Above, an old Baal sketch.
I’ve put this off long enough, but it’s time I addressed it. In late June, I received an email from the prospective client of an app development studio. He wanted to know what my experience had been like working with these people. Thing was, I had never heard of the company. But sure enough, they were including Stress Baal as part of their portfolio on their site (I’m omitting their name because a couple weeks ago, they removed it of their own accord).
Gallingly, the company also claimed to this prospective client that I had come to them with nothing more than the idea for a stress relieving app and they conceived of the game and even the character. No doubt they also recognize the little tributes they placed throughout the game to my indie animator friends like Julia Pott, Pat Smith, and Peter Ahern. AND to put a cherry on this sundae of bullshit, they went so far as to impersonate me on the phone to the client. He literally emailed me “I need to know if that was actually you I just spoke to on the phone.” We had not spoken. And it got creepier, but that’s an even longer story.
So, I want to lay out some things. Every single frame of Stress Baal was drawn by me, Arthur Metcalf. Every interaction was designed by me (I have the massive google spreadsheet to prove it). The game mechanic (the way the animations are strung together) was my invention. I wrote and designed the randomized about page (it’s never the same twice) and the font. Even the goddamned internal file naming conventions. I hired a company, now bankrupt, called Social Jitney (also known as Avenue Social) to do the actual coding of the game. The only thing in the game that wasn’t wholly my idea was the two finger touch gesture to return to the main menu. That was a suggestion from Social Jitney. Thanks, guys.
If you hire an app development studio off the internet, be VERY careful. Social Jitney did the job I hired them for. But I seem to have gotten extraordinarily lucky in that. Googling to see if this new studio was in any way related showed me that I seem to have dodged a bullet.
Anyways, I’m not sure what these liars were thinking. An email I personally manage is right there on the about pages for the game in both the App Store and Google Play. And the game and I are easily googled. But they lied about their role in the game and they went so far as to impersonate me to back up those lies. So, and this is the reason I’m writing all this, if anyone’s got a question about Stress Baal, hit me up here or at [email protected].
Oh, and if you ever speak to Arthur Metcalf on the phone, I should sound like this, the first voice on this video, or Baal if I’m feeling sassy. That’s me, too.
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