I know I've quit a lot of projects that I would probably would have kept on if there'd been more hype/interest in what I was doing. Overhype can be an excellent motivator. It can also be a crushing defeat when you can't succeed, but hey, at least the guy is trying. More than I can say for myself.
How do you know you would have kept on it if you never actually did that? You might think pressure and other negative reinforcements are good motivating tools but in my experience that doesn't usually work for personal programming projects.
Back when I was young, before I was doing any kind of real programming, I started out in the community for the gaming making program Megazeux. In this community (and in any other game making community I've seen) vaporware was the vast rule, not the exception. You'd constantly see games announced with all these massive goals and great ideas. People would post reports saying what percent they had complete of each part, where the categories would represent grossly uneven levels of work, making it look like they were further along than they were (come to think of it, back in the 90s people did this with emulators a lot too, and there were also a lot of vaporware emulators) We had something called the "demo curse", where making a demo itself was
such an accomplishment that if you released one you were practically certain to never finish the game after that.
The problem is people who hype want the recognition that they get from the hype. And it's easier to get that recognition with more hype than it is with actually accomplishing what you're claiming you will, at least for a while. Until it gets too big and just falls apart. And it's human nature to overpromise and underdeliver as a rule; self imposed deadlines are rarely met, for instance.
Frankly I'm struggling to think of a single hobbyist project that went well after a bunch of hype. Maybe people are encouraged by professional projects which have a much better success rate from hype, but in those cases it's (usually) an independent marketing department performing the hype, while the people doing the actual work aren't allowed to talk about it at all.
It's just not worth all the disappointment and bitterness that'll come from letting people down. Better to promise little and deliver a lot. At least he has something to show here but I don't like what he's doing with it, ie "okay just Puzzle Bobble but you can see the potential right?!" well, no, not really, because lots of emulators post these really impressive early results for the platform's Puzzle Bobble port because it's a simple 2D game that needs close to no CPU time.
I get that the guy is probably more interested in attracting developers than making end users excited, but the sort of developer he wants for this is going to see right through it.
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