You know, I started wondering recently whether his last post was precisedly because he received a letter demanding proof or providing reimbursement, and that he doesn't actually have jackshit.
Someone mentioned that on the Kickstarter as well. I don't really have a good response to it, other than putting it up really only feeds us. Proof for a third party (the Trades Bureau, for instance) is likely to happen separately and discretely.
The other thing is that I kinda feel like a lot of people jumping onto the "it's a scam!" thing don't really have a full grasp of the timeline and challenges. The game started gaining notice in August of 2014 (at the latest - that's the creation of this topic, *after* lots of attention on indiedb and tigsource), and by that time there were screenshots, corroborated pieces of news, massive QAs with Josh, and other piles of evidence that suggest, at the very least, a stuffed design document and concept art. Given that Josh is a developer and Joe is not an artist, concept art is less likely than some kind of tech demo.
That's already far more effort put into a scam than a scam is going to require, and that was a month before the Kickstarter was created.
Then the Kickstarter itself. The original intent of the Kickstarter was just art. That was it. We have significant circumstantial evidence that art was purchased and integrated.
Then stretch goals hit, notably Procedural Generation and Endless Simulation. These things are *hard*. We're sitting on the Dwarf Fortress forums. We know they're hard. Not only are they hard, they were explicitly picked back up from the cutting-room floor, where they were left because they were hard.
A good six-nine months of the delay was because Josh had to start from the ground up to make an engine that could support procedural generation and endless simulation. This makes sense - the existing engine wouldn't and couldn't support it, because the decision was originally made that it didn't need to, in favor of quick iteration and getting something out. (As a dev myself, I do want to note - and did note at the time - that 6-9 months for a fundamental rewrite of something at that scale is actually quite good, but still easily within the realm of believable.)
I don't have a specific date for when this engine overhaul ended. This was only really detailed on the forums, and that section was nuked from orbit. Probably around June/July 2015, if I had to guess. Not mentioned is the family medical issues as well.
Mid-October 2015 he publishes the First Turns/New Map video, with a promised series, that never materializes.
The likeliest reason the series never materialized is because, on advancing to the next few turns, he ran into the AI issues he then spent the next *very long* time trying to fix. This is also about when he went full-recluse, and the only real communication we had was courtesy of Serenseven / Sean acting as an intermediary. From Sean, we received interesting updates, and the news that the problem was with the AI. Also reasonable - AI is not exactly easy in the "easy" cases, and suffice to say that Josh hadn't set himself up to make it easy. Communication eventually ceased through Sean (in retrospect, understandable, because everything that made it to the forums just increased the vitriol).
And that's basically the entirety of 2016, other than a few unexpected map redesigns that crop up.
January 2017, Josh crops up on Kickstarter and provides new information. He tweaked the map even more, sure, but notably - he gave up on his original novel AI implementation and went to something far more tried-and-true.
That alone covers multiple map redesigns (at best actual, full-on, redesigns - at worst, time spent in Photoshop mocking up maps.) that no one asked for or wanted. QA sessions that go into crazy detail of a vision for the game. And more.
And on top of that, each step is pretty believable on its own. These are problems developers face. These aren't easy problems, either.
And that's not even touching on botched map maker and mod tool releases (that on their own prove *something* was done, even if they don't exactly do much), more massive QA sections on the forums, and other tidbits here and there.
That's why I don't think it's a direct, organized scam. We're talking about massive piles of work *just to fake game development* over the course of *2.5 years* for a measly $80k split between 2 people, less whatever art commissions cost.
The alternative explanation is that Josh had this great idea, actually began programming it, bit off more than he could chew in stretch goals, and out of a mix of pride and misplaced honor burned significant amounts of time trying to swallow that which he couldn't chew.
Or, summarized, one side is that two people went into elaborate detail for a scam, for about $17k/yr, and the other is that a developer fell prey to something so common for devs to wander face-first into, that it actually has a name - scope creep.
That altogether is why I say there's *so much* effort put into it for a scam.
