No, not that Crystalis
It’s funny. I never thought I’d get to write such a thing as an Autopsy Report, but after the recent developments at CrystalisOnline, I guess we can safely call it dead.
You see, Crystalis Online was born right after Pokenet, a Free and Open Sourced Pokemon MMO, Ceased and Desisted to exist. Back then, we were a happy-go-lucky little group of friends and some Indian asswipe who pretended to be boss, but once the tough decisions needed to be done? He suddenly became busy, unavailable.
This Fishy character liked to take all the credit but none of the responsibilities. The emails and calls we made with the lawyers? He wasn’t involved. Such a good boss.
So, after Pokenet disbanded, they decided to clone Pokenet, without the Trademarks, and decided to call it after an abandoned SNK Franchise, hoping, I guess, that SNK won’t take legal action against a bunch kids over a dead game. I decided I wouldn’t be helping them, if that Fishy character, who really lives up to his nickname, was going to be involved in boss-ly position. And he was.
April became September, and the project was as dead as when we disbanded Pokenet. Sure, they had a couple of monster drafts, but that’s about it.
With apologies to Jim Davis
With Fshy(Short for slimy scumbag) nowhere in sight, I decided to help them out. The mistake I made was falling in love with the project. I started organizing the developers, assigning them tasks, and making damned sure that it wasn’t a Pokemon clone, but something entirely new.
We like to think of #Crystalis as a Science/Fantasy Real Time Action Battle Tactical Monster Catching Massive Multiplayer Role Playing Game
It became a Space Pokemon on a Chessboard on Steroids. We grabbed the best concepts from Pokemon, Digimon, Monster Rancher, Final Fantasy Tactics, Stargate, Firefly and a dozen other things. I guess Inception is real. They actually believed its their idea.
September became November. We had our concept. We had creatures. We had move-sets. We had a story. We had an incomplete engine but with the schematics to finish it. And then Fshy returned, and was welcomed like some sort of messiah. He asked how his project was doing. His project.
He never left me. He said he was just going to buy a pack of cigars a few years ago and never came back. -Nelson Muntz
I’ll be the first to admit. Fshy was Crystalis’ dad. I was the foster parent that adopted the abandoned child. I foolishly thought nurturing it, caring for it, raising it and educating it would be enough. I was wrong.
Not only had I organized the project, assigned tasks to the members, listened attentively for feedback, promoted a healthy Open Development, where the ideas where not kept in the dark, but in the light. I wanted to eliminate the Anonymous Prick Ambient that Crystalis had going on with everyone hiding behind cute nicknames, and start treating the kids like adults.
In the short time I joined the project, I wrote about 10,000 lines of code. 4,000 of those were for the Game Server, which while incomplete, was capable of logins, chatting, had a rewritten network engine, an awesome (If I may say so) Database Manager, the Network Protocols cleanly (and humorously) documented.
I also worked on the ‘Web Tools’, which were a frontend to an SQLite database that would display creature data, move data, abilities as well as players, their teams, their wins and loses, and helped create a Development Diary, detailing what we had been working on each few days, a Twitter account that tried to keep updated and an awesome, and detailed chart that had the schematics on what to do next and who did what.
The actual Planner had over 100 tasks to be done.
I wasn’t going to let some unqualified hobbo come back after I gave the project momentum and keep the credit, was I? The fights were public, and I guess that scared the children. For the record, I know I started the fights, it was my mistake to believe the kids had my back.
After what seemed forever, we decided to let the children vote to see out of the 9 of us, who’d be the 5 members that would make all the big decisions on the project. I figured, why not? They surely are mature enough to know what’s best for them, right? Wrong.
The candidates, and their qualifications. I marked in bold the ones that actually contributed something.
- Drawig (Wrote the Game Client, which is currently a glorified, crappy chatroom)
- Firefly (Calls himself a Browncoat, but Turncoat is what he really is. Thinks space exploration is his idea.)
- Fshy (Like herpes, you think you’ve finally got rid of it, and it comes back to haunt you)
- Gama (A drunk & rich kid. He paid for the server, but that’s about it)
- KPKarl (GNU Hugger. Stallmanite. Scared of JavaScript warming his laptop. Hates being called a Stallmanite)
- LordAdmiral (Worked out the creature’s move-set system with Firefly)
- Nushio (I’ve talked plenty about me. )
- Omnimon-X (Helped develop the chatroom, worked mostly on the server side)
- Wyverii (Awesome spriter. This girl’s got talent)
The system was simple. Each of the 9 members would have 9 ‘votes’ to spend on the candidates they felt were more qualified to run the project. A grand total of 81 votes and the one rule was that you couldn’t vote for yourself. The team had my back, right? What could go wrong?
The results?
- Gama: 21 votes
- Fshy: 20 votes
- Firefly: 13 votes
- LordAdmiral: 8 votes
- Drawig: 7 votes
I received a lovely 6 votes. Out of 81. 3 of which came from Omnimon, 2 from Wyverii and 1 from Gama. The traitorous bastards. When it came to deciding who was worth more for the project, they voted me out.
And what’s hilarious is that the bloodsucking leeches acted surprised when I decided I would no longer help them out. When push came to shove? They shoved me out. Like if I was a silent slave, whose opinions were worthless. They just needed the manual labor. They needed a tool. I should’ve seen this coming. They actually asked if they could have a copy of the Webtools, which I never commited. The answer is No. Fuck no.
Human Resources are human first, resources second. --J. Garbers.
And that’s what killed the project. They decided that the one guy that kept working, day after day, helping push the development instead of letting it stall wasn’t worth their time. They were loyal to their hobbo dad. They were wrong. They dug their own grave.
Too bad. It would’ve been an awesome MMO.
That, they were.
Rest in Peace
