The Stomping Land designer quits as Kickstarter game looks dead and buried

Kickstarter has received another PR blow with what appears to be the abandonment of another successfully funded game.

Vlad Konstantinov, who was responsible for the game’s dinosaur models, has quit work on the game after lead developer Alex ‘Jig’ Fundora stopped communicating with him.

I’m sad to say this but I have to temporarily freeze all my work for TLS project,” he said in a forum post. More than a month has passed since the day when I received the last reply from Jig. I’ve sent him five messages and haven’t got any single reply.

I don’t know, probably he has some serious reasons to ignore me (and whole community) but to my mind there are no excuses for such behaviour. Not to mention the fact that Jig owes me the money for the latest model, he’s put me in a very difficult situation because now I will have to pay our texture artist for his work from my own pocket.”

Konstantinov has since confirmed his complete departure from the project.

The Stomping Ground was successfully crowdfunded back in June 2013, passing its $20k goal with a final haul of $114k.

PC Gamer reports that Kickstarter backers are unlikely to receive any refunds, with the crowdfunding platform telling one backer that it has already reached out to Fundora to remind him of his obligations” but has no actual power beyond suspending his Kickstarter account.

The buy button for The Stomping Land was actually pulled from Steam last Autumn after what amounted to months of inactivity from its developers and a distinct lack of updates. At some stage since then, however, sales have been re-enabled and the game is still currently available for 18.99.

It’s yet more bad news for Kickstarter which is still suffering from last week’s media backlash over the high-profile struggles of Peter Molyneux’s Godus.