Hello, World! And [You may have read this blog post], [If not, I highly urge you to read it before reading the rest!]!
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Have you read it yet?
Alright, let's talk about it.
PART 1: THE PART WHERE I TALK ABOUT IT
In the blog post (Which is actually a revisit of a topic from a "log" from last year before they upgraded the website), Axo talks about a certain Dev-turned-YT-Guru, uncovering how they were exploited for content and some other horrible things committed by the ex-dev and some members of his new community of content creators.
In latter half of the first part Axo briefly talks about an archive of a video by the ex-dev before moving on to talking about the ex-dev's plan for a second video that was canceled partway through, "I Made a First Person Shooter in 2 Minutes" was the title of the first video.
Notice the highlighted parts of the title? Those were the parts of that horribly clickbaity title that were straight up lies.
The part about making it "In 2 Minutes?" That's a lie, in reality it was written in a little over a week and was sent over to somebody else so that a macro could be written to do it again in under 90 seconds.
But clearly that's not all, notice how "I Made" was highlighted too?
Yep that's right! Axo was exploited to make a video game so that this ex-dev could make [[LOTS OF KROMERS]]!!!!11!!1!
PART 2: SO WHO THE HECK ACTUALLY UPLOADED IT?
So who is this person who uploaded the archive to archive.org?
Looking closely at the archive.org page, you'll find out that it was uploaded by the mysterious entity known as "RetroDude128"
I wonder who that could be... oh wait! That's me!
And that's what this topic is about, going into more detail about the archive and giving my own perspective from before Axo decided to make their first "log" about the ex-dev.
PART 3: DUMB STUPID VILLAIN BACKSTORY OR WHATEVER
So in Mid-2020, at that point I had just started my journey into gamedev just a few months earlier under this new pseudonym I had created for myself,
At the time I conceived this ambitious new idea I had for a browser idle game that I had called "ClickRPG."
Roughly around the same time was when I met N8Dev on scratch, the ex-dev that the blog post talks about.
At the time, he didn't even have a single video uploaded on youtube. In this scratch studio of his I talked to him about some of my projects that I was doing then, like making my own esolang and the aforementioned "ClickRPG" project.
PART 3.1: BACK TO THE FUTURE
Fast forward to March 2024, I had seen that N8 had finally uploaded to his old dev channel after spending over a year doing nothing but youtube guru crap.
I was so excited that I put the video on in the background while paying very little attention to the title or the contents of the video itself, a week passed by before finally somebody pointed out to me just how abhorrent the video was,
around the same time I had decided to ask Axo (a moderator of N8's server at the time) what they thought of the video, partly because I wanted to see if one of N8's mods would praise the video or something, but instead they said "I was surprised he used "I" statements."
Eventually while talking to Axo while relaying the information that I was being told to some fellow devs (giving Axo the name Jeff since they wanted to remain anonymous at the time) my dumb stupid moronic brain began to connect the dots as Axo gave some details about their involvement in the video's creation. (would just like to add here that yes, other people were told about this too, I'm almost certain I was not the first one to have been told about it)
After finding out about all of this, I just felt as if I was backstabbed by N8, even if I wasn't the one who was exploited. This obviously pissed me off, and eventually I made a webpage that I called "The Hall of Halls," which was originally created to credit the creators that had their work shown (i.e. assets used in the FPS game) in N8's video without any credit (to this day I am still trying to find an excuse to create a new hall). Originally I had planned on figuring out the original creators using only the video itself, but eventually I asked axo for their notes so that I could use it to help in creating the "uncredit" hall.
Towards the beginning of April, Axo decided to make a log about the video, which gave me an excuse to finally reveal who the anonymous "Jeff" really was.
At some point I was relaying this information to a friend of mind because I was still incredibly pissed off, and they just said something along the lines of "that really sucks, better not to interact with the video at all," and I considered this good advice, since Youtube's algorithm only really considers any kind of engagement or something like that, so any kind of negative engagement would still count towards the overall engagement and push the video to even more people.
This gave me the idea to download a copy of the video to send to people rather than sharing a link to the video, which was how I had a copy to begin with, later on in early May, I discovered that the video had been privated, cutting off access to the original video, and since I still had my copy of the video, I decided to upload it to archive.org, putting credits in the description using the list that I made for the Hall of Halls from Axo's notes.
And just a few moments before I would start to write this post, I had noticed that not only did Axo mention JJJacksFilms' "Bad Creator Bingo," but that they had also mentioned my archive briefly, and how they had given me the credits for the people who had made the assets that were used in the game.
When I read it, I felt slightly honored that my archive was mentioned, but I also felt that the wording was a bit misleading when both in order of events and how it happened in the first place, so I wrote this post here on the forum to serve as additional context to the blog post and offer my perspective as an onlooker during this whole mess.
PART 4: THE ONE THING I REGRET NOT DOING
My one regret from then was the fact that I decided NOT to take a screenshot of the original YT description, because that was arguably one of the most important pieces of evidence that we had against N8, and as of now we have no known record of its contents.
PART 4.1: THE ONE THING THAT I WANTED TO DO BUT THANKFULLY DIDN'T DO PARTLY BECAUSE HE EFFECTIVELY KILLED OFF THE DEV CHANNEL
Shortly after I realized just how bad the video was, I wanted to become one of the developers for another episode of "N8Dev's totally original game dev content that is totally made by me 100% the real N8Dev and totally not made by some AI stink bot and young beginner devs that I exploit for automated content generation and optimal people exploiter" JUST so I could sneak code into my game that basically acted as a hidden game that was supposed to say "Fuck You N8!"
I ended up deciding against the trolling idea even though I flipped a coin twice and guessed correctly, but was still considering the idea of being exploited myself just so I could understand just how bad N8 had become, in the end N8 privated the video and closed a Trelloboard for the N8Dev stuff (which Axo notified me of), and we speculated that he was killing off N8dev, as of right now it really does seem like N8Dev was killed off for good, which is both a good thing to see considering just how much of a bad person N8 really is now, but also very sad to see, not just the death of N8Dev, but just to see the person that I once called a friend go down a path like this.
