Bunky Bartlett was indeed willing to listen to somebody. While publicly a fair amount of people were vocally dismissing his ideas, Bunky was getting calls and emails from developers, artists and other people who wanted to help make the game a reality.

Pure Bang Games is a Baltimore-based studio known mainly for casual, social games found either on Facebook or mobile devices. Its biggest hit so far is the Facebook version of "My Pet Rock." However Walsh, its founder and CEO, loves fantasy and has always wanted to make an MMO. A producer and designer who worked at Bethesda Softworks before founding Pure Bang, Walsh was eager to help Bunky bring some structure to his mixed bag of ideas.

"Bunky's an inventor. He comes up with ideas and some of them are ... pretty different. We take these ideas and innovate on them and turn it into an executable product," Walsh says. Since Pure Bang has taken on the project, Bunky has gotten a crash course in what goes into actually making a game, rather than an idea for one. Since coming on the project in May, Walsh and his team have "been spending time just doing some more careful budgeting and planning. We're also looking at features that are must-have, what's nice to have and what we're not going to have when we launch." In other words, everything his critics were telling him was true, but Bunky showed he was willing to listen to someone with expertise.

Even as the creator of, Bunky has been willing to surrender parts of his brainchild to Walsh's team, going so far as to bring the entire crew out to his remote property for a pool party. "I've tried to give [Pure Bang] as much artistic license as possible. Everyone at the company are gamers, and I want them to feel like they're making a game that they'd want to play," Bunky says.

Yuzun Kang, designer

One of those gamers is Pure Bang designer Yuzun Kang, who notes that everyone was "pretty much immediately on board" with the idea of making Bunky's MMO even though the company usually focuses on games of a different scope and scale. Pure Bang also appears to be at ease with Bunky's status as a lottery winner and a neophyte when it comes to game design. "It's OK to be lucky," Kang says. "It's always a great thing when luck and circumstance can accommodate your endeavours."

Since linking up with Pure Bang, it appears that Bunky has brought his grandiose vision down to a malleable and reasonably-sized plan for actually getting a game made. The website (complete with hookerbot t-shirts for sale) still remains with Bunky's manifesto. Behind the scenes however, it's clear that Walsh and his team have been able to help Bunky manage expectations about what is realistic. They've sat down to address which, if any of Bunky's original claims about the project or its features will ultimately hold up.

Walsh stresses that they don't yet know what the game truly is, what it's ultimately going to cost or when it could be finished. "has gone through stages," he says. "[creator Markus Persson] released it as an early alpha. People played it and people gave feedback, and the game has evolved. We're going to do something similar. We'll work with the community to build up that game and that vision." The funding plan is more of the same. They continue to seek investors to fund iterative chunks of the process, though they also haven't ruled out another Kickstarter campaign if they decide it makes sense.