Board Thread:News and Announcements/@comment-1738746-20180702064433/@comment-1738746-20180707032429

I have definite proof yes, I'm not one to just simply jump to conclusions. The user in question just said something that came across as odd for me so I did a little digging and was able to recreate a gif overlaying their sprite and the original image to show even down to the highlight pixels was all copied. Aside from copyright and being on the site and all, it's kinda cool to watch the transition because it was copied extremely well so you can see it morph right in front of you, but yeah not great. I have no idea if the spriter in question has a history of tracing, I don't personally know them that well, but they have a crazy temper.

I'd recommend getting in contact with the spriter, especially if they're already in-cave, so that they can talk to TJ about it. You're right that in that case it broke the rules (tracing claims completely aside), but in this case the leak was his fault, not any of the artists. He can't really punish artists for him breaking his own rules you know? Most of us get the feeling it will be delayed, though seeing the backlash of angry users on the forum, I think it would be appropriate to release next month- might as well, no one's going to forget about this, damage is already done might as well do the release that will then at least appease the angry people and those worried it may not ever get released. From a business perspective, it's a win-win for him to release it next month, but seeing as he does hold on to the "secrecy" thing very hard to the point where he's constantly losing talented artists, at the most it might just be delayed for a long while.