Hello, backers!
Director Don, producer Lindsay, and litigation attorney Leonard, here. We know you all have a lot of questions. Here is an official update.
TL;DR: The Starr Mazer project is alive and recovering from the many months of damage that was done by a legal issue regarding our former composer. A lawsuit has been filed in federal court to protect Starr Mazer and Starr Mazer: DSP from a false copyright claim attack. There will likely be some additional delay before we can report that full development has resumed as we finish the lawsuit and seek a new publishing partner. We have team members ready to go. We are sorry for all of the turmoil and especially for the lack of an update to you, our backers.
First, an Apology
We are incredibly sorry for the delay in officially updating all of you via Kickstarter. In this update, we hope to shed some light as to why as well as explain some of the circumstances that weve faced over the last year. We had hoped to post this update during the summer when we assumed the lawsuit would have had more answers, but it has taken longer than we initially expected. We are not trying to offer an excuse or scapegoat, we take full responsibility for not updating you sooner. We just want to offer information and an understanding of our position.
Development Recap: 2015-2016
Our entire team was blown away by the support we received in early 2015 with the successful Kickstarter launch. Development was proceeding in full swing from 2015 through most of 2016. During 2015 development, we built an engine and spent many weeks slotting content into that engine before PAX West 2015. This alpha-level demo included point-and-click elements, SHMUP elements, and a small story that would be built into a larger story for the main game. This was shown off on the PAX Twitch Stream as well as at the Adult Swim Games booth.
While the engine was functional, we found it to be incredibly difficult to efficiently slot content into the game. Since Starr Mazer is a semi-procedural game, each asset required a huge amount of effort to define its place in the game and how it would interact with other assets. We determined that the time cost to get content into the game was prohibitive and we would either need to rebuild the engine entirely or build a toolset to accommodate. We, very publically, chose the latter and were open about Starr Mazer being pushed into 2016 due to the addition of the toolset, affectionately named Mazer Maker. This was announced near fall of 2015 on our thrice-weekly Twitch stream on which we interacted with backers and viewers three times a week, every week, for all of 2015 and half of 2016.
As we spun up development on the toolset we amicably separated with Adult Swim Games, with whom we mutually agreed that the Starr Mazer suite was better handled in whole by a single publisher. We found that publisher in AGM/Playism. From early 2016 to autumn 2016 we worked on writing for the game's 20+ story modules, art concepts, animation concepts, and primarily, the games engine and toolset.
It is at this time that our internal issues started with our former composer - the breadth of which spans personal turmoil through to publisher separation. Effectively, when the health issues and burgeoning aggression began with our former composer, our publisher lost confidence in our team. This was only explained to us fully in a recent meeting this month with our current publisher representatives at Playism. As a result, development was forced to pause early this year.
To boil things down, the bulk of our development has been put into the engine/toolset with work also having been done on art, writing, and world-building.
What's the Deal with Starr Mazer: DSP?
There has been a bit of confusion around what Starr Mazer: DSP is, how it came about, and where funding for that project came from. Allow us to clarify!
Throughout 2015 we'd been working with Pixeljam on some of the SHMUP concepts for Starr Mazer, as Pixeljam has a strong track record in those action elements, and we have a close relationship. While doing so we discovered that there was a viable game in a Starr Mazer spinoff-prequel. We thought that since Starr Mazer proper was going to take longer, it might be nice for the fans to release something smaller in the interim. A "Fallout shelter" to Starr Mazer's "Fallout 4", if you will.
Funding for Starr Mazer: DSP never came from the Kickstarter budget and was covered by our publisher, Playism. As this would come at no development cost to us (our artists, though still producing concept art, were effectively waiting for the toolset to be complete enough to work directly on Starr Mazer, and could be put to work on DSP assets which could be shared between games), we decided it would be a great idea. During early 2016, our artists split time between concept art and DSP, with our animator focused on DSP animations as he would otherwise just be waiting for the engine/toolset.
Alex Mauer
As briefly stated in a previous section, in 2016 Alex Mauer began to make illegitimate claims of copyright ownership to Starr Mazer and Starr Mazer: DSP.
Initially, we thought that the situation could be dealt with quietly out of consideration for the people and circumstances involved. But, as the last 10 months progressed, it became harder and harder to be quiet about what was happening.
Alexs wholly incorrect claims did a lot of damage. They directly damaged our relationships with our development team, investors, and community. As you read earlier, we lost our publisher as a result. Instead of creating our dream game we had to start damage control when Alex began to harass our publisher and became more public with her claims in the form of issuing DMCA takedown notices to anything Starr Mazer/Starr Mazer: DSP related.
A Federal Lawsuit
Our response has been measured in an attempt to be compassionate. We initially attempted to counter the illegitimate claims without court intervention. But, as Alex began sending what would become over 70 DMCA takedown notices, it became necessary to file a lawsuit against her in order to protect the games and our customers from further illegitimate claims. We hired Leonard to pursue the litigation against Alex in June 2017. We did so with the generous support of a GoFundMe campaign set up by Leonard to cover the cost of this action.
We asked the court to restrain Alex Mauer from issuing further illegitimate copyright claims on Starr Mazer and any related content such as videos and Lets Plays. The court granted our request and we now have a court order protecting Starr Mazer and Starr Mazer: DSP from further takedowns. A timeline, including many of the important court documents, can be found here.
The Federal Judge in our case gave Alex until September 25th, 2017, to answer our lawsuit. On September 26th, 2017, we asked the Court to Default Alex for not responding. Later that same day, a day after Alexs response was due and with over two months extra time to respond, Alex emailed a one-page response to the Judges Clerk.
We will be responding with the full force of law in asking the Court to recognize the Default and require Alex to show Good Cause for the delay. We dont expect that she will be able to show Good Cause.
Once the litigation is resolved, we will have a Court Order showing that Imagos and Don own their respective copyrights as well as a finding that Alex has, indeed, abused the law and interfered with our ability to make our games.
We will keep you updated on Kickstarter about the lawsuit on a regular basis from here on out.
Additional Questions
We are trying to address as many questions as possible in this update, but we realize we may not catch everything! Weve outlined some additional questions and answers below. If you have more questions, please feel free to reach out to us.
"How much money is left, and will you need more funds?"
As stated during the Kickstarter campaign, and very regularly after that, we brought 80k of our own funds, and the KS funds, to bear to get us to the halfway point of what we thought we'd need. We streamed religiously during the KS campaign, and Don was in numerous published interviews and videos stating this. We thought we were clear. We can see now that we were not clear enough. When we pushed longer than expected, it came at a cost. The toolset was estimated to take between 3 and 4 months, but ended up taking more than twice that. As such, we moved into reliance on publisher funds in 2016. With the stepping back of our publisher after the events involving our former composer, we no longer have that monetary support.
"Who owns DSP considering it was developed by another studio for another publisher?"
All Starr Mazer IP belongs to Imagos Softworks (a brand within Imagos Films LLC). We are set to share income from DSP with Pixeljam at an equal split, but ownership of the title is ours. We have yet to receive any substantial income from DSP, due to friction between Playism and Imagos during the issue with our former composer. That friction has since been dispelled, and a monthly reporting/payout deal has been struck. At present, Playism retains the publishing rights to DSP, but has been very open about being willing to concede those rights at cost or recoup if we find an interested investor/publisher for Starr Mazer who wants access to the entire suite.
"How are you doing with finding new publishers?"
Quite well. We have a handful of very strong prospects and are in active talks.
"How is the development progress on Starr Mazer, then?
The shortest version is that we have an engine and toolset, both where you would expect them to be with the time put into them. We also have a demo of a new UI that our art team cooked up while we were working on the aforementioned engine and toolset. Both the engine and toolset are incomplete, as they would be at this point; we intend to refine them further as we develop the game proper. We effectively have the machine to make LEGO bricks, the design of many of the LEGO bricks and a tool to help us put the LEGO bricks together. We need the resources to build the bricks and package up the set.
How has all of this affected the release date?"
We estimate 14-18 months once we're back on track. This estimate is exacerbated by the fact that 4 of those months will be additional pre-production now that our team has largely moved on to keep themselves in work while the core Imagos team works to get the game back on track.
"Why the lack of updates?"
A direct answer from Don: The supporters who regularly followed our thrice-weekly Twitch presence were clear as to the status of development, but it was wholly an error on my part in not reaching further than our regular broadcasts. I realize now that this was an error, and we should have been more widely broadcasting our message than we were. I openly fall on my sword on this one. We were working pretty intensely on having a show 3 times a week, and that show had a ton of backer followers (and others) and I concede that I thought we were doing "enough." I understand that I was wrong in this assumption. Once issues began with our former composer, we began fighting the fires of this problem internally. I was shocked into silence since last year when things went dark. This was an issue that caused a once close friend to become hostile, and a dream of many to be put on hold. It was a perfect storm of personal and professional turmoil. While, in retrospect, we absolutely should have updated Kickstarter sooner - in many moments over the last several months, it just felt too dark and too lonely to do so.
Whats Next?
Right now our focus is on two things:
1. Finish the lawsuit and move on from the entire scenario that started it.
2. Lock down a publisher in order to reboot and complete development.
In regards to Kickstarter updates - we will keep you informed much more frequently as information unfolds. In future updates, we will include news on work toward the two items listed above as well as any art or progress that we have to show. This will be in an effort to inform all of you more frequently, as well as to be as transparent as possible while we try to recover from a particularly rocky year-plus.
We are still here, we still intend (and are ready to) finish development of this game and get it into your hands. We have been put up against some very difficult circumstances and failed to communicate those circumstances clearly to you, our backers. For that, again, we cannot apologize enough.
Thank you for your understanding so far - we hope this update has made the events surrounding this project more clear. Please always feel free to reach out here or on Discord, Twitter, and Facebook if you have questions and want to continue the discussion.
We are doing our best and working, on a daily basis, on this and will keep you updated.
Yours,
Don, Lindsay, & Leonard
