destroys any feeling of progression. Having your gear lose ALL of its value upon entering a new region feels way too aggressive as well.
I understand Wollay's conundrum, but even with that as a factor I really think he needs to communicate with his community more, because the current PR model he's chosen has done nothing but create a lot of angst and worry. and keeping people clinging to threads of hope through sparse correspondence really isn't helping anyone. Even just a "hey, I'm still working on the game, it will take a while, thank you for sticking around" would be enough for lots of people.
I think NerdyBunny hit it on the head, yeah. That alongside his development process being... as insular as it can get, alongside the endless anxieties of "oh I have to make a _product_ now"
He wouldn't have had any feedback over what would inevitably be tunnel-visioned game design, _and_ at some point he probably just had to stop himself from rewriting the entire game and just... force himself to launch what he had, flaws be damned. For his own sake.
@@nerdybunny9975 the permanent character upgrade was literally 3% increased swimming speed 😐😐😐
@@itzsweetz83 and it didn't actually increase your swimming speed, just the number on your stats
I feel this guy. Negativity is the biggest problem when you're creating something on the internet..
Yeah, its not like you could just, I don’t know, simply ignore it.
@@co7769 it's not easy consider most people are having a break down from this. It's a mom put in her best effort to make the most delicious food for her child, and her child throw the food on the ground and tell her how trash she is, how she shud put in more effort, how the food is horrible etc etc. And she need to continously keep up with it. If the game are small and not very popular, u dont get this level of negativity. But once it popular reach a certain point,u will get many many toxic people. A solution for this is to have a team with leader who are learned to cope with this, a leader with strong mental stability, or move in to a corperation. Ignoring it WILL NOT BE A SOLUTION
Beside, how can u create something for people to play, and actually not reading comment from user about it. I think that wud be the first thing that ppl do, and u dont know if a comment is negative until u read it. Even most content creator need someone to moderate their comment section, to reduce negativitt
@@co7769 You've clearly never posted big projects online.
That's what happens when you take people's money and then faff about for years making nonsensical excuses along the way.
The moment he saw the money was coming in and that he couldn't do it all he should have realized he needed to hire some help for the site, and if that wasn't what he wanted then he shouldn't have taken people's money to begin with.
Piece of shit took the money and ran. Im glad I pirated the game.
I've seen a lot of videos covering Cube World and the story surrounding it, but yours is the first that kind of digs into the mindset behind the creator. I think it's fair to say this game didn't 'fail' because of the game, as is the case in so many similar stories. This was absolutely a case of a guy trying to share something of himself and spiraling into darkness because of the expectations and pressure from the monolithic internet opinion. Very sad and I really feel for the guy, it's not an easy way to be remembered.
Except he didn’t make himself look innocent either. He never had effective communication with the fanbase which not only resulted in several bad choices for the final game (Like Stripping your stuff from you whenever you enter a new area) but also made people think he took the money and ran.
I feel this guy. As an introvert with my own small passion project I can understand his anxiety: facing any reaction to your work at all(or even worse - lack of it) is terrifying, and even if 99% of reviews are positive, that negative 1% will devastate you.
That is more of a sign that there is a lot of room for growth as a person. If you're bothered by 1% then you don't understand how the world works. No matter what you ever do, you will never please everyone. Never. You cannot change that, nobody else can change that and that is just something you have to live with. You can make the most perfect thing ever, absolutely revered by 99.9%... but you'll still find 0.1% to despise your work, mostly for selfish reasons. Everyone needs to be able to take criticism, and part of that is being able to tell what criticism is valid and what is not. You shouldn't be taking somebody seriously that complains that the car you sold to him does't drive faster than a plane.
@@spugelo359This is absolutely true. Something that helps for me is mentally acknowledging the fact that- Most likely, the majority of that "1%" aren't doing it out of some dramatic Disney villain malevolence.
That being said, I also understand why and how simple things like criticism can make people just go... Haywire.
It's not rational. And someone can *know* it's not rational.
Yet still easily be influenced by it.
I don't think what's happening with the developers is fair to the people who paid for it. But on some level, I have some sympathy.
I just wish for them to grow from this and do better in the future. But who knows.
It feels weird seeing this game again.
I was one of the people that tried the Cube World Alpha back in 2013. I even found the original PayPal receipts for it all the way back from 2013-07-11. Time sure flies....
I remember playing this with my friend. It was very fun to just run around and kill stuff. I liked the upgrade system where you got small elemental voxel pieces as boss drops that you then used to upgrade your gear. And it was not just that you needed 30 wind pieces to upgrade the weapon the get some attack speed upgrades. You inspected your gear and you placed the voxels wherever you wanted on the gear. So your weapon slowly turned bigger and bigger. And the different elements had different colors and upgrade effects so you could make some beautiful weapons :P
Sad to see that he dropped the ball a bit. He really should have formed a proper studio and hired more developer and artists. This could have turned into the next Minecraft and not just another perpetual early access Steam game :(
"The next Minecraft" can be misinterpreted in so many ways that it's really hard to agree with that analogy without any context given.
@@hunzhurte I'm interpreting it as one of few games out there that still sells a shit ton
@@hunzhurte I'm interpreting it as one of few games out there that still sells a shit ton
It could've been the little brother of Minecraft. Mojang offered free help with him joining them. But he'd still keep full ownership. He has chances for free help with people that loved the game too.
222 👍
As many people might have said already: What I immediately took note of was that a lot of core features had been removed, like with region locking etc. It was like he worked backwards instead of elaborating on what he already had. I don't think what he added to the full release was bad ideas, but I'm just surprised that he took away features that weren't issues with the design to begin with and replaced them entirely.
That being said: All love to Wallay.
It's weird because if you follow his progress posts, it's clear that he *had* elaborated on what he had and made great changes that the fanbase really wanted. Then there was a certain point where it was as if he threw all of that out and started from scratch.
@@_S_P_A_C_E_M_A_N_ exactly. Like, if this was the first release then people would probably have been ok with it. But "alpha was better" became the standard response, since Alpha release set the expectation and "formed the mold" so to speak.
yea, i never played the game but all the videos i saw of people playing the alpha i can say that if he had just expanded the alpha and built upon it, he would have won. but he seemed to have dumped it at one point during one of his manic episodes and went pre alpha and redeveloped it into a region locking ?>???>>? mess. who thinks "yea everytime you move ot a new area you lose everything" is a good idea.
The region lock & pointless progression system really killed it. I don't know if this ever gets another update, but if it does I hope he goes back to the roots of what this game was & what made it great and rather expands on that. I don't even know how he could think that this was a good idea to do. Nobody cares about a bit of additional boat speed. Especially if your boat is gone in the next region and your gear only valid for the one you found it in. You couldn't even go backwards and be stronger. No. Your gear would be crap again and so would you be crap again. But at least you might sail 2% faster if you find the boat again, not that you'll have a lot of reason to use it, because whoop, it's gone! Ugh…
"all love to the scammer taking peoples money for years before destroying the project in the official release so people would call it a flop and forget so he can add it to his resume and people would stop asking for their money back" lol no
If you keep polishing that Diamond, you will eventually be left with only Diamond dust and disappointment.
I used to really like this game when it first came out, and then me and a friend decided to play it again after we saw it got a "full release". The way that all the best features got removed is beyond me. Never saw a game get this much worse before or since.
My favourite feature the game had at one point was actually the weapon customization, where you could add a voxel to the weapon model which upgraded stats, and also enabled some really great fashion for your swords. Elaborate hilts or spikes, everything possible, super creative system
Sometimes, I catch myself wishing some people just redo this game based on the alpha build, and develop it further from there.
I just wonder how copyright laws would handle that.
The guy’s not entirely there so he’ll lash out given the chance
@@marcar9marcar972 Where's your proof of this, man? The guy posts like once a year. He's not exactly an autocratic dictator, he's a guy who made a mediocre game and then vanished.
Thats just called mods
@@infinitemausoleum721 Cube World Alpha wasn't mediocre, far from it.
What's a real shame nowadays, is the fact he released it almost a decade ago, if he didn't flake so much, by the time it could've been a wild success story and maybe, maybe, inspire so many others.
@@marcar9marcar972 You make him sound crazy or something. He was dealing with a lot of shit so give him a break lol. I don't like how he handled his game but it doesn't make him a wackjob.
I still wish he would release the game's Alpha as beta branch from within the settings of the game on steam. So people can access and play both versions. That way people who bought the Alpha can still access it to play, and those new to it, have a legit way to access and play it. Plus, two games for the price of one is a win.
He probably doesn't even have the alpha build anymore
@@YourPalKindred Doubtful.
@@YourPalKindred i have it saved on my PC, hed just have to ask any fan for it
@@gollumbeutlin5646 he can ask a fan for the alpha build, until someone puts a virus in it. he would have to ask many fans and cross check each one to find the one true version, with no viruses
@@rainyafternoons7003 you can literally just use a virus scanner on some old laptop to test that, i dont think if he picks the project back up ANY sane person in his community would want to ruin it
wollay really needs a dev team
I think he might have anxiety or his perfectionism makes him not trust others to do what he wants. I say that because I relate. It’s bad, like it’s a character flaw, I think he needs a therapist. He seems like he deals with problems like stress and guilt.
@@user-sf9gs2pg1b
He should have made a smaller game, this feels like you'll need a team and dedicated servers. He did well for a Two man team but he's not Notch, and I'm pretty sure even Notch had a team.
@@envynoson Stardew Valley, it's a large game initially made by 1 man until he eventually hired a dev team just to make more updates
@@juicy342yt4 Difference being, Stardew was lovingly worked on for years with dedication and a sure vision. It was also a complete package at launch. Cube world lacks such... dedication, let's say.
@@Scruffers i was just making an argument about having to work on a smaller game just because it was the 1 person
Just so everyone knows, months later he really was outside my house like he said and is a man of his word
I'm glad he was talking to you. Got a bit frightened for a second...
This is the problem with waiting to update. You change a game a ton all at once and it’s definitely gonna cause problems. You implement changes in small batches, and take criticism little bits at a time. Then you can actually craft something amazing
the thing is hes probably taken alot of criticism through out the years but you have to realize self doubting yourself can cause a problem to your art or craft
There is a similar game to Cube World called Veloren. It is free and open source, currently under development and it has singleplayer and multiplayer. I would recommend it. It has great music as well.
I just looked it up and it looks amazing! I’m definitely going to have to give it a try after the grind I’m currently on.
While we’re giving out recommendations, Necesse is pretty amazing too, $10 on steam, it’s a mix on Terraria, Rimworld, and Stardew Valley all rolled into one.
@@Jarvalicious thank u for the recommendation bro :)
also if anyone that sees this wanna play veloren hmu cause the higher tier dungeons are a pain if ur alone 😅
@dCy since you helped me out let's me help you what kinds of games do you like?
@@hazydodo8253 I have a high "level" character and i helped many new players but I stopped playing for some months. They have changed the map so it's always randomly generated whenever people leave the server and I'm basically lost in a forest without finding anyone :^)
@@ryanclemons1 well, I like many genres but i usually like like games like this one: exploring, magic, castles and stuff. I used to enjoy Nosgoth a lot (different genre, similar to left 4 dead, team deathmatch vampires vs humans) medieval stuff... but they closed it because nobody was playing online. Maybe this channel will upload a video about it. The funny thing is that it was made by the developers of Rocket League so they probably had money but didn't find it profitable.
It's always sad to see an aspiring creator have their soul sucked out of them by their own passion project.
I remember having so much fun playing this game with friends back in alpha. so sad to see it come to this. poor developer as well, he truly had a good game on his hands
I often hear about games that were "better in beta" (or any previous versions) but GOD DAMN, as someone that played the original alphas, I can attest that the alpha was indeed so much better, even in its heavily unfinished state that it really boggles the mind to see how much they've fucked up on this one, and how long it took them to fuck it up.
It's a shame really, the alpha game was very, VERY solid, fun enough to play dozen of hours, it could have become the next minecraft (and I'm not even hyperbolic here) had they just released it in EA on steam and just kept rolling content updates bit by bit.
Sadly they waited way too long, and delivered a new version that had just bad design all around, not just compared to the alpha, but just objectively.
I really wanted to love this game, but to touch on my steam review of it - it's all random and absolutely unbalanced.
It is random what mobility options you get each zone - which yes, may mean you won't get the glider or ability to ride the ENTIRE zone if you don't happen to get the quest for it - it's random what loot you get, it's random whether the enemy you have to tackle is even beatable. Try fighting a witch type boss as a caster. You literally can't. The beam attack will hit you even if you dode out of it, the remaining damage will always be enough to take you out.
Bosses have the same runspeed as you, making kiting impossible, since after the first couple shots you take, they will remain RIGHT behind you indefinitely unless there is terrain to cheese. Even then, casters are so vulnerable that one or two (often rapid, back-to-back) hits will KO you and you have to restart a 10 minute fight.
Crafting is utterly pointless, I played for a couple hours, gathering everything in sight, and still was far short of crafting even one item - that is assuming you can even FIND the craft book for your level.
The concept was fun, but it was very poorly put together, balance was nonexistant, and boss fights were utterly annoying, until you hit a boss you literally couldn't kill. There just.. was no strategy. You can't kite, you can't tank, some of them you cannot dodge to avoid attacks. And you often only get to take one hit, if even that, or you fail and have to retry the fight from scratch. You can't even get enough distance to take a shot via rolling away from bosses since that doesn't get you far enough to turn, hit and run before taking a hit and potentially being KOd.
The game is awful. Wholly and truly. It sucks.
This just makes it more sad not only that you have to pay 20 bucks for it but also that Wollay is clearly a person who let his negative mental health get the better of him.
I love Cube World, and while I never got the chance to buy it back when it was released, I find the alpha version incredibly fun, and I just started playing it again. While it was probably disappointing for fans who paid for the game and waited for the updates, I feel like the experince the alpha provided was well-worth that 14 or 15 Euros it costed.
I just stumbled accross this video and your youtube channel, and I gotta say, I like what I'm seeing here 👀
Yeah, I bought it back when it was alpha and considered to have got my money's worth out of it.
Buying early development games is always risky, so consider what the game is like right then, because that may be all you'll ever get. Any future development is uncertain.
@Herecore ooo interesting I'll check it out
@@tylisirn True
There was a perfect version of cube world on his pc that he was too embarrassed to release, and now none of us get to experience it.
Wdym?
@@Sonnet. Perfectionism and pressure. He feared players would be disappointed at release. Impatient fans break you, like when he got DDoSed. They make you scared of really committing the game, or stepping further into it.
Thanks for the video. Sadly a lot of passion games go this way. Starts off great then goes down hill because just one person is deciding it and often changes their mind as they go through producing it. With the internet making things worse and worse for them emotionally.
This feels like a Jurassic Park: Trespasser scenario. Although DreamWorks wasn't DDosed, they promised alot almost too much to magazines, fans, and other sources. What we were told was a 3D open world environment where we could explore and interact with everything. But when you throw all your cards on the table, 2 things happen 1. People start to have higher expectations for what they'll be getting, and 2. People begining to have some their doubts. With things rushed out the door due to limitations, lack of resources, lack of communication which resulted in more promises not being kept, an entire level being removed because the puzzles were just unplayable, and time becoming less and less, in 1998 people got a broken, half finished game. Trespasser could have been one of the best Jurassic Park games ever released, but what we got was a shell of what we were promised. This person promised alot, and kept the gig up for almost 7 years, but when the veil was revealed, we got a completely different game than what was introduced. Cube world is just another example of why you should never lay down your cards at the start, because people will expect all you promised, or call your bluff as quickly as you showed it off. Maybe triple AAA games like Bethesda and EA/Dice will understand this one day, but as long as they keep getting money...the future looks as bleak.
i mean it a little bit like No man's sky the reason why people where mad was all the promised stuff not in the game and the fact that it costed the price of an AAA game it was not that bad but was way overprice and really empty but at less No man sky got an Happy ending
"wollay" (pure scum) was not DDoS attacked. It was all a lie to scam people out of their money
@@aoki6332 agreed, nms is now a fantastic game, but it took a MASSIVE amount of effort, and frankly that entire dev team has earned massive respect from their fanbase, myself included, for proving that they would stick it out to finish what they started
He needed a team to support him, not just in development but in emotional support. He needed people to take over the social media when his anxiety got to him, to talk him out of second guessing himself and delaying from fear, being a backboard for idea development to prevent badly executed mechanics, and to take on criticism about bad mechanics and work on fixing them instead of freaking out and running.
I always wondered what happened to this game after seeing it on tv. Knowing what happened to it has finally put my childhood mystery to a rest.
The animations in this game are just so nice to look at dunno why, it reminds me of old cartoons or something.
sometimes the community are better devs than the devs themselves.
look at guitar hero, activision let it die and Ubisoft bought freestylegames leaving the community with no more games in the series after GHL. Thus came clone hero
I really like this series, very good video! Also its highly appreciated that your putting in a lot of your time and effort into your videos. The game actually looked kinda good, sad it didnt go well. Bye!
Thanks, I'm enjoying this much more than the other stuff I've done
@@ccriztoff show proof
@@ccriztoff yeah, and that's why people want proof.
@@ccriztoff Oh, I'm not saying you should give them proof. I'm only saying that others want proof, and your lack of proof is why.
Everybody chill, the video is really goof still!
Veloren is a real gem I found recently, that has me excited for a new Cube World experience. Just from the two people developer team behind Cube World I did not have a lot of hope, but Veloren has a active community and bigger development team behind it and has regular updates.
It's open-source too and the devs and community are very passionate and communicative about it.
The game is already quite good and playable despite being in pre-alpha.
Oh! I remember this game! I watched let's plays of this game back in 2013 and I loved it. But suddenly, this game dissapeared from my eyes.
And every time, I see a cube RPG game (for example, Trove), it reminds me of Cube World.
Honestly as an outsider to this situation who only heard about cube world maybe in 2016 and hasn't kept up with it or heard about it since, this just sounds like one man's personal tragedy. A passion project turned into a burden and a target on your back. What he went through sounds like a nightmare scenario. For a lot of creative types I know, that would be their personal hell.
If Wolfram has truly serious chronic depression or recurring episodes, no one can blame him who doesn't know first-hand what that means.
I wish him cope both with his depressions, and with the game.
*_Addendum:_*
Since the opinion that is repeatedly expressed in the following comments is that one should pull oneself together with depression and with a little self-discipline would be able to lead a normal life and this statement is also made by supposedly depressed people themselves, I would like the following excerpt add from the Germans to describe a *_real_* major depression:
The serious, often momentous illness cannot be influenced by *_willpower_* or *_self-discipline_* on the part of the person concerned and, due to its disproportionate duration and severity, can be distinguished from mourning and from dysphoria, i.e. a temporarily depressed mood. Depression is a major cause of disability or early retirement...
@Zog Zog We don't know the severity of his depression. With severe psychiatric depression, you may not even be able to process a packet of instant noodles or tie your own shoelaces. We're talking about The Depression here, not being depressed in the sense of having a low mood. The second is vastly overdiagnosed as true depression, which it is not. If you've never experienced major depression yourself, you have absolutely no picture of it. It's easier to imagine standing on the moon than it is to comprehend a true depression. Even doctors specializing in this direction are not able to do this. This is not a mood, it is misprocessing in the brain due to a disorder and nobody is able to leave this state behind by their own will. You could also try to stop breathing or say to a wheelchair user, get up you lazy bastard, we'll walk around the block, it'll be fine. Invisible illnesses can be far worse than visible ones and have a tremendous impact on you and your loved ones. It is precisely this attitude, full of prejudice and suspicion, that makes it all the more difficult for those affected and then actually ends in suicide, unnecessarily due to the pressure. And not to mention that you're busy all day trying to figure out the right way to commit this suicide.
I paid for the game 2 times and of course I'm upset about it. I don't know if he's really depressed. But if that statement is true, then you can't blame him. Put it this way, would you be just as adamant if he had a brain tumor and was so severely neurologically damaged after surgery that he couldn't continue working on the game and want your money back even though he couldn't even take care of it? If he's not depressed (although from the unfinished released game it at least seems like there's something wrong, because he behaved differently before) then he's an asshole.
But you cannot blame someone with a depressive episode or an ongoing condition for his behavior. You could also ask someone with dementia to do your bookkeeping.
When I read such comments, I would like to wish you this disease. You always make the mistake of thinking it doesn't happen to you and that you can deal with it. This is as wrong as death is certain.
@Zog Zog _a schizo having an episode comes and kills your friend, you could be like "he wasn't himself, it's not entirely his fault"_
And that is exactly the case law in my country. There is no conviction under the Criminal Code for an offense in this state.
@@JohnZombi88 Sorry, but if you're severely depressed, you won't go to work anywhere. You don't even get up and you can't do anything about it. If you had been depressed for years, you would also be an absolute exception. This condition is extremely rare. I would seriously question the diagnosis.
@Zog Zog I have no empathy for the guy. I don't even know if he's really sick. I only deal with severely depressed people, sometimes with significant delusions, i.e. psychotic ones. They cannot face everyday life alone. They are subject to compulsions and behavioral disorders.
I would also like to add that SCHITZOPHRENIA as such does not exist. A wide variety of psychoses are summarized under this and, depending on the degree of severity, the person concerned is no longer of sound mind and cannot be held responsible for his or her actions.
For everyone who loved the original Cube World Alpha, i'd highly recommend Veloren. It's basically a CW clone in active development. And iirc (unless i completely forgot that i bought it), it's completely free.
Wow thankyou for this!
It's not only free of charge but it's also free software (open source)
I thought you were joking but it's exactly what you said it is
I downloaded this despite the mixed reviews at the 2019 release... I must have started a new game on five different occasions, and never could figure out how to progress at all. Everything was too hard to fight, and when I actually managed to kill something it seemed to provide no benefits (no XP or drops).
Hearing your explanation of how they messed with progression makes it make a lot more sense now, but I can definitely testify to how unintuitive it is... I wanted to love this game but it just wouldn't let me even understand it.
too much hype on a mediocre developer, well at least he still have a small community that are always protecting him, with white knights being passive aggressive when someone ask questions or give some criticism, so thats something i guess ?
@@lerr123456 Our vibes don't match up.
@@lerr123456 shut up
@@ImSquiggs True lmao the "small community" isn't really white knighting him they're just producing mods and enjoying the game with said mods on
@@lerr123456 go create a game like this by yourself for years while under pressure you have no idea how game development is
I honestly feel sorry for the guy. He worked like two years on his big project, put so much love into it, then he releases a alpha and even though its received really well, the ddossing just destroys his confidence. He feels the need to redo basically everything and after 6 years of nothing, he finally releases the game, just to get bashed by poor reviews. I can't really blame him for going silent again. Releasing a project that consumed like 8 years of your life, just for people to say how disappointed they are.
You know, if you do something that almost everybody wouldn't like and don't even try to ask your community if it's ok, you clearly do something wrong and should be blamed. It's just lame...
There's so many expert product owners in the comment section that seem to know how to run businesses. I had no idea making games was this easy!
@@QuantumConundrum Was this guy a expert? Releasing an Alpha and then disappearing for 6 years? Anyone with common sense would do a better job. If he has mental health issues, get a therapist.
@@vahahadziev What does that have to do with the guy spending almost a decade developing the game only for people like you to immediately criticize him?
@@TheHardcoreGamer1 if you spent a decade on pooping your pants and people criticize you - it doesn't make you a hero
Man, if the developer got traumatized from the DDoS attack I can't imagine how F'ed up he his now. He's probably deleted the internet and moved to a deserted island.
Was it confirmed if the DDoS was even maliciously intended? Or was it just he didnt have enough capacity to hold all the fans up? DDoS is the LEAST of someones' worries on the internet nowadays.
@@zariarogers2846 from what I can tell, the developer said it was a targeted, hateful attack. My first thought was that the fans crashed the website, but Im not sure.
@@zariarogers2846 No, there was never any proof it was a DDoS. I'm still convinced to this day that he just didn't realise how much traffic he was going to get and somehow convinced himself it was a coordinated attack.
@@MooseCastle we don't have his traffic logs to say what was happening, it's definitely not impossible it was a DDOS, people can be arseholes especially when it comes to highly hyped games, or just ones with a problematic relationship between the community and the devs ie Phil Fish and the 4 year fight between him and the expectant and then outright abusive community.
Don't matter what initially set it off. When he came back, he was met with such hatred. Everytime he tried to come back he was met with spite. Even when he opened up about his anxieties with it he got it all thrown back at him from his perspective. Obviously no way of actually knowing, but the internet probably killed this man.
Feels weird to say but i appreciate this series hasn't done just bad dev cases. There are games that failed from due to lack of funding, passion being too strong and more
It's oddly refreshing to hear not all flops were without good intentions all along. Still hoping Wallay is doing okay. This is such such adorable game. Shame to see it left like it was
Wallay is a bad game dev xd
This happens a lot with passionate game devs. At some point, they stop feeling passionate about it and money isn't enough of a motivator. The more donations they accept, the more pressure is put onto them. It's also why many games are developed in silence, and there's little to no communication. Players are greedy, and the indie developer is always the target.
I used to watch this game on yt all the time and I enjoyed it so much. I wish Wollay kept close to the alpha version, which is much better than the new version in my opinion. Could of been a great game. Nice vid btw! You explained things well 😄
Another thing that personally disappointed me was that the steam version didn't have multiplayer anymore
I really miss the good old alpha days of the sheer chaos that was king of the hill on a server with 20 people
The steam version does have multiplayer though
Back in 2013, alpha was pretty fun. Played with a couple of friends for about a month and this simple game managed to keep us entertained. Taming mounts, traveling to find rare resources, even an object editor that allows you to change in-game furniture. Sometimes I think about this project, but didn't return to it for a long time. Now it became clear the fans indignation after the Steam release.
Yeah, I remember comming hone from school and just exploring as my skelebro, and then my brother deleted the savefile lol, Cant remember if it was intentional or not, i just remember it happening.
So of course i buy the Steam version day 1, and played for about a day and havent touched it since then, i was so hyped told my friend he should get it too, luckily he didn't. Shame
Damn this is heartbreaking. The guy made a very appealing game, anticipated by a lot of people, and because of one gameplay decision, destroyed everything he worked for years and he had to face his biggest fear : public dissatisfaction. This is... Just sad.
All I can say to him is "Welcome to the world of consumerism", and if people don't like your product, their going to be blunt and honest. If you can't take the heat, get out the kitchen, simple enough. He honestly should have branched out and talked to other game devs to find out what baggage came with being a developer. Also his depression is just an excuse, he comes back when the bank is drying up, then leaves once its full. Rinse and repeat. Mark my words he will be back in a few years with some garbage DLC no one asked for to snipe some more money before again vanishing back into said bush again like Homer Simpson.
@@haxonprime1243 How much you wanna bet those DDoS attacks were staged so that he could get out of working on it further for a while?
@@haxonprime1243 terrible bait try again later
@@haxonprime1243 The guy is not Phil Fish to deserve that kind of threatment. It's that kind of mentality why people are afraid to show off their passion projects.
Being cynical doesn't help anyone, it encourages complacency and repetition rather than inovation. Don't be that guy.
@@kankeydong2500 You are obviously not a long time follower of this game. He keeps making false promises. Disappears for years at a time once his bank account is stocked up and only comes back when they need more money. He deserves every ounce of hate and criticism he is getting and I don't care what the 1% have to say about it. It's not a good sign when more then 70% of the Cube World community are witch hunting the guy. Says a lot about him...
I don’t think Wollay expected the game to get so big. I want to make a game, just to be a small dev, might sell said game for money but with a warning to not expect much. I have a lot of anxiety and can’t take criticism, I criticize myself enough as it is, so I’m not expecting it to be like a job, just a fun side project to maybe make some cash on the side. I think he probably underestimated how people would be or how much expectation impacts his development. I would’ve just not sold it at Alpha, and him pulling it from the store tells me he probably wishes he did not.
just remember: people will be critical of things they love and want them to be better.
haters will be angry they arnt in your place.
If you take criticism so poorly then you really just shouldn't be a creator. That's not something to be proud of, you should work to accept criticism before you take on artistic endeavors or you're just gonna suffer
i mean that like Notch and the reason why he sold Minecraft he had lost the passion he had when it was a small project whit a small community
I remember buying and playing the alpha just a little after it came out. It was a good and engaging game, but playing it I always felt a little aimless as the game didn't give me anything to work towards.
Then when the updates stopped coming I was really disappointed, but given what I learned about Wollay in this video, I feel nothing but sincere sympathy for the man, as I know first hand what shitty mental health can do to your desire to create.
I hope he someday will find joy in working on it again, or at least get some closure on it and find another passion project.
I remember this game. It could have been insanely popular if they kept developing it. At least Stardew Valley popularity. Such a shame.
And wol_ley is back with a post comfirming a year later!
This is high quality, Wiz! Looking forward for more of these videos!
Cheers mate, gonna keep cracking them out
To me, this feels like what happens when you don't take care of yourself enough and let your work control you. Wolly spent a lot of time reworking this game because he felt like it had to be perfect. Not to mention the DDoS attack. DDos attacks can be a really scary thing, especially if you are small business, or even just one person. But it sounded to me like he didn't ask for help when it came to his issues. I feel like one of the first things he should have done after that is get professional help. Therapy is a tool that everyone can benefit from in some shape or form. You can't help others if you can't help yourself.
Yeah this, it's very sad that Wollay ended up too depressed and anxious to develop properly, and it shows, but I see a lot of people blaming the community for his mental state, and that also doesn't sit right with me. If anything, this is a tale about how asking for help is essential when making a product, since developing something in your own insular vaccuum will always end up with you making strange decisions that seem good to you, but not to others. When his following got too big to handle, or when he started getting put down by feedback, he should've ask for help and hired a community manager. When his website got DDOSed, he should've asked for help and hired a site manager. When his mental state started to decline, he should've asked for help and gone to a therapist.
All that said, it's easy for us to say looking in after the fact. There may have been many things that deterred him from doing so, but still, the lesson is ASK FOR HELP!
@@thegamesforreal1673 Don't know if you are also yelling at me with this, but this is basically what I was trying to say with my comment.
@@darienb1127 no not yelling at you at all, just affirming my agreement and expressing my own thoughts.
Not just therapy. He should've hired another person to handle things like the website & server. He made a lot of money from the initial sales but outright refused to hire anyone else (something that didn't got mentioned here).
It's a bit easy to say Wollay should've just asked for help, mentally and development-wise.
For a lot of people, it can be really really hard to ask for help. How do you even ask for help? Who do you even ask for help?
From the outside it's easy to say, "Uh, a therapist and another developer, duh."
When you're already in a crushing depression spiral, simple questions with simple answers transform into terrifying monsters ready to crush you even further.
This is pretty standard for a "one man band" project, ie, they only do what they think is right and only do what is interesting to them. I play with other people's DIY EFI projects, and they are all OMB projects, ie, they decide everything. You can even look at MacOS, there is only one developer with no competition, ie, no incentive to make it better, and it's only Apple that decides what you get, eg, Apple block nvidia drivers in MacOS so you can't add a better graphics card to their slow $50K workstations. Basically you get what you get, unlike a group project where people with different skills steer your project to more profitability.
I played the first release with some friends and it was so much fun to run around and try to find the hardest boss. When the updates fell off we all thought it was over. We wish it was. He could have released the last updated version and said something like 'I got really depressed the last 8 years heres what you wanted' and people would love it. The mods would be super fun. No one wanted region locking.
They say, perfection is the enemy of progress - this game is a clear example.
There is a mod you can get for this game that removes the resetting of your character between regions. I used it, I can say that that one aspect of the game was it's biggest failing point. Once that was removed, the game became much more enjoyable. The alpha was still better, but not THAT much better. Here it is if you want to try it:
ua-cam.com/video/5-30AJhvIrc/v-deo.html
Mod name??
@@nebulaa1356 ua-cam.com/video/5-30AJhvIrc/v-deo.html&ab_channel=Scyushi
Plz.
@@bensoncheung2801 I already posted a link to it in the replies.
He literally said this in the video lol
Good documentary on a game that I helped donate in the Alpha version. I still love playing it but the official release is just embarrassingly bad compared to the Alpha. There are some features in the Official release that are better but the big downside is the zone lock gear. That was a huge mistake. Other than that, the official release would have been very good.
I don’t understand in what universe they thought that was a good idea
Well, i dont know if you'll even care to do so, but someone made a mod to remove region lock, so i'd say give that a test & see if you enjoy the game more then
As someone who has very intense anxiety issues that have - and still do - prevented me from following through with projects of my own, when I saw the dude vanishing from Twitter so many times with no explanation, my instant guess was anxiety. I sometimes vanish from social media for weeks at a time with no notice too. I’ve been wanting to create a youtube channel of myself for so long now, not as a career but as a passion project to showcase my playthrough of the games I love - especially simulator-style games, but my crippling anxiety issues have always steered me away from it. I really feel for this dude because I know exactly what it is like to tell yourself you’re gonna get to doing something “later” just to notice it’s been months since you last talked to that one person or did that one thing you had to do, and then you just convince yourself that it’s not even worth it anymore. If it’s with people, they’ll all be mad at you and will never forgive you, because you feel like such a shitty person for not giving them the attention they deserved, and think they will feel the same way about you. If it’s about projects, you keep telling yourself it’s never too late, with that last dim light inside of you slowly dying and all hope going away every time you don’t accomplish something you wish you had. It sucks. It’s the worst thing in the world. I hope he managed to get over it and I hope I’ll get over it someday.
I remember that TotalBiscuit(god rest his soul) had to stop engaging with the comments section of his youtube videos, passing off the running of his account to someone else precisely because he would focus in on the negative comments and ignore the overwhelming amount of positive comments. It eventually started to have a negative effect on his mental health and I think for his case having a more hands off approach was the correct call at that time.
In saying that however you should totally start that youtube channel my man, I know there's man people that enjoy that kind of content. You could try to find your own steps to limit your exposure to negativity but regardless I wish you luck and hope that you someday find the resolve to follow through on your own project.
I’m the same way. It has only gotten worse, but I’m taking Zoloft (it helped me before, so I hope it’ll help me again) and quit adderall. I hope you pursue making videos, maybe just don’t allow comments, or allow comments but get rid of ones with negative keywords. You could also have someone close to you look through the comments and get rid of rude ones. The thing is, it’s hard to not want to reply to the rude comments, isn’t it? To prove them wrong? But they won’t ever stop coming, and you could spend an infinite amount of time dwelling on it, instead of living. I always dwell on things I can’t change or the past, I get it.
Do what you love and people will follow bro. Always gonna be haters but that's just a fact of life
I vividly remember Cube World back when I was still in high school. I followed development closely and looked forward to buying the game when it would eventually come out. Never did buy into the alpha since I was still extremely cautious with online purchases at the time. Told all of my friends about it, we were excited. The silence that followed hit pretty hard.
Cube World is another example to me about why clear and consistent communication between community and developers is extremely important, especially indie developers. Radio silence is almost always a red flag that something is going horribly wrong. Even got to see the other side when I briefly became a tester for an indie horror game, which ended exactly as I expected it would. Even got thrown out of the project when I dared to try and clear things up afterwards. Thankfully the developer seems to have cleared up his act since then, but it will forever stick with me as a reminder of why communication is so important.
10:45 Hey look its me! As an alpha player I really enjoyed the procedurally generated world of Cube World and fell in love with its combat. I would play it along with some friends of mine. I was one of the people who got the beta test. I tried my best to not judge to harshly to the changes but I just didn't really see a point to the new leveling system. All it did was increase a few stats like swimming and not by much.
And the reign locking thing. When he first tweeted about harder difficulty areas I thought it was gonna work like my items are even more affective in that region but less affective in the region over there. But how it worked was my items are only affective in this region. There are items with a + on them that our multi region but they only work for neboring regions around their origin.
And there was the fact that the skill tree was gone witch made progression all about the weapons & armor you collect.
But the game was overall a lot more fleshed out and fun especially with the questing system but it wasn't as long lasting as the original due to the region lock.
it’s you
I remember getting hooked on this game because of the weapon customisation. I just wanted to go out there and find components to make the most busted sword.
As a person who only just came to know the existence of Cube World. I must say, waow this game looks really good; the design, the animation and the action all looks so polished, I can see why he is a perfectionist. I hope the dude is ok and get some well needed help... but damn what a shame because this game looks and feel so good, if only he can pick himself up together with the supports of his loved ones and find the confidence to re-engage with the community transparently... I must say, this game has so much potential!
I played the alpha when I was about 10, it truly breaks my heart to see the game (and developer) like this.
My friend and I played Cube World when it came out way way before it hit steam.
They were doing updates slowly but all of a sudden the game died and then released on steam and then died again.
The Alpha version of it was really fun and the modded version of it was even better. The steam version was sadly a let down. But even with that being the case, I had fun over the years with it for the low price of it all those years ago. I never wanted or requested a refund for it. It absolutely sucks that his passion project went down the way it did. I just hope the guy is doing better these days.
I remember following some youtuber who played a lot of this game, and was avid about making content every time it got updates. As the releases became more sparse, his content of it was too, and my attention in regards to Cube World have always been a sort of "Oh yeah, that was a cool thing I saw in my teens!"
Even to this day, watching footage of the game, I feel like the game has a lot of really good parts to it, it's an open ended RPG with smooth combat and a worthwhile skill system. What baffles me is both the decision to change the skill system in such a way, and then restrict item progression to regions?
The first could be to either pad out game time since some skills allowed for much faster progression, etc. And perhaps an argument could be made for it considering it had multiplayer, which makes one want some semblance of balance (I guess). The item-Region lock thing though... Why make an open world if that's the kinda progression you want? That's counter intuitive.
A part of me wonders(fears) what Wol_sey will end up doing, but I'm very glad the game exists, an that it exists in a fashion from which fans can mod it and address the quirks of an otherwise very good game.
I feel the pain, I'm also a profectionist and been working on my game for 6 years, also reworked a lot I wasn't happy with. I wanted to shoot for a release 2 years ago but rework after new feature after changes and still to this day being tweaked lol. It is very hard being a single developer wearing many shirts, programming, music and sound, play testing and debugging, it's a huge drag for sure. But I'm not giving up so easily.
Dude I seriously wish you the best of luck with your game! Yes perfectionism can be a pain, but I hope you can find a way to make it work for you and not against you! I know I'm a stranger, but I'm gonna root for you because heck yeah! You are doing something most people would never get to that first step, I hope it doesn't discourage you too hard on the days its less rewarding! Good luck!
As game modder, I know this feeling. Constantly reworking stuff, being unsure if other people will like it, seeking for imperfections, ideas oftenly popping up in your head, sharing with ideas in public and fear that you might actually not implement them and it's such a mess. Developing in team much easier since you don't need to hold that weight on your shoulders alone.
Good luck to you pal.
I've tried my hand at game design too, and this is exactly how I am (except for this guy's obvious talent): release paralysis, constantly rethinking, failure to communicate (both ways). In my case I was lucky to never get others involved past trying it out once or twice: I never got into a position where I risked letting a lot of people down.
A lot of this can be managed, e.g. by other ways of paying for content, making releases less dramatic; finding someone to manage the project, etc. I have given up, but I think not everyone whose brain works like this needs to do that.
This story is interesting to me because I can see in a slightly different world how this could have happened to Notch and Minecraft
Nice observation.
This did happen to notch though, the popularity of minecraft is what got him to quit because he could not do his own projects anymore without a massive following around anything which comes with expectations that prop themselves up. He wanted to make a space game where people programmed their own ships instead of directly flying it but in the end that never happened, just an example.
Issue is Notch wasn't an absolute bitch but wollay was
You should also mention Veloren. It's a spiritual successor to Cube World and developed as an open source game. Anybody who likes the idea of Cube World should check it out.
I remember playing the Alpha with a group of friends and playing a giant quest for months, fighting massive bosses that could take 30 mins to an hour to defeat.
The game is fully released, we all buy the game day 1, log into our server, realise the game is completely trashed for no reason and none of us touched it since.
Really like your work, the pacing, graphics and good chronological order of the history. You deserve more recognition and you’ll for sure make it big
This one really was not a case of expectations vs reality.
Once the alpha was released the fan base had a tangible albeit unfinished game that was good and they liked it. The update that ended up on steam hindered many of the fun features and flat out removed some others the fan base was out spoken about loving.
Less expectations vs reality, more what the players wanted vs what the dev thought would work.
Also the fact that he essentially ran away with the money that got with the expectation that he would use the money to make a good finished game.
Passion and perfection can end in destruction , for both the creation and the creator alike...
I'm a blacksmith who restarting from scratch ones again do to such things... I've hit both the wall of trying to perfect to the point of destroying the item with all the reheats and changes till all my work would crumble in my hands....sometimes literally...
I've also hit the lows of trying to fix that problem but over shooting and just making mindless garbage in a vain hope of making money to pay for the actual project I want some where in a fake future I sold myself...
These both are a horrible way to work, and even worse with major depression problems, to work so hard and it fail can leave one stuck in bed exhausted at life it's self.
While "creating" garbage just to try and "fix" where you think your going wrong , can leave you feeling like a soulless zombie feed off others just to shable by in life...
I kinda feel though this is what happened here.
I couldn't even imagine feeling like this and having so many other people watching and waiting on you...
I hope at some point he finds his balance and can use his clear potential he has.
And I hope I have learned that middle ground to for my own work...
Being a "artist" (I hate how that makes me sound) can be painful and feel trapped in your own mind and life.
Wow this is a blast from the past. I remember seeing this and even people on steam in some community pages talking about it if I remember correctly. I thought it was cancelled years ago.
What really makes me angry about this game, is how an indie dev's biggest problem is finding a community. It doesn't matter how good or bad your game is, if you can't build a community around the game or you, it will flop.
Now, Wollay had such a big community, that even after 3 years of no upates, you could still find people talking about the game in its reddit. To have a passionate community like this is any indie dev's dream. I get the pressure and negativity would affect him, of course, but disappearing seems like such a terrible decision in all ways to think about it :/
Definitely wasn't the best decision for him, but also arguably hard to judge him for it, considering how it essentially was *the* passion project that he put countless hours and years into, only to see the majority wind up disappointed and call it god awful. Like I dunno about you, but with the amount of work put in, it's easy to assume that would be a very soul crushing thing to deal with. Either way, this really did turn out to be a sad tragedy.
@@norrecvizharan1177 I'm not talking about after the game actually released, in that case yea, I don't really judge him.
I meant like... there were many mistakes way earlier. if he stuck to that passionate (alpha) community, listened to them, wondered what they thought was so great, maybe, just maybe, the game would've gone in a direction that most people would enjoy. It only ended up as a disappointment to everyone because the game was created in a vaccuum, where, I assume, the negativty was floating around his head constantly, causing him to redesign things that most normal players would enjoy. To be honest, I still don't judge him since it must've been scary to suddenly have so many eyes on you, but still, so so sad to see the game end up this way :c
@@minoxs Maybe it was just a passion project and the guy didn't really want the attention? Like I get it, a lot of people struggle to break into the already highly competitive market, but you can't blame him for something he probably didn't even want in the first place.
@@loren5432 That's why I don't blame him. It's just really sad to see this happen, Cube World could've fostered an even bigger community, which would've been lovely.
@@loren5432 dont release the game then, and dont charge 15 dollars for said game and wonder why people are pissed you ruin it after years of silence.
I remember when this was a crazy popular game. Wondered what it was called and what happened.
A key part of being a developer game or not is understanding that releasing often and not being afraid of failure is freeing but also super hard to get your head into. Concept is simple if you release regularly then bugs don't last long as you release a fix pretty soon after its found. Regular beta versions set the mindset of "there will be bugs and that is ok" in the community (as long as you fix these bugs as they are reported **STARES AT STAR CITIZEN and its known issue list longer than changelogs**)
just a couple days ago wollay posted a link for a new blog with screenshots for cube world omega which he wants to develop following the spirit of the alpha version. good luck!
Oh damn, the memories. I remember when that new CubeWorld got released. I was super annoyed those region locked items were introduced.
Someone very quickly released a table for Cheat Engine that had a "cheat" to disable restrictions on items.
Conspiracy: the DDoS attacks were Mojang and Minecraft trying to eliminate cube based competition
based
I was thinking it was steam, to push for steam release
hmmmmmmmm
Douchebags are gonna douchbag . I seriously don't understand ppl that go out of their way and waste everyone's time to ddos a niche game.
@@serbronnoftheblackwater798 at least minecraft gets updates
"...or be a coward like me and get the whole village to help you out"
I'd definitely be a coward like you xD
Cows are actually god tier early game
I've never played this game, but your comments on perfectionist attitudes leading to more time, leading to more expectations, leading to more pressure, leading to more time? Spot on. I struggle with that a lot, but at a certain point you just gotta release something.
Good luck to the dev, I hope the game comes along!
The game won't.