More than 1,200 people backed "Haunts: The Manse Macabre" when it ran a funding campaign via Kickstarter in June 2012.

Haunts sought $25,000 (£15,590) from Kickstarter but the project proved popular and meant the game's developers got $28,739 (£17,895) to fund completion of the game. Prior to the funding appeal Haunts creator Mob Rules Games had spent about $42,500 getting the basics of the title completed.

Haunts' lead programmer was only contracted to work for Mob Rules for a year, said Mr Dakan, and having returned to Google has no spare time to keep working on the game.

(That's not quite as severe as the original slant of the story ; it implies nothing unreasonable about the developer.)

In addition, Mob Rules second lead programmer has quit and no longer wants to work on Haunts.

And these things happen. In the absence of barbed-wire whips, there is little that can be done to force someone to work on a project they don't want to work on.

Unfortunately Mob Rules has no-one available to do this work. In addition, Haunts has been written in the Go programming language which is not widely used and will limit its chances of hiring new hands to complete the work.

In his blogpost, Mr Dakan apologised for how Haunts has turned out and pledged to refund any backer who wanted their money back out of his own pocket.