The Magical Realms of Tír na nÓg: Escape from Necron 7 – Revenge of Cuchulainn: The Official Game of the Movie – Chapter 2 of the Hoopz Barkley SaGa, or far more reasonably called, Barkley 2, is an ambitious planned sequel to Barkley, Shut Up and Jam: Gaiden, a cult classic RPG by Tales of Game’s (no, this isn’t a typo). This sequel was pitched on Kickstarter in late 2012 and was very successful but now, after a nearly two year period of silence, former team members opened up on the state of things and it isn’t good.

Barkley 2 made $120,335 off of its Kickstarter, more than triple its initial goal of $30,000. The project attempted to do regular updates, but it all stopped in October of 2017. The game’s social media accounts went silent. Everything about the game went silent.

That is, until June 2nd. GZ, one of the original creators of the first Barkley, made a sudden post in Something Awful’s Barkley thread under the name of Hiratio to tell what’s up with the game. GZ was not involved in the original Kickstarter, which was led by fellow original creators Bort and Chef Boyardee (or cboyardee). He was brought in 3 years after the Kickstarter and found that there was a whole lot of problems that eventually led to him quitting 3 months ago.

At that point, the project had little money and was being horribly mismanaged. The game was unorganized, feature creep was setting in with a whole lot of half-baked ideas – from a standalone “B-Ball Tactics” game to complex time systems that may or may not have been necessary.

Not helping things was that core members Chef Boyardee and Bort ended up leaving the project in the 2015/2016 time period. In the meantime, Tales of Game’s is being managed by Bort’s brother, bhroom, who not only had nothing to do with the original Barkley but reportedly had little experience in game development. Having a boss with no idea how things are made isn’t a good thing moving forward, especially if they’re in charge of decisions.

“The reason I even agreed to commit to this project was because I was told I would be able to make executive decisions if necessary,” GZ said. “Any time I brought up any issue it was immediately turned into some hour long meeting or justification of why it’s “needed.”

Lazrool (posting as Gortarius) was a fellow member that quit soon after GZ, and he posted his own story in the Something Awful thread. Early development had awful compile times because an NPC named the Dark Draker, was copy-pasted everywhere to give the illusion of work getting done, which is probably a perfect microcosm of this whole debacle. At the very least, the Dark Draker became a meme on that thread due to how absurd it is. Things reportedly got better in 2017 when a new scripting system was implemented, but at that point, the writers of the game were gone, which was bad considering that the writing of the first Barkley was what gave it its spirit.

Another former team member, Bisse, went more in-depth with the problems of combat. To make a long story short, he described Barkley 2‘s combat to be as if fast-paced run and gun action was placed in a hardcore RPG world, where enemies are slow and methodical.

The result of that is that combat was not fun and so horribly skewed in the player’s favor, that there would be no reason to sincerely engage with the game’s RPG layer, like the eight different weapon types the game had at one point. Giving limited ammo to force resource management was attempted, but that meant leaving players as a sitting duck when ammo was out. “No amount of bringing up how this is not actually fun to play could change management’s direction on combat or even have an open honest discussion about it,” Bisse said.

Pretty much the only team member that’s walked away with a positive attitude, and has been open about their experiences is Barkley 2‘s artist, FrankieSmileShow. The Kickstarter money provided him a regular salary for a year and a half, that enabled him to quit his day job, and working on Barkley 2 cultivated his skills for his own projects.

“I am immensely grateful for this project, and have learned a lot from it, from both what went well and what has been going poorly,” FrankieSmileShow said. “If I see some real progress in the project and they ask me to make some more assets to take this home, I’ll be happy to do it.”

Chef soon made his own appearance in the Something Awful thread, openly acknowledging that the project was just too ambitious. He had apparently left the game after the sudden death of his mother, and was too intimidated by the scope of the project and the fear of failure to hop back in. Chef is still involved in games though, as he apparently wrote for the recently released Katana Zero, under his real name, Eric Shumaker.

“I think we were just too young and too ambitious and I want to say we tried to fly too close to the sun, but I don’t think we ever took off. What we have is great, but I failed. And I’m sorry. I don’t know what I can do to at least partially make things right, but I welcome suggestions,” Chef said.

I think of all the issues with the game the true and most egregious fault was lack of updates and transparency. That is all on me and I apologize to especially all the KS backers and to everyone else who cares.

— Hoopz Barkley (@TalesOfGames) June 2, 2019

Soon after GZ’s story, the Tales of Game’s Twitter account, run by bhroom, came out of hiatus to address concerns. The Kickstarter also finally got an update to inform backers of the state of the game. The reason why the Kickstarter was not updated for so long was because bhroom thought it’d be better to push back announcements until Barkley 2 had good news, instead of just being transparent about things.

Bhroom vows to finish Barkley 2, even announcing that he brought on a new part-time coder. He also claimed that he’ll provide another update within 3 days. It’s hard to tell if Barkley 2 will ever actually be finished, especially with the tales of mismanagement and feature creep former members brought forward.

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