DieCarly



dieCarly is a cancelled game by Akimbo Game Studios. It was going to be a survival horror FPS game in which the player faces hordes of “tortured souls,” creatures from the underworld, who broke the barrier between Hell and Earth’s surface and wreaked havoc on Seattle. The player’s goal was to kill the onslaught of hellish creatures to keep the iCarly crew alive at all costs. dieCarly was leaked as in development in November 2020, and no other information was learned about the game prior to its cancellation. Later in November 2020, Akimbo Game Studios confirmed the existence of the game, but stated that they decided to cancel it for “several reasons.” dieCarly would have been TagTheFlag’s first game as a director, should it have been released.

Development
dieCarly was said to have had a “rough, troubled development history” due to conflict between directors and issues with Roblox. The development started at an undisclosed date in November 2020. exrahs and TagTheFlag were the two who came up with the concept and directed the development of the game. At some point within the development process, exrahs and Tag’s visions of the game split, with two key differences: exrahs wanted the game to take a more multiplayer-oriented approach, with an ambitious party system and PvP features. He also wanted to reuse the gun system from Ham Warfare so they could focus on programming other aspects of the game. Tag saw a single player story-oriented game, being the first campaign for Akimbo. Tag also wanted to create a new gun system, and improve upon Ham Warfare’s mistakes and implement new features. They “met in the middle,” and continued development of dieCarly. However, ex and Tag had a “bumpy and turbulent ride” along the rest of the development. Both directors wanted two different paths for the game, and that led to even more conflicts between the developers. Throughout the history of dieCarly, Roblox shut down various parts of the game. It was cancelled in November 2020.

Cancellation
The developers decided to cancel dieCarly in November 2020. The official statement said that it was cancelled “for a plethora of reasons,” and was later stated to be due to both developer conflicts and issues with Roblox, as well as the fear of copyright issues with Nickelodeon. “We had a few... um, altercations between directors,” exrahs stated. “Me and Tag had two distinctly different creative visions for the game, and we just couldn’t seem to get over the differences. Me and him are still on good terms and we’re still friends, it’s just that that chapter of Akimbo is done with.”

Throughout the development, Roblox stepped in because they had issues with some content in dieCarly. On this matter, exrahs later stated, “They had some issues with some content we had in the game. Mostly decals, we had images of iCarly characters holding guns. Which I really don’t see anything wrong with, but apparently Roblox had a different take on that.” These matters were taken on a case-by-case basis, and all were later resolved with no punishment. “I think they didn’t really go that hard on us because we didn’t make the game publicly available, but I thank them for that nonetheless.”

The final reason for dieCarly’s cancellation was fear of copyright claims from Viacom, Nickelodeon’s parent company. “They’re infamous for shutting sh*t down,” exrahs later said, “and we really didn’t want all our work to get f*cking copyright claimed and go to nothing.”

Staff
It's not fully known who worked on dieCarly, but the people we do know are on the following list.


 * exrahs (lead content design, creative director, programmer)
 * TagTheFlag (gameplay director, map design)