Pesterquest Gameplay

[Milton Beaty]

Thegame was the subject of a crowdfunding campaign on Kickstarter, raising over US$2.4 million in funding. While development initially began with developers The Odd Gentlemen, it was eventually moved back in-house under What Pumpkin's own newly formed game development studio.

Act 1 was slated for release in mid-2015; however, the release was postponed until January 2017. It was further delayed in January to an unspecified date.[4] On September 14, 2017, What Pumpkin Studios released Act 1. This was the release date previously announced on August 29, 2017, accompanied by a new trailer.[1]

Hiveswap tells the story of a human girl named Joey Claire, who gets swapped with a troll boy named Dammek from the planet Alternia, as she tries to get back to Earth. A second game, Hauntswitch, will feature Dammek's adventures on Earth.[7] While set in the same universe as the Homestuck comic, Hiveswap and the sequel exist in a separate storyline with only "loose relation" to the comic, and involve a new cast of characters.[8]

At the time the article went to print, the Kickstarter had been running for just over one day. The game reached the full $700,000 of funding in fewer than 32 hours.[13] The campaign also reached certain "stretch goal" amounts, whereupon Hussie added Mac and Linux support onto the proposed game.[14] Digital Trends writer Graeme McMillan commented that the campaign was approaching, at the time, the record for most successful comics-related Kickstarter campaign, whose previous record was held by the Order of the Stick campaign with $1,254,120.[15] The Kickstarter eventually raised $2,485,506, making it the "fifth game on Kickstarter to pull in a full seven figures" and the third highest funded video game in Kickstarter history at the time. An additional PayPal-based fundraiser was created to accommodate those who could not donate via Kickstarter's available methods.[10][16][17]

In an interview with Game Informer, Undertale developer Toby Fox, who has worked with Hussie in the past, announced that he was contacted to write music for "the Homestuck video game".[19]

On October 30, 2014, it was announced that the game's official title would be Hiveswap, and that production of the game had been taken back in-house "alarmingly well" under Hussie's What Pumpkin studio. It was also announced that the game would be the first of two distinct stories: each will be an episodic story, but there will be parallels between them, and they can be played in either order.[7]

On December 26, 2015, updates were posted on the project's Kickstarter page stating that the game was going to be using a 2D system rather than using the 3D graphics shown in the teaser trailer, asset reel, and other footage. It is stated that this is "to make things a little more cost-efficient, and more rapidly producible over the full span of the series".[20]

On October 6, 2016, a teaser trailer was released showcasing the game's changes to the 2D system and other various elements of the game, including combat and interactive objects.[21] A release date for the first act was set to January 2017, but was delayed for a non-specific number of weeks.[4] The game was greenlit on Steam on December 15, 2016, and showcased a number of in-game screenshots.[22] On April 13, 2017 (Homestuck's 8th anniversary), another trailer for the game was released, this time showing parts of Alternia as well as more gameplay.[23]

Promotion for Act 2 includes the "Troll Call," a feature of troll characters slated to appear in the installment,[24] and the "Extended Zodiac", a feature of 288 symbols, including the original astrological signs as used by Homestuck characters, as well as symbols used by Hiveswap characters, complemented by a personality quiz to determine the quiz taker's Extended Zodiac sign.[25] The characters from the Troll Call were later featured in a spinoff video game called Hiveswap Friendship Simulator. Starting on September 4, 2019, a sequel to Hiveswap Friendship Simulator called Pesterquest began. The story picks up where Hiveswap Friendship Simulator ended and it follows MSPA Reader (the playable character) as they interact with the kids and the trolls from the original webcomic Homestuck, such as John Egbert and Karkat Vantas.[citation needed]

On October 25, 2020, another teaser was released revealing that Hiveswap: Act 2 would be released in November 2020. Three weeks after that, on November 16, 2020, a gameplay trailer was livestreamed revealing the release date of November 25, 2020.[26] The game would be released to controversy due to lacking credits upon release. The official Twitter account @homestuckteam would claim the reasoning to be the prevention of targeted harassment against those who worked on the game, and members of the hiveswap team would reply claiming they were not consulted before the decision was made. Hiveswap: Act 2 would later be silently patched with credits on November 28.

On October 4, 2020, Tumblr user Gio would publish a blog post detailing independent research done on the development and release of Hiveswap.[27] The blog post would attempt to compile a number of different events that led to the extended development time and budgetary issues, among other controversies, concluding that mismanagement and unprofessionalism within the Homestuck franchise is heavily underestimated. He would later publish another blog post[28] on January 21, 2021 further analyzing and disputing the accusations of embezzlement and fraud[29] levied against the initial developers of Hiveswap, The Odd Gentlemen. On April 13, 2021, YouTuber Sarah Z included a summary of the articles in her video titled "A Brief History of Homestuck",[30] which currently sits at 3.4 million views as of April 2024. This prompted Andrew Hussie and his team to send a series of legal threats to Sarah Z day later,[31] featuring claims that would be debunked in a follow-up video by Sarah Z[31] and another blog post by Gio.[32]

Reviewing Act 1, Polygon gave the game an 8/10, citing minor bugs, a "convoluted UI", and its short length of about two hours as issues but praising the game's humor as "hilarious", its art as "gorgeous", and the setting as "a treasure trove [...] for players to explore."[34]

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considering homestuck is about kids playing a game, very little of the comic actually shows gameplay. sure, lots of interactions take place while the game session is in effect, but even in the early acts, the actual gameplay is rarely shown. we're more likely to see "on screen" the beta kids in conflict with their parents (rather than with sburb constructs), or the characters struggling to bring each other into the game to avoid meteors. the game itself appears on the page mostly as a series of frustrated conversations about the meta-game: the characters asking each other "why are we playing this? what are the consequences? what happens afterwards?"

if you contrast that with other stories with similar premises, or even other stories that involve games in general, this is really startling. it's a major departure from what you usually find in the game-that-turns-out-to-be-real subgenre of science fiction. instead, homestuck is a series of interstitial moments strung together, and its central drama is the experience of living in those interstitial moments.

9. post-hivebent and pre-murderstuck, terezi is SUCH an asshole. it's amazing. i love her. she gets john killed, she gets various dave(s) killed, she feels bad about it but doesn't actually change her behavior meaningfully. she laughs at vriska for trying to conduct a rivalry by proxy via the beta kids, even though arguably it was *terezi* who actually turned it into a rivalry. to go back to an earlier point: you can see how the grumpy-uwu image of karkat developed, because when people start getting murdered on the meteor, his reaction is to go "OH GOD OH GOD OH GOD" and get emotional about how much he cared about all his now-dead friends... whereas terezi's reaction is this:

which gets me to my actual point: why have so few people in the fandom hated terezi? i mean, i love her, but i also love vriska and uhhhhhhhhhhhhh i think there might be a few people who uhhhhhhhhhhh don't like vriska very much! but most readers either (1) don't care about terezi, or (2) think she's great, even though she's exactly the type of weird, complex female character that typically gets disproportionate amounts of fandom hate.

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