Just because it is free should not make much difference though, if he leaves my project to go after money jobs, what is to say that he will not leave a low money job to seek after higher paying job?
If someone here gives him $100, what will happen to your project if someone offers him $1000 later, do you leave the first project? You cannot leave in the middle of it with no explanations, you must finish the job.
Just because I am an indy game devloper with no money does not mean that I am not a serious game developer also. When I make deals with people I expect them to stay true to their word.
In this case he was having trouble with his rig for the "death" animation so I told him to send me the model without the "death" animation. I even told him that if he wanted to back out of the project that it would be fine with me, I repeated that several times but he assured me that he was going to finish it. So in reality I told him again and again that he should just quit this project and do something else but he kept telling me again and again that he would finish it next week, then the next week...before you know it there was a month gone by and he comes back with no explanations except that he wants me to teach him to export models into the engine for another client. So I spend 2 hours teaching him to do it, which is something I wouldnt normally do for free.
Then dont get me started on all the time I spent with him on msn chat hoping that he would just be quiet because I had a lot of work to do myself. Just think, instead of doing all that useless blabbing, he could have finished my animations. Because he talks every TIME we are on msn I have to pretend I am offline.
If you never saw any of gamesaint's work you shouldn't have said things like: "His work is beyond what most of us have seen around here." in the first place.. That's just lying.
No Larry, he sent me an .avi and he sent me the walk cycle.
But if you ask me if I would want another animation by him I would say no even if it was free. I dont even really want the one he is working on now. At first he kept insisting that he was glad to make it, but now that I find out that he has a sick kid to take care of I would rather he just keep it and I will never do business with him again.
Im sorry that I didnt get it to you sooner. I keep my word but we never had a contract and I told you that after I did that one model I would have work comming up. We never had a written contract, thats something you get when you pay for it
If a man's spoken word is not trustworthy, then his written contract is just as bogus. There have been many people burned on deals with written contracts also.
I'm not proud of that, but that's the life of a developer, always straggling with deadlines.
To be honest Larry, you are another one who really needs to be true to your word. Many good software companies out there dont make vain promises, you can tell the difference between bad ones and good ones by their ability to stay true. But this is a different issue than yours anyway. This is not an issue of gamesaint not able to make the deadline, it is an issue of him leaving the project for a better offer and leaving me out to dry just because he could. There is a big difference.