Rising Thunder wasn’t funded by the community. As per this interview:
It has external funding, so it won’t be running a Kickstarter campaign or asking players to donate.
I’ve never had strong feelings about Rising Thunder, except that it took away resources from developing SH. If anything, I was glad when they canned it. Those fighting games don’t appeal to me in the slightest, it’s not what drew me to SH.
You know who isn’t commenting? The developers, cause they have no excuse as to why this game is going in the direction it is.
You are making a post on a developer comment. I would argue that Radiant explained very well why and where the game is going. I don’t necessarily agree with the explanation, as you can see from my post above, but I accept it as valid.
I remember the months following a lot began to change, @Tom disappeared completely, everyone else got more and more quiet, people left the company, Radiant moved, and the team grew.
Yeah, that concerns me, too. I asked before why Tom and Tony vanished from the public eye, and was told that they’re still around, but they do more behind the scenes stuff, like guiding the direction of the studio, keeping the development environment stable and updated, and some security stuff. Here’s a post from Tom (bizarrely, on Reddit, not here…) confirming that they’re still alive and working on Stonehearth:
Hi! We’re still around! I’ve taken on somewhat of a different role since the Riot acquisition, helping support the team through hiring and managing the studio. As old-timers know, I was responsible for most of the art in the game. Now Allie and Malley are doing a great job on that front, so I’m more focused on how we can continue to move the project forward.
A big part of that has been augmenting the team with skills that we’ve been lacking. So since spring we’ve hired an animator, an actual game designer (!!!), a UX designer, and an engineer. We’ve also made an offer to Morgan, Destroyer of Worlds, (last summer’s intern). She has accepted and will be joining the team mid next year! We continue to actively hire, especially for more engineers to help pick up the pace of development.
That said, the fact that Tom only makes himself known when people start asking questions doesn’t really reflect that well on his dedication to the team. I remember when he used to be in the public eye a lot more. He and Tony were the visionaries for Stonehearth. Now the situation seems like: “Hey, thanks guys for funding our studio. We’re gonna sell it to a fighting game company and make fighting games now. You didn’t really think that the organizers of the biggest fighting game tournament in the world would care about this game for long, did you? Anyway, here’s some staff hopefully to finish this game. Sorry, gotta go, got a meeting with Riot now.” Would be lovely to see Tom or Tony post on these forums, but it seems that they don’t really care about SH anymore. People who care still post here, developers or not. They’ve no excuse as far as I can tell.