Employee #1

Introduction

Just for clarity: is there a specific role, position, or department you specialized in during your time at Kindly Beast? Would you say you worked more-so on the Kindly Beast side of things or Joey Drew Studios?

I’d say I was more-so a member of Kindly Beast, working on Showdown Bandit.

To start things on a lighthearted note: what was with the coffee machine? What made the coffee so good? How do you feel about Bendy Blend (KB’s Bendy-branded coffee blend) given the company’s reputation?

*That’s the first I’ve heard of Bendy Blend. Haha, this is ridiculous. I guess they’re trying to cash in? Is it a passive aggressive thing towards the ex-employees? I don’t know. The coffee was good! I don’t know if it was mindblowing, but we liked our coffee machine. I feel like it just became a ridiculous meme that the coffee was great after someone said that. Like, it’s just really funny to weigh the crap they put us through in the cons of a Glassdoor review against the pros of “good coffee”. *

We were pretty dependent on it, though, and if I remember correctly, the guy who serviced and restocked only did it as a part time job. So sometimes the machine would be out of beans, and people would get pretty cranky. It was also pretty loud, and once or twice someone who wasn’t thinking would start making a coffee at the start of an all staff meeting, leading to some pretty funny moments of everyone just staring at the person in question until their coffee was done brewing.

Is there a particular reason that you specifically have been so quiet about things? Has it been for the sake of moving on or has there been pressure to keep quiet?

There is definitely worry that lawsuits could be filed. I don’t think they have a basis in reality, but it could certainly be a huge hassle (I talked to a lawyer at one point who suggested Mood could have potentially made it hard for me to work at my new job for a while, though I think at this point that would be impossible). Trying to move on is part of it, too. I generally don’t want to live in the past, hold on to negativity, or be publicly raging. The latter is also just a question of professionalism to some degree.

Would you say the anonymous employees (on Reddit and glassdoor) are credible, or would you happen to know for a fact that they were written by ex-employees? Not looking for names if you're not wanting to give them, I just want to know if what little info exists is accurate/genuine.

Everything I’ve seen on Glassdoor is credible. In some cases I do know for sure they were written by ex-employees. Most of the Reddit stuff I’ve seen is also credible, although there is some pretty salacious stuff about Cricket that I hope isn’t anyone from KB, because it was gross and bad and no one deserves to be harassed in that way. I don’t know about the possible relationship, but there was a bunch of stuff that just took the speculation there way too far, and then just outright harassment. I like to think everyone I worked with at KB was better than that.

Management

Alright, I’d like to now talk about your time employed at KB:
What was day-to-day life like? Was there a pattern or were things constantly in flux?

It changed a lot, over time.

But one constant was that they never explained themselves. You have to justify some of your decisions to the people you work with. They were running the company, but absent. Then they’d come in and just play the “I’m your boss” card. At first I think they held everyone’s respect, but doing that over and over, and also giving inconsistent feedback and bad direction, they lost people. If you always use “because I told you so”, people may continue to follow your orders, but unless you deliver anything solid, you’ll lose their respect.

That was my perspective anyways. I started off really respecting their work, and the idea of the company they wanted to make. But over time they just got more and more pushy, let more and more distance form between themselves and the rest of the company, were not forthcoming or honest with their feedback, didn’t want any ideas or criticism of their direction. It felt more and more like they lucked into success, and their management style was terrible.

On some level, I do get some of their troubles, I think. Like, they came back, after the Showdown debacle, and tried to work on BATDR with the team. But they were still treating everyone like “just follow our lead”, not trying to listen or understand.

There was a final push where Mike and Meatly showed up, just for a couple of days as I recall, to work on BATDR with the team. But they weren’t really working with the team, they were just showing the team how they worked as a two man operation, and downplaying the team’s work. The fact that they only lasted two days speaks to a lack of real effort to bridge the gap. They had all these people’s jobs on the line, and that was the best they could do.

If I can muster any sympathy there, I would say that would be a hard position to be in. Speaking to a group you’ve sort of already lost, and not knowing how to build trust back up, not knowing how address the divide. Once you’ve lost credibility and people are just there because they’re worried their work is going to be thrown out and maybe they’ll be out of a job soon… that’s not going be great for the leaders either, especially leaders without a lot of experience.

I also think some of the KB team from before the company started growing fast were not super happy with the new process and team size. So there was some dissatisfaction and desire to return to the indie feeling from before. And that’s fair enough, those are hard things to manage.

Again, the fate of a company and all the people working there was hanging in the balance. You might think they would try harder to get over themselves and find some way to make this work. Especially after repeatedly making those promises to not throw out work, to work with the team, to keep everyone’s jobs safe. But no.

One thing I want to stress is that while a lot of blame was put on VPs and leads, Mood and Meatly were having trouble getting things from people throughout my time at the company. My understanding is that even before growing, they just couldn't get even a small team to work together to produce anything.

What was the communication between The Board and the team like? For example, were they hands-on regarding certain areas of Showdown Bandit but ignoring BatDR or vice versa, or were they focused on the look of both games rather than the gameplay?

They didn’t tell anyone what their problems were, or what their vision really looked like. From the outset they definitely misrepresented what the situation was: in terms of the team’s creative freedom, and maybe even business objectives and what the nature of the merch deals was. I’ll never know what parts were deliberate lies told to us, or just mistakes they made along the way. There’s not much to gain from lying about some of this. It seems more likely that they really thought they could hand the project off, they probably believed what they were saying. But maybe not, there was never a conversation from them about this (although Mood has misrepresented it on Reddit - I don’t know if he’s lying or in his mind he’s retconned what happened).

Was there anything particularly weird that was required of you or anyone else? I assume there were no daily blood sacrifices but I suppose I won’t know until I ask.

Haha, no. From early on I noticed some weird politics within the core group, that should have been a bigger red flag for me, but I can’t comment about that. I failed to ever bring it up past encouraging people to talk to each other, and it wasn’t my place, so I’ll reserve further comment on that.

One thing I REALLY didn’t like about how the Meatly operated was making things into tests. Instead of just giving people feedback, he would have ideas about things could be done, and if you didn’t magically make the same decisions he did, he would just quietly hold that as a mark against your ability to perform. So not a weird requirement of working there, but rather very particular ideas that would deliberately not be shared.

Did any of the directors display any anti-diversity behavior? Mike has a reputation of being a Gamergate supporter, and claims to not have LGBTQ representation in their games because “their characters are not defined by what they identify as.”

I honestly can’t say there was! I know that was something in Mike’s past, but he was incredulous that people were holding that against him when he was going out of his way to do diverse hiring and I think even some charitable donations to social justice oriented causes. I won’t villainize him for things I didn’t see, and I didn’t see any of that.

Did any of the board have anything against other game devs in the area? I know Mike has feelings about Dirty Rectangles and Scott Cawthon, but did he ever say or do anything to reinforce those feelings, and did this mean that some places/topic conversations were not allowed?

Nothing came up at the time I was working there. From my perspective, the rift between folks in the Ottawa game dev community and Mike got really bad after the mass firing.

Did you or any other ex-employees have problems with Cyn, as HR or as a person?

Cyn was another person I thought I had a good relationship with while I was there. She was very friendly. It was almost like she became a completely different person after the mass firings. The stuff she started posting on social media was the height of unprofessionalism. I guess she felt she had to defend her brother… I dunno… pretty insane stuff from her actual account, and some other things that I think came from her, but are unconfirmed. They went out of their way to attack people, even when ex-employees were mostly being pretty quiet. It was kicking the hornet’s nest - so unnecessary. I feel like this probably caused more Glassdoor reviews to be posted.

Did you or any other ex-employees have or had problems with Foxygen, and is there any credibility to her having an affair with Mike? After what I’ve seen: I don’t believe so but that’s just based on what’s been made public.

Cricket was never anything but nice to me. I don't know about her relationship with Mike, other than saying they were good friends before she was hired. I heard other people saying she was spying on us for Mike, and I know people in the community had complaints with her moderation. But as I said before, she really doesn’t deserve the harassment she’s had to put up with. On the subject of the community, I’ll say I found it surprising how great the Bendy community was. Lots of good people, not a lot of gross stuff happening before all this went down. I’m sad that what seemed like a lot of good people online are now split because of this whole Kindly Beast debacle. I don’t think I would prefer that people keep the blinders on and worship Mood and the Meatly, but I hate that it’s probably caused a lot of grief for a fandom that, for all the inky darkness, seemed pretty wholesome when I first joined.

Can you recall any specific instances of abuse in the workplace (Mike’s mood swings, threats, etc.,)? I use Mike as an example because he’s the one with the public allegations of abuse.

I wasn't personally present for the worst of it. What I saw was a lot of being very dismissive of people's work, and towards the end just worse and worse conflicting feedback, just being super rude while offering very little to constructively improve anything. But I also know he called people into meetings or had phone calls where he blew up and threatened people about various things. I have heard about threats of legal action to stop people from speaking out. The thing that was super constant with Mike and Meatly was dishonesty. In retrospect nothing added up. They were constantly saying conflicting things about our work, company health, goals with the games, all of it.

Were theMeatly and Bookpast complicit in Mike’s behavior?

Well they were equal partners and did nothing to stop it. They were super nice to me to my face, but obviously had huge my problems with my team's work, and mine in particular. From what I heard, Meatly was pretty bad to some of the senior people on BATDR. Mike and Meatly were partners in crime, seeming to come to all the major decisions together. On the other hand, they were not always very respectful of each other when addressing employees and the other party was not around.

I'll also say this about all three of them: they brought me on talking about building a company that felt like family. They acted like this company was going to be super indie, and everyone was friends. Then they were allegedly just too busy to be present, and I honestly found that disappointing. Then they threw out all my work on a project I cared so deeply about, and that was brutal. I tried to fall in line and get behind their vision, even as they failed to provide any clarity of what that was. And in the end, they fired me with everyone else, without a word of explanation. Nothing. Just sent in Cyn to tell everyone we were done. Minimum severance. That's not the right way to run a company, much less treat your "family". I've been through other layoffs and company closures, but never anything like this. Not knowing what you did wrong, if you even did something wrong, it's so hard. And part of me thinks they wanted to make it sting. We wanted to make great games, but they really wanted us to validate their genius. And for not doing that, we were shut out. You can point to the Reddit AMA trainwreck and say Mike apologized and explained there, but for various reasons I didn't personally find that very credible. It hurts to be let go from any job for any reason. Moreso when you're a passionate game developer, I think, where your job is probably a big part of your identity. Having that taken away, and not even being told why, that's crushing. They can say there were complex legal reasons they couldn't say anything, but to me it felt more like they didn't want to say anything to make it better because they didn’t want to minimize the impact. Their silence was the message.

Did Mike frequently use legal action as a means to an end, for employees or outside issues, when you were employed there? Has he threatened legal action since you were let go?

As I said before, I know it was threatened, both to individuals and, near the end, addressing the entire company. The last thing addressed to me was the NDA to not talk about anything that happened, which everyone got when they were fired. For most people it was accompanied with an offer to pay a bit of extra severance (arguably only what was due, in some cases, I thought), but for me, there was zero additional money. It also came with the offer for Optimum to help, but like I said, I had another job, so that was a non-issue. So I never signed that NDA. After the firings, you’ll notice that some people took to social media to talk publicly about this. And some of those tweets disappeared. My suspicion, and I wouldn’t want to get anyone back into legal trouble by discussing anything more than suspicion, but let’s say strong belief, is that in those cases, people were threatened with legal action.

When the VPs were fired, do you know/feel that this was due to them not adhering to the board’s vision, or was there a different reason (like the beginning of the firings in a staggered fashion to avoid mass termination)?

I know that the dodging the legal requirements for mass termination thing has been speculated. Possibly! That could also have been the reason they kept employees on sick leave around a little longer. I never felt like I got the full story here, though. Even from VPs. I would guess some sort of contractual or legal concern has kept them quiet. But in terms of why, really, I could only speculate. My gut feeling is that the board knew many employees looked up to and respected the VPs at a time when people were losing faith in them (Mike and Meatly were very absent during this period, showed up only to message crazy sounding pivots in company direction). So yeah, difference in vision, but maybe also frustration that the VP layer was providing leadership in a transparent and accountable style, where the board at that point seemed to be all about “shut up and do what we say”. I think the VPs were in a bit of a tough spot, because they were being asked to sell a message from the board they didn’t believe in. But then I’ve also heard, and I don’t even remember where now, but Mood seemed to be implying they were spending too much money and other crazy allegations. So he either believed some weird stuff or was making up things about them related to other issues. I cannot imagine that the VPs were doing anything objectionable like that. At the end of the day, the board didn't really offer an explanation of any sort, so who knows.

The Products

I’m curious how the board felt about their products. Bendy, for example, has had the lore change a few times, and “get it done, good enough” doesn’t exactly sound like the words of someone who cares about what they're making as long as it’s done. Do you know if there was anything in particular the board was truly passionate about, or was it all just a product to them?

Was Showdown Bandit and/or BATDR a painful trial-and-error-built game with no direction because the board kept shooting things down while not being involved? I absolutely think that there’s credit that’s due for SB in terms of the models, sound effects, and a few others details, but I didn’t know if any of the board or vice producers were/should've been overseeing the projects specifically.

Their motivation and attitude changed constantly! At times it seemed like there was such pride in their work. They celebrated cool ideas and bits of things coming together. It seemed like genuine enthusiasm. But then things started to get less clear. At first it was "let's make some cool games", but then the emphasis would shift to selling merch. Some days they would say it was all just an ad for merch. And the target audience kept shifting. How much it was for us versus for pretty young kids versus specific content creators was always changing.

I don't know if I'd say the whole thing was trial and error. It was an experimental game on a short timeline. Then as we got closer to the date, Mood and Meatly started to demand changes. The team was trying to figure out what they wanted, but it was impossible to please them. Mood and Meatly sort of halfway tried to provide leadership, but it was a mess. They would change their minds, give inconsistent feedback, or make impossible demands. The lack of ability to manage a team was really apparent here.

They also loved their own work and made all sorts of excuses for things they would have called the larger team out for doing. It was a huge double standard. They just thought everything they did was great, and everything the team did was below their greatness. It came across sometimes in what they said directly, but other times in the condescending attitude. Meatly can make things pretty, I’ll grant that. I think some of the artists probably had differing opinions on that, felt there were places we could improve. But either way, game design and programming are not areas Mood and Meatly excelled, and they were not very interested in hearing the nuances of why solutions to complex problems were necessary. Once again, trying to be charitable and objective, I could see where they were coming from in some cases. Here was the core issue: they said they wanted to make bigger better games. But then it was hard to solve the problems that come along with that. So they would always just want to drop anything that created problems. If you want to be lean and scrappy, that’s fine, but stop selling people on the grand visions! To make the sort of big, awesome games we were talking about, you need to be willing to make decisions, you need to hire and trust experts, you need to have a certain amount of planning. You can’t keep running that like a two person operation. Even when they were working on later chapters of Bendy, it was still their show. They’d tear out and remix everything other people made for them. And that’s where you get a simple game that’s mostly just walking around. Which is fine! I don’t have a problem with that at all! Just stop telling people you’re making this other kind of thing. The problems get more nuanced the closer you look at where the breakdowns were. It all gets a bit muddier. But the board was very hostile to working through complex problems, no matter what the team wanted or how much better it could have made the game. That’s where you get this “just get it done!” and “we don’t need to innovate” sort of talk from them. But that all begs the fundamental question of why grow in the first place? Why hire all of Karman to build the thing right? It was two conflicting visions of what Kindly Beast should be that never got reconciled.

Are these screenshots from Showdown Bandit’s pre-release Steam listing from the original build of the game, or from Mike and Meatly’s?

Showdown Bandit Steam Screenshot Showdown Bandit Steam Screenshot Showdown Bandit Steam Screenshot Showdown Bandit Steam Screenshot Showdown Bandit Steam Screenshot Showdown Bandit Steam Screenshot

That's the team's version. The level designers worked so hard against an impossible deadline to make all that happen. I like Meatly's level work, but I also thought this stuff was starting to look great, and more importantly, it was also being built in such a way that it had proper patrol paths for enemies, spots for collectables that actually did things, etc. It was slower to come together than we wanted, but in my view it was coming together, and it fit a larger set of design goals.

Would you be able to tell me what this teaser image was? Given that KB has been disbanded and Meatly & Mike have barely said a word: I’d hazard to say that we’d never know the answer unless you’d happen to be aware of it.

Kindly Beast Teaser Image

Oh crap, I think I did know, but I forget. It might have even been from another game idea, in which case discussing that would violate my NDA. They had lots of cool ideas for games, and sharing anything about those is not something I can do.

If you worked on Showdown Bandit: What was your reaction, or even the general reaction, to theMeatly and Mike taking over and remaking the game?

When Mike and Meatly took over Showdown Bandit it destroyed morale. Everyone had worked so hard on all the art and systems and gameplay, and felt so burned. Some people really cared about the story and world, and they were devastated to be told that was all being thrown out. No one even knew what of their work would survive, we were all waiting for the release to see what would be used. The actual launch was brutal because that's when the team saw how little had been used at all. Almost all the code, level design, story and UI was gone.

The Board knew what was going on throughout development, people were giving them regular updates. They just couldn’t decide, or else they wouldn’t say, what they did and didn’t really like. Just tell us what you want, show us how to fix it!

Then they released this thin shell of a game. The team wanted something immersive and interesting to play. The story was all planned out for several chapters, I think, trying to have some mysteries for fans to pick apart. Instead they just slapped some art assets together and released that. We had all heard all these fully voiced audio logs and all sorts of cutscenes were already fully animated. They put in a couple of notes to read.

I think they don't care about making good gameplay, and their approach to story is to make something and see what fans make of it. Again, impossible to know what they were thinking. Here's how little they told us: they didn't even announce to the team when it was released.

The Firings

After being let go: were the KB team helpful in finding you work, and did they ever try to privately apologize? Or did they even go the other way and attempt to sabotage your careers?
Mike said he had made amends with one of the VPs, but I’m curious if you or anyone you know of had been approached by Mike or any of the board to apologize and attempt to smooth things over (before or after Mike’s statement in the gameinudstry.biz article). Additionally, from what I’ve seen, it seems that Optimum talent wasn’t very helpful in finding everyone work.

I got nothing from them in terms of communication or assistance. The offer to help was attached to signing a strict NDA about everything. Optimum Talent is probably a perfectly fine agency, but ultimately, some of these jobs don't exist in Ottawa. Really hard to find game art positions here. Programmers do a little better, but they could figure out the few game studios available without help.

In terms of career sabotage, nothing directly. However there was real risk of harming people, I don’t know if it was deliberate or just super thoughtless, but Mood has been peddling stories about no game getting made, giving zero credit to the team for the efforts there. I know he’s tried to sell this story publicly online, and maybe even more pointedly to people in the Ottawa game dev community. How does that impact the careers of people, especially in lead roles, to say that during this time they accomplished nothing? [If] you were running another studio in Ottawa, would you hire managers or tech/art leads if you heard that story? It’s untrue, and harmful to people’s careers. Thankfully it seems it wasn’t taken that seriously, because Mood lacks credibility, and people did get hired in spite of it. I have wondered if it is legally actionable, to say those things about your workers, though.

What was it like, seeing everything fall apart day after day until you were fired? If you don’t want to share then you don’t have to.

Like I said, it was crushing. Different people handled it different ways. A lot of dark humour. It was a fantastic and supportive group of people, so we were trying to look out for each other. But some had it much worse, too. People had relocated, bought homes. They had asked about the health of the company and been promised we were all fine, “no one’s job is at risk”.

Follow-Up Questions

This is kind of a dumb question, but I realized I never asked: were you all technically fired or laid off? I've seen people use both terms interchangeably, so I thought I'd just get that clarified.

Technically fired! "Fired without cause", which is a way of firing people where you don't have to give justification, but still have to pay a certain amount of severance.
Then they gave everyone an envelope that asked us to sign something saying we wouldn't disparage the company, for a small additional payout. The amount varied from person to person, for reasons I did not understand.*

For clarification: you call out Bookpast, theMeatly, Mike, and the Board at varying times. Would you be able to explain who all was on The Board and if/how their power differs from, say Mike being the CEO?

Mike Mood and The Meatly said they were equal partners. Bookpast is also a member of the Board, but I’m not sure if he had any legal say in anything. In terms of the dynamic, it was very obvious by the end that Mood and Meatly liked to do a sort of good cop/bad cop thing. And then Mood seemed to deliberately take on the public heat, maybe to preserve the Meatly’s friendly, caring persona. After all this, it’s very hard to know how much or if Meatly cared. But my understanding is that he had the stake in the company to stand up to Mood and stop him at any point.

Would you be able to elaborate further on the sequence of events for Showdown Bandit’s development? Right now my impression of things is something akin to “a team or a few project leads were originally just handed the IP and told to ‘make a game’ before theMeatly and Mike began to demand more and more changes as the deadline became closer.”

There were a few characters to start, and some ideas for what the game should be. They were handed to the guy put in charge and he was told he had to use those characters, but could do anything. He tried to lead on some early video demo, story, and gameplay ideas. Mood had wanted it to be like Binding of Isaac, but Meatly specifically didn’t like that idea. So there wasn’t a super unified vision. Randomness for replay was supposed to be a big feature. Because it was supposed to release in a pretty short time, and be on a bunch of platforms, the development team was trying to build it right, so you wouldn’t get a bunch of terrible ports this time (after porting problems with Bendy). Over time, different people had different complaints, features got cut. I think it took a while to get the whole team together.
But then they added too many people, and by the end wanted it to be exactly like their original ideas, not the designer they asked to make whatever he wanted. There was the team proper, then a prototype happening in parallel to check a few specific things. There were some cool ideas, it seemed like lots of pieces were coming together. But then more and more cuts as people became concerned with the deadline. It was definitely a problem that very little of it was playable on any given day, but at least some people on the team were sure there was a core game there. At least as much as Bendy - where you just walk around, find spooky stuff, have a vehicle for interesting characters and a story. There was a lot of backstory - but Mood and Meatly explicitly threw all of that out.
Just a few months before shipping, they brought a bunch of people into a room and decided to restart the whole thing, design a different progression through the game. There was a whole process, and it was a lot of stress and uncertainty for the team. No one was sure that could be pulled off, but the team tried really hard to make it happen.
Then in the final month Mood and Meatly started talking about just building something else themselves. Grabbing assets and prototyping.
One problem here was that Mood couldn’t work with the complex codebase the way he wanted. He wasn’t used to a larger game built properly, so he was constantly frustrated when he couldn’t quickly get things to work. So he started taking it apart, broke things horribly when the team had to merge his changes back in. It was a lot of disruption and floundering, and most of it seemed to be over cosmetic stuff. If they had just worked with the team I’m sure that it could have looked and felt the way they wanted, but also played better, had more character and story. There was a huge amount of dialogue and animation that was just thrown out. Audio logs that told the whole story of how the show came to be. But it wasn’t their vision, so they tossed it.

Would you be able to summarize the core concept or idea of the original Showdown Bandit? You can keep it as general or specific as you’d like. Was the game focused more-so on the gameplay, overall story, specific characters, or overall aesthetics?

The overall aesthetics were not super different from what was released. Level design was handled differently. The idea was a spooky stealth action game, random rooms and enemies, random weapons. You always had the ability to shoot with your cork gun as a last line of defense, but you lost a string if you missed, or if enemies reached you without the cork gun being wound up. There was much more loot, and you could trade and eventually craft stuff to fight enemies. There was a lot of weird, complex story, trying to be deep enough that fans would be guessing about characters and how the world works, with stuff planned out from the beginning that would pay off in later chapters. Story and world was very important. Gameplay went through a few revisions, but all built around a core that’s sort of like what’s there, just different mechanics. Mechanics I think most of the team would agree were better than what got released.

How were the release dates decided, at least to your understanding?

Based on deals with merch partners, I would think.

Looking back, what do you think about Showdown Bandit, both the released and unreleased versions?

There was an interesting vision with the unreleased version. The game that was planned originally sounded cool. What was left after cuts and direction changes wasn’t much, but the plan to keep building it after initial launch still had some great ideas. What was released had some nice artwork, but there wasn’t much of a game or any signs of a story or world that was really interesting. It was just a hollow, kind of neat looking experience without much gameplay. Didn’t actually play it, but heard it was really buggy, and even when working pretty janky. Mood and Meatly were really hard on the team for having janky stuff in the game that was nowhere near as bad as what they released.

Mike said regarding characters and LGBT representation that KB makes “characters are defined by what they do, not who they identify as.” Some have taken this to believe that KB does not wish to put anything in their game that may be seen as offensive or political. Do you believe that KB chooses to create nonpolitical/inoffensive characters, or could this simply Mike’s personal philosophy?

They definitely wanted to avoid any controversial topics. They were very concerned with what people talked publicly about, even on your own social media accounts. Not much else to really confirm or contradict that statement.

Are there any details you’d be able to share about Bendy in Nightmare Run?

The team working on that also had some grand plans to make it more exciting, have lots of great art and sound added. It was neat, it’s another one that it’s too bad we’ll never see.

Employee #2

Prelude

Do you have any specific instances in which any of the directors were in any way abusive in the workplace towards employees?

There were times during a playtest session meeting of batdr where mood would just be outright saying things were bad left and right and when being shown the codebase would say everything was over engineered to people who absolutely had way more coding experience and knowledge then he had. there was one time he just angrily bursted out saying "we are making games for stupid kids, this isn't hard" he would be overly critical of the code base and if anything belittling the accomplishments we had made

Did theMeatly/Paul or Bookpast/Stephen ever step in, say anything, address any of it, or were they completely complicit?

bookpast was in the states somewhere so he was never physically around except maybe once or twice, and paul was just as complicit not saying anything against it, and just saying stuff like "hi this is my friend mike hes not very sociable" or something like that just playing it off as a joke which really just made it worse. And with paul he would constantly change his mind on design decisions for BATDR, like it went through so many iterations just on the fly, we think he either was not properly explaining himself or could just not properly envision things in his head

How far along was BATDR before the layoff?

We were essentially building the final level for chapter 1 we had the custscenes in pretty finished states and all the gameplay elements were done it would have been ready on time for the october release we had. with showdown we would have also made our original date had they not yanked the project away from us last minute and gutted the thing to start from scratch

Not sure if you'd have anything particular to say about it, but what was the internal consensus on Cyn? Clearly she's not been friendly towards you guys after the firings, but was it ever a big problem while you were there?

Cyn seemed nice at face value while working there but it was obvious we were not ok with her as HR because of her relationship with mood. one of the vp's even said that its a conflict of interest upon handing her that position and mood's response was " what am i suppose to do take back the offer?" like obviously yeah. there were also some pretty obvious throwaway accounts that were made to talk bad about us after the firings, that we know it was her cause we complained to them about it and suddenly they all disappeared after we said something about it

Mike appears to have something of a reputation of being prone to lawsuits or threatening legal action. Did you ever experience or witness anything like that with him before or after the firings?

with how he treated people and made it seem he had no trust in us, after always touting that the company was like a family made us think that. like the day before we got fired we started to get locked out of everything and to remember not to steal company property and our contractual obligations and obviously thats just the lawyers talking but he went through with that so either hes spineless or he agrees with them. and then there was the time he took everyone who used to work for karman the like day or so after firing the VP's and was just kinda grilling them like "you guys aren't thinking of leaving right?" which really showed there was no trust for that last month without the VP's

How do you or everyone else feel about Foxygen? I don't believe she was having an affair with Mike, though she stayed on after you all had been let go and was then fired during a global pandemic no less. Have any of you spoken to her after she was fired?

I don't, many of us had much interactions with her personally, but we knew her and pascal were rats, any time anything would get said around them it would suddenly make its way to mike and the board, one time someone during a meeting said they were worried about job safety and somehow that made its way back to mike and that employee got grilled out for it which was insane. we had been told from the beginning that Foxygen and mood were like best friends and that at the time she was like staying at this place he had rented in austin texas and she was like always staying there from what we knew, honestly no clue if they had anything going on. after she got fired i'm pretty sure some of us reached out to her but it was probably still with like we don't trust her enough (sorry for some tangents here and there)

Mike said that someone spoke out in a meeting, saying that some employee(s) didn't understand the direction the game was supposed to be going in, and that he agreed. Were both BATDR and Showdown both just being built kinda blindly?

BATDR was overseen and designed by paul so it fell into what they wanted but they handed off showdown and never really oversaw any of it, all they gave was like maybe a quick document and a prototype and told them to run with it. so yeah when they finally look at it and arent happy with it thats their own fault, the team worked their ass off and made something that was pretty fun and had a solid roadmap for future chapters but they did not care cause it was not what they had envisioned

The last thing anyone has heard about Bendy in Nightmare Run was that according it Mike it was “on hold” like Showdown Bandit, which if it goes the way of Showdown: it won't be playable anytime soon. I don't know if you knew or could share some of what those updates were, but I'd be curious to hear.

to keep it brief there was gonna be new level design like running in different directions and loot boxes and a whole new suite of animations and designs

Introduction

Just for clarity: is there a specific role, position, or department you specialized in during your time at Kindly Beast? Would you say you worked more-so on the Kindly Beast side of things or Joey Drew Studios?

*Worked as a Software Developer on the Kindly Beast side of things *

To start things on a lighthearted note: what was with the coffee machine? What made the coffee so good? How do you feel about Bendy Blend (KB’s Bendy-branded coffee blend) given the company’s reputation?

*There wasn’t really anything special about the coffee machine. It was a rented out standup coffee machine that could make a few different kinds of coffee and also hot chocolate. It just became part of inside jokes because many people would congregate around the coffee machine in the morning and chat. *

Is there a particular reason that you specifically have been so quiet about things? Has it been for the sake of moving on or has there been pressure to keep quiet?

A little bit of both. There is some pressure to keep quiet, as the CEO Mike Mood has been litigious in the past when it came to defending everything Bendy related. My worry is that he has a fragile ego and speaking out publicly will grab his ire, and really having to deal with that is not worth my time or money.

The other part is just moving on. It turned out that the company's board are who they are, and it's easier and less stressful to just keep living my life without them living rent free in my thoughts.

Would you say the anonymous employees (on Reddit and glassdoor) are credible, or would you happen to know for a fact that they were written by ex-employees? Not looking for names if you're not wanting to give them, I just want to know if what little info exists is accurate/genuine.

*The anonymous employees on Reddit and Glassdoor are credible. Very soon before and after the layoffs happened it was well known that many were posting reviews on Glassdoor. I even wrote a glassdoor review myself. The Reddit user ExKindlyBeast, is legit, they knew enough about all the inner workings of the company and Showdown Bandit that unless someone bugged the office, the only way they would know that information was if they were an employee. *

Management

What was day-to-day life like? Was there a pattern or were things constantly in flux?

*For the first few months the day-to-day were quite good. We were allowed to focus on doing out work. Things went into flux when the Board (Mike and The Meatly) seemed to get stressed about a few aspects and then their lack of leadership skills took over and they just wanted to do things themselves *

Was there anything particularly weird that was required of you or anyone else? I assume there were no daily blood sacrifices but I suppose I won’t know until I ask.

*Nothing weird at all for the majority of employees. The only thing that really stands out is at one point it seemed like The Meatly started to develop a crush on one of the female employees, and there was some general unease occurring between other people, as they felt that the way he acted was inappropriate. He even started changing the lore about some characters in one of the games to line up more with the employee mentioned. *

Did any of the directors display any anti-diversity behavior? Mike has a reputation of being a Gamergate supporter, and claims to not have LGBTQ representation in their games because “their characters are not defined by what they identify as.”

For many months Mike wasn’t there day to day and wasn’t doing much of the interview and hiring. That was led by the very capable and understanding VPs (Who were let go a few weeks before the big layoff). Their ethos were much more about making sure things could be as inclusive as possible.
Since Mike and The Meatly were probably only in the office for 2 weeks total the entire time I worked there, we didn’t see any direct anti-diversity behaviour.

*And yes, I can say that it is known that Mike was a known GamerGate supporter *

Did any of the board have anything against other game devs in the area? I know Mike has feelings about Dirty Rectangles and Scott Cawthon, but did he ever say or do anything to reinforce those feelings, and did this mean that some places/topic conversations were not allowed?

*Mike’s problem with Dirty Rectangles is that they don’t allow bigotry to events. Around the time that GamerGate was happening Mike was at a Dirty Rectangles event. Near the beginning of that specific event the organizers said something along the lines of “If you are supporter of gamergate and bigotry, you can just leave. This is a safe space for all”. And Mike just up and left and never came to another meetup again. *

*There are also some other drama, as his ex-wife had a previous relationship with someone else who would also go to Dirty Rectangles. So I think that also played a small factor into it. *

*I don’t know too much about his beef with Scott Cawthon, but I assume its a dick swinging contest between narcissists *

Did you or any other ex-employees have problems with Cyn, as HR or as a person?

*Many people had problems with Cyn, who was basically the only HR person. People were feeling hurt and pressured by Mike’s attitude about things. It becomes very hard to talk to HR when HR is the CEO’s sister *

Did you or any other ex-employees have or had problems with Foxygen, and is there any credibility to her having an affair with Mike? After what I’ve seen: I don’t believe so but that’s just based on what’s been made public.

*Foxygen worked from Austin so many of us never interacted with her much. I have no idea if there is any credibility to her and Mike having an affair. The only thing I know is that Mike bought a house in Austin, and was renting it out to people, one of those I believe was Foxygen, and he would spend time down there at the house. *

Can you recall any specific instances of abuse in the workplace (Mike’s mood swings, threats, etc.,)? I use Mike as an example because he’s the one with the public allegations of abuse.

*He would openly berate people’s work. It was really shit behaviour for someone who is supposed to be in a leadership role. He would complain that other people’s code was too complicated. But that was because Mike has the skills of a junior programmer, and he doesn’t possess the skills to spend any time reading and understanding other people’s code. He would complain about things like “Why can’t we do this one thing, right now”, where the answer was usually “Well that system was never in the game design document, how are we supposed to read your mind and write systems for unplanned, undocumented things” *

*There was also some non-directed abuse towards the art team. Things like “Why doesn’t this work right now, fuck it, I will just model and rig the character myself”. Another example was that at one point The Meatly did a pass on one small level design and lighting pass on one of the games and when Mike saw it his response was basically “See The Meatly is awesome, this is how it should have been done from the get go”. This was all in earshot to the art team. Even though it wasn’t directed abuse. I still feel that these instances are still abusive. Most of what was abusive were these passive aggressive comments that he made over and over again. *

*There were some more directed attacks, in private messages to some team members on Slack. And on phone calls. I saw the evidence of that abuse even though it didn’t happen to myself. However I won’t say anymore of that, as those people who did get those abusive messages deserve to have some privacy. *

Were theMeatly and Bookpast complicit in Mike’s behavior?

*The Meatly wasn’t really complicit, but if he actually cared, he would have stood up to Mike to stem his behaviour *

Did Mike frequently use legal action as a means to an end, for employees or outside issues, when you were employed there? Has he threatened legal action since you were let go?

*He didn’t threaten any legal action to anyone since we were all let go as far as I am aware. *

When the VPs were fired, do you know/feel that this was due to them not adhering to the board’s vision, or was there a different reason (like the beginning of the firings in a staggered fashion to avoid mass termination)?

*The VPs being fired, in my opinion, were because Mike has a huge ego and want things done exactly the way he would do things. However the VPs have way more experience working and managing larger teams and projects. *

Mostly it came down to that Mike believed that everyone should work starting at the beginning of the game. So an example would be that for Chapter 1, everyone would focus on the first room until that room was 100% done, then everyone would move to the next room, and so forth. That system worked when it was just him and The Meatly working on the first game. However when you have a team of 20 working, it is often best to stagger the work. Some of the major systems and art could be parallelized. That is the way most games get made. Not Mike Mood’s terrible system that only works for 2 people.

*To add to the above system, he felt that we didn’t need to keep track of tasks at all, and everyone should always be at their coworkers desk talking about what should be done next. That just didn’t work for a larger team. So when the VPs were pushing back on those type of processes on behest of the development team, I feel like Mike decided they were in his way and laid them off so he could exert more pressure on the team to work Exactly like he wanted them too, rather than listening to the team to how they would like to work. *

The Products

I’m curious how the board felt about their products. Bendy, for example, has had the lore change a few times, and “get it done, good enough” doesn’t exactly sound like the words of someone who cares about what they're making as long as it’s done. Do you know if there was anything in particular the board was truly passionate about, or was it all just a product to them?

*The “Get it done, good enough” probably just stems from the fact that Mike cared more about money and milking the fanbase rather than making a sustained company and product. That can be shown with how they ran Kindly beast. I feel like it was all just a product to them. I am not aware if there was anything that they were truly passionate about. *

Was Showdown Bandit and/or BATDR a painful trial-and-error-built game with no direction because the board kept shooting things down while not being involved? I absolutely think that there’s credit that’s due for SB in terms of the models, sound effects, and a few others details, but I didn’t know if any of the board or vice producers were/should've been overseeing the projects specifically.

*Showdown Bandit was more a trail-and-error-built game with no direction. They made a very basic idea of what SB should have been, and then the original release date was going to only be 5 months from when it was started. That is a very short amount of time for a game of that scope. From seeing the build of SB before the board took over, and the one that Mike and The Meatly did, I will say the one before was better than the Mike/Meatly version. The really frustrating part is that they were super critical about any bug found in the previous version. But then in their version there were so many bugs, that some of them they just decided to leave in as “Easter Eggs” for youtubers to find. The cognitive dissonance there was astounding. *

BATDR had more direction as that was their bread and butter. However once they went away to work on SB for a month a bit and shutdown any communication between the board and the rest of the team, it became harder. BATDR was creating a bunch of systems that were designed to alleviate many of the issues from the original Bendy game. Things such as better level loading, saving, etc.

Are these screenshots from Showdown Bandit’s pre-release Steam listing from the original build of the game, or from Mike and Meatly’s?

Showdown Bandit Steam Screenshot Showdown Bandit Steam Screenshot Showdown Bandit Steam Screenshot Showdown Bandit Steam Screenshot Showdown Bandit Steam Screenshot Showdown Bandit Steam Screenshot

I honestly can’t remember if those screenshots are from which version of the game.

Would you be able to tell me what this teaser image was? Given that KB has been disbanded and Meatly & Mike have barely said a word: I’d hazard to say that we’d never know the answer unless you’d happen to be aware of it.

Kindly Beast Teaser Image

*I don’t immediately recognize that silhouette. If I were to guess it would be a silhouette of a planned new character/villian for the Showdown bandit franchise *

I don’t know if you’d be willing to share, but what was the original Showdown Bandit and BATDR like? From what Mike has said: chapter 1 of BATDR had 3 hours of content in chapter 1, and SB was fairly interesting in terms of complexity and details. I’d love to know as much as you’d be willing to share.

*The original Showdown Bandit had much more potential than what was released. They just weren’t willing to let timelines slip until they took control of it and then realized how much work was to be done. So they started partially from scratch, and made a worse game compared to what they took over. Having the rest of the team take those same 7 or so weeks to polish and and new things would have been amazing to see. *

*BATDR is harder to talk about since they never released a gameplay trailer of the original version. They only released a teaser which was just an animatic that happened to be rendered in engine. There was no gameplay code happening (so no user input, no locomotion, no collision, nothing). I think the best way to describe what the original BATDR was going to be was, that it felt inspired by BioShock. *

The Firings

After being let go: were the KB team helpful in finding you work, and did they ever try to privately apologize? Or did they even go the other way and attempt to sabotage your careers? Mike said he had made amends with one of the VPs, but I’m curious if you or anyone you know of had been approached by Mike or any of the board to apologize and attempt to smooth things over (before or after Mike’s statement in the gameinudstry.biz article). Additionally, from what I’ve seen, it seems that Optimum talent wasn’t very helpful in finding everyone work.

*I don’t think they ever reached out to privately apologize to anyone as far as I am aware. But didn’t go out of their way to sabotage anyone either.
The KB team were terrible in helping find work. Optimum talent weren’t going to be much better. Many of the developers found work very quickly. The artists had a bit more of a hard time finding work from what I saw. *

*One thing that irked me about that gameindustry.biz article or another one, was Mike mentioning that they worked with another local studio (Snowed In Studios) to get people work. However that was far from the case. The President of Snowed In Studios, ran the job fair on his own as he has very strong feeling about keeping game development talent within Ottawa, and was aware of the talent that was just laid off. Mike Mood or KB had nothing to do with what Snowed In did. Mike then also had the audacity to tell the President of Snowed In that “He didn’t know the whole story of the layoffs”. Mike was setting himself to seem like the victim in the press and in other people’s mind, but luckily most people easily saw past that *

What was it like, seeing everything fall apart day after day until you were fired? If you don’t want to share then you don’t have to.

*It was really stressful, even more so for some others. Some went on medical stress leave because of how things were going the last 6-8 weeks before the mass layoffs. It was kind of surreal since the studio was really new and they were spending so much money on hiring and other things too. *

*During that time the team really came together and supported each other. The morning of the layoffs we all knew it was happening, so we all just relaxed in the adjacent office, gossiping, making sure everyone had a way to stay in contact with the rest of the team. There was even some impromptu resume reviews, and other things like that for helping out others for what was to come. After the layoffs we all took a picture with our pink slips outside as a little “Fuck you, you won’t make us feel down”. Many people still all stay in contact. *

Is there anything else you’d like to share or make known? I know I’ve asked a lot of questions, but if there’s something you want out there that my questions haven’t covered, then go for it.

*One thing I would like to mention is that Mike Mood I think falsely claims things online to garner sympathy from his fans. He said in the reddit AMA, he only owns 2 things, his 2 cars. I highly doubt that. He would brag about having to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars in personal income tax the past few years, and brag about the money he had. He lived in a nice fancy house in a nice part of Ottawa, bought expensive furnishing for that house. And a bunch of other tells, where I find it hard to believe. However it may be true that he doesn’t own that house, because Mike declared bankruptcy in the past which makes it really hard to secure any sort of credit. That actually made it hard for some things to run as a company for Kindly Beast. Since he had no credit and was the owner of KB, he couldn’t get corporate credit cards, which made it hard for acquiring some software licenses. *

Related to the Reddit AMA, he also basically passed the blame on the layoffs on 2 things, the CFO and the VPs. The first who said they were running out of money, the second who he blames for hiring too many people. For the VPs, they thought the company was only going to be around 35-40 people. It was Mike and the Board that pushed for more and more hiring. They sign off on all new hires, and set the budget for hiring. That hiring could not have happened under the nose of Mike. That is just him blaming someone else besides himself. He then also blamed the CFO for not warning earlier about the money situation. The CFO for the record was an accounting firm, so not one individual. However, my guess. Is that the CFO was trying to make Mike aware of the financial situation, but for a while Mike wasn’t answering Slack or emails while he was purely focused on reworking Showdown Bandit. It also seemed like some of the financial woes of the company coincided with his divorce finalizing.

Follow-Up Questions

You mentioned how BATDR was inspired by BioShock. Could you elaborate on that? Also, how much of an influence was BioShock to Kindly Beast in general?

It was inspired by bioshock as in the playable character was going to have abilities, on one hand, and weapons on the other, not too dissimilar to Bioshock 1&2. There was also going to be more verticality in the game, but that wasn't really Bioshock inspired.

Would you be able to share any details regarding Bendy in Nightmare Run? Were there further plans for content or was it abandoned by the time you were hired?

There were lots of further plans for it. There was a team working on improving lots of aspects of it and they made huge gains in terms of player retention and a bunch of other metrics. That was also with only the first phase of a multiphase plan. Once they layoffs happened BINR got abandoned.

Some have speculated the influence merchandising may have had on the games during development. Do you know or believe that to be the case?

Merchandising was really the boards main thought. They were making games to sell merchandise, that was their business model. Characters in the games were designed with merchandising in mind from the get go.

Finally, I wanted to ask if you believe any playable versions of the original Showdown Bandit or BATDR still exist, and if you think they will ever be made public.

There are probably playable versions of the original Showdown Bandit and BATDR games, but they will most likely never see the light of day. The legal ramifications of releasing that to the public would be too high. That is something Mike, the Kindly Beast board and more would very aggressively try to prevent. But as they should, it is their intellectual property and they need to defend it.

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Pub: 26 Jun 2022 23:06 UTC
Views: 1431