The future looks quite grim for Greed Monger today, as its lead programmer, James Proctor, announced on the game’s social media accounts [the Facebook post has been deleted as of this morning -Eds.] that he is leaving the project and that a planned update is now canceled. His departure means that the game effectively has no dedicated team.
Proctor pointed fans to a forum thread on RPG Codex in which he attempts to explain what’s been going on behind the scenes of this crowdfunded MMO, including the reason in-development screenshots looked so much worse than the ones posted on Kickstarter. “When it came time to start paging in the terrain at the view distances we needed Unity’s performance just wasn’t good enough… So we had to rework the terrain,” he posted.
As the sole programmer, Proctor was working for free on the promise of being paid a share when the game went live. He asserts that Lead Designer Jason Appleton was pressuring him to stay: “It’s been a long time in the making… The last couple of years working on GM hasn’t been much fun since Jason threatened me with a lawsuit if I left. I now was being forced in my eyes to be there, instead of working on it because it was something I enjoyed.”
[Source: Facebook (now deleted), RPG Codex, #2. Thanks to Xanward for the tip!]
