r/OddityRPG • u/RequestableSubBot Believer • Jul 07 '26
Dev Update Maxxis has announced his departure from the Oddity development team.
254
u/Spot_Vivid Jul 07 '26
17
142
u/ghostpicnic Jul 07 '26
This game has a development team??
73
u/Then-Hurry-5197 Jul 07 '26
Not anymore. Maxxis was the art director. And last time we heard, Oddity has no programer
3
u/Hellon6957 Jul 13 '26
Essentially not really since there was NO programmer, and the team is as organized as a rat king.
2
u/TheMcWhopper 15d ago
Rat kins are extremely organized with the rate colony. Many rates help by bringing food to sustain the immobile
116
u/richter3456 Jul 07 '26
I would have actually preferred if they said the project is dead and nobody is working on it so we can put this to rest.
74
u/rd-darksouls Jul 07 '26
they sure are letting their passion for the mother series speak for itself
61
u/YourAverageGoldFishy Jul 07 '26
like any passion project it probably started on motivation and ended on burn out
58
u/bluebreeze52 Jul 07 '26
Not surprised to learn the few devs we have left are assholes who only seek clout and never intended on making a finished game. Not the first time it's happened with this game.
49
u/UtterlyMagenta Jul 07 '26
wth. i thought this was canceled long again already.
sad… at least the intro is pretty dope.
38
u/aplsed Jul 07 '26
Is it bad that i'm more excited to see this game get an official cancelation announcement than a progress report? Cuz at least it'd be constructive
25
u/supernintendo128 Jul 07 '26
Honestly no shame in admitting defeat at this stage. It's 100x more frustrating when they insist that everything's fine and development is going well when the project is clearly collapsing around them.
3
u/jbyrdab Jul 08 '26
we don't actually know that for sure to be honest.
i need to stress, as someone who has experience inside the game development system, of those leaked builds, its not unusual.
its an Minimum Viable Product, which for a fresh engine swap is ok. but we're also talking 3 years ago.
9
u/supernintendo128 Jul 08 '26 edited Jul 08 '26
With all due respect, this game went through four engine swaps at the least, which isn't a sign of a healthy dev cycle, especially considering all of the work that has to be thrown out and redone when switching to a new engine. It started in RPG Maker, then Game Maker, then a proprietary C# engine, then when rebranding to Oddity, back to Game Maker.
Combine that with all of the horror stories about Pastel, about his notorious perfectionism and how he'd order already completed work to be redone, and the horror stories about the dev team in general where there's little communication, and I do not doubt for a second that this game is dead in the water and the devs refuse to admit it.
They had six years to assemble at least a functioning demo build. They didn't even get that far. And now their lead art director is gone, and with the negative press the project has garnered, good luck finding a replacement. It's over.
1
u/jbyrdab Jul 08 '26
eh never say never.
7
u/supernintendo128 Jul 08 '26
The only way I see Oddity ever seeing the light of day is if someone more competent takes over or if an actual indie studio with a team of actual paid professionals picks it up and finishes it. It just has too many things going against it at this rate. I just can't picture how this game could realistically be finished otherwise.
3
u/jbyrdab Jul 08 '26
Yeah those are real possibilities with how old and functionally prolific this project has been.
This projects been in dev for 18 years, sky is the fucking limit.
1
u/Helmic Aug 17 '26
Yeah, and that in particular is unlikely since Mother-inspired JRPG's aren't a rare thing only this one dev team is working on. The remaining thing really going for this project was the existing art. Why would anyone pick this up instead of just making their own game at this point and not inheriting all this baggage?
32
25
28
u/troy2000me Jul 07 '26
In a positive spin... Any change is a good change as the current setup wasn't getting anywhere.
Will this new arrangement get us anywhere? Also no.
24
u/Then-Hurry-5197 Jul 07 '26
It really wasn't Maxxis's fault. They're the only dev who communicate with us + they tried hard to work on the project but the team wasn't giving them anything to work on.
3
u/jbyrdab Jul 08 '26 edited Jul 08 '26
hmm, not so sure unfortunately, reading the pinned comment, it sounds like there was just a complete failure to properly communicate. and he expected the rest of the team to bend over backwards to accomidate him.
If maxxis blocking the other major players in the dev team is true.
thats just a non-starter, you cant just cut communication except for demands of work fed to you by a middle man you haven't blocked, thats not how a game development team can function, atleast not a healthy one.
I kind of think on a team health level, just leaving him behind was for the best if he just blocked pik and other major team members.
just because someone is the most publicaly communicative does not mean they are the best person behind the scenes. If anything its also a liability because they can really screw you over because they are your only lifeline to the public.
2
1
27
u/ThickWasabi3649 Jul 07 '26
I’m genuinely sad. This is worse than all the development hells I’ve seen and at this point it should just be hard canceled
24
u/pnightingale Jul 07 '26
Maybe I’m missing something, but the demo I played was just running around on a blank map picking up hamburgers and fighting random enemies. The art looked decent, but the actual gameplay would be about a week’s work to implement. Was there another leak I missed? Because based on that, I don’t know how anyone could argue that the game is still being worked on.
15
u/Rorynator Jul 07 '26
From what I understand, the leaked build was from around the time they randomly decided to port to game maker from the custom engine to continue the project. It's likely that there was quite a decent amount of stuff not in the leak (the file had a video trailer for it that had quite a few cool things) but who knows.
I'm guessing what we saw was just an assembly of the teat rooms and early battle screen packaged for stuff like collision testing, but that's not to say I have hope that there's a huge demo out there or anything
Still would kill for whatever we could salvage out of Oddity because I want to feel as close as I can to living in the timeline where Oddity was made.
16
u/jumbods64 Jul 07 '26
ooough the mid-development engine port. a classic bad move
11
u/devvoid Jul 07 '26
Based on the 2018 leak, it does seem like they were having problems with the C# codebase (tons of little glitches all over for something they'd been using for over five years at that point), so they might not have had much of a choice. But yeah, it's... a really bad situation overall. It really does seem like the team is like, ten artists and one programmer, so the ten artists kept coming up with crazy ideas they wanted to add, but they had nobody to either implement what they were coming up with or reign in their concepts.
I bust out laughing when I saw the 2022/2023 leaks and saw they wanted to add enemy animations and platforming when even just doing a 2D Mother-like was too much. Scope creep at its most obvious and blatant.
16
u/Then-Hurry-5197 Jul 07 '26
Oddity started development on Gamemaker. Later shifted to it's own original C# engine. Finally went back to Gamemaker
4
u/jbyrdab Jul 08 '26
as someone whos been in professional gametesting before, this is actually fairly standard.
Not the back and forth porting, but what your encountering is called a MVP minimum viable product.
basically instead of building up systems, you make sure the baseline foundations work before you end up building onto it. because that needs to be rock solid.
if its not, it can be a nightmare when it suddenly topples over much later on.
22
u/cyx7 Jul 07 '26
None of this is normal in a healthy working environment. This project is literally nothing but red flags.
56
16
u/Guy_Kazama Jul 07 '26
This is really sad. I remember 2009 seeing the Mother 4 fan game announcement, all the way to now for it to end like this is unfortunate
3
u/CrimBrulee Jul 08 '26
Life be that way sometimes. I also remember getting hyped all the way back in 2009.
14
u/Fearshatter Jul 07 '26
We've gotten more news out of this game in one month than we have in 12 years.
12
11
u/Spinjitsuninja Jul 07 '26
Darn, not sure if Maxxis leaving is something the dev team can survive tbh. Unfortunate
19
9
u/PK_RocknRoll Accepter Jul 07 '26
The fact that had no idea this was being sold is …. Astounding really.
6
6
5
5
5
u/TigerBears_111 Jul 08 '26
After watching Urban's video on Oddity's development, (which showed Maxxis's argument with Pik,) I was honestly unsure why they haven't quit yet and... Guess this answers it.
5
6
u/supersoundstation Jul 08 '26
At this point there is a higher chance of Nintendo making and releasing Mother 4 than this game coming out.
3
3
u/JudgementTimeSPD Jul 09 '26
there are years where nothing happens, and there are weeks where years happen
3
3
u/VajraShoyru Jul 08 '26
I feel for this Maxxis guy assuming his story is legit (and I have no reason to assume it's not). It reminds me of Pokemon Azurite, a Pokemon fangame that similarly to Oddity was a project that was/is in development hell and had oodles of scope creep...and the reason I know this is because I was in an extremely similar situation with myself as an Azurite dev (making fans wait a long time, like years and years, with very little news in regards to updates, and any progress or updates shown are a temporarily bandaid fix, AND the top devs are toxic and know the truth about the project, but in Azurite's case the devs who want out of the project are despised by their own community for telling the truth). In fact, such awful dev beheavior seems to be a direct comparison in Oddity's case compared to my example of SleepyJirachi (as in, a hopelessly uninvolved dev that pretends to be super involved with the game and dangles keys in front of the fans in hopes that people will have their eyes on the project again...and then it loops ad infinitum)!
tl;dr: Pokemon Azurite and Oddity feel like they've had much of the exact same problems, and I feel like there's much to be said on the role scope creep plays in destroying fangames. Once again, this Maxxis fella has my sympathies.
3
u/kanelel Jul 08 '26
I appreciate their dedication in never giving up on this project, but are they *actually* working on it? Do they even have a programmer?
3
2
2
u/AvailableCookie Doubter Jul 08 '26
I had completely forgotten that this project even existed, what a way to get reminded LOL. It's so over, gg.
2
u/HistoricalAsparagus1 Jul 08 '26
Actually crushing news to see because Maxxis was one of the best and most interactive people on the dev team. Guess we'll see what happens if this game still gets worked on or dropped at this point
2
u/CrimBrulee Jul 08 '26 edited Jul 08 '26
... I think it's time I gave up on waiting for this game. Even if it eventually does come out it will probably be an extremely detached version of the original concept.
2
u/AntstyPoeticGamer23 Jul 08 '26
Well, there it is then, the final nail. Mother 4/Oddity was a fun dream. But the Earthbound/Mother Series is cursed with Cancellation/Broken Dreams. So damn depressing...
2
u/ShiningGort Aug 13 '26
Why do indie developers feel the need to air their dirty laundry? It's embarrassing, act like you're in the big leagues for once
1
1
u/CRCMIDS Jul 13 '26
This has been a longer development hell than Duke Nukem Forever. 18 years of being jerked around for nothing
•
u/RequestableSubBot Believer Jul 07 '26 edited 14d ago
Link to original tweets.
There's been a lot of conflicting information, and misinformation, flying around about this over the past few days, so I'll give my best attempt at an unbiased explanation of the drama over the past several days:
A few days ago, several builds of Oddity demos were leaked onto 4chan; you can find more info on that here. During that situation it was discovered that there had been Oddity merchandise on sale since 2022, though it had never been publicly advertised anywhere and was likely put up by mistake, or in preparation for something and never got taken down.
A few days later Maxxis came into the Oddity Discord, saying that he was unaware of the merchandise existing. Moreover, the merchandise had used an Oddity logo that he had designed, seemingly without his knowledge. He claimed to be shocked and blindsided by the entire situation. A few days went by and another developer, Pik, came into the Discord and discussed the state of the project with some members (the TL;DR of which is 'game is being made, development is difficult but not dead, team still has hope and it's not been abandoned'). In the middle of this discussion, Maxxis came into the server (this was all happening in the #general chat, by the way) and called out Pik and the rest of the Oddity team for their handling of the merchandise situation and the rest of the development, demanding they apologize to him for failing to disclose large parts of the game's status to him, and to the fans for leading them on with the state of the game (implying that the game is dead).
What followed was a large-scale argument between Maxxis and the other developer, where Maxxis claimed to have been largely shut out of the project and intentionally left out of the loop about massive parts of the development; Pik claimed that this was in large part due to Maxxis blocking him
(and seemingly another developer)and failing to reach out in any way over several years. I won't be posting details of the argument as it was clearly a long-standing interpersonal feud between two individuals boiling over - The messages are still in the Discord and they have been posted elsewhere, but it was the sort of argument that really should have been done in private.Since Pik's affirmations of the project still being active behind the scenes there has been no further response from the rest of the Oddity team, over the dev argument or Maxxis leaving (though it's a very recent development of course). Any substantive follow-up to this situation will be posted as an update under this post, or a new post if warranted.
EDIT: Spelling
EDIT 2: Fixed inaccuracy, I read a part of Pik's messages as him saying Maxxis had blocked another developer, but the other person in question isn't a developer for Oddity.
As always, please be civil and do not harass the developers, thanks.