As you may know, I rushed the development of this game so I could release it in time for the 1 year anniversary of Five Nights with Phoques. This had lead to many bugs, very large coding oversights, and scrapped gameplay elements.

Sadly, because of these issues, as well as me finding the game to be too long and not fun to play, I have decided to cancel the big update.

At first, the big update would've included bug fixes, new music tracks for bosses, save data, difficulty selection and gameplay customizability, and making Antipise not ugly.

(Old; ugly Antipise)

(New; significantly less ugly Antipise)

By the end of development of the game, I had grown to despise what it had become. At all times, it was either too easy or too difficult, and every time I worked on the game, I was bored and lethargic and rushed through coding in bosses.

But immediately after release, I was somehow pleased with what I had made, and I decided that I would revisit the game and make just a small update and leave it at that. I even considered adding scrapped content and even a third phase for the final boss.

However, every time I tried to go back to the game, I found myself unhappy with the game, and I would be too frustrated to work on anything for longer than an hour.

It wasn't until recently, after I published Maltigi: Brother Collector, that I found time to work on it again. I had other old projects that I wanted to work on, but because this game was the only one that was released unfinished, it had the highest priority.

I opened Turbowarp and I thought about what the game needed, and I remembered how dissatisfied I was with how vague I had made the story, even though at the time of release, it was stable enough to be fully displayed. I wanted to make the story more obvious to the player, rather than having vague hints when using the hard mode rune at the final boss.

So I thought about it, and I remembered that I wanted to have cutscenes for the final boss, so why not an opening cutscene? So I worked on the opening cutscene (pictured at the top of this post), and for the first time since the game was created for fun as a little tech demo (I was originally going to make a FNwP remake for the anniversary, never got around to even starting it), I was enjoying working on this game. It was then that I thought about changing the gameplay, but I ignored those thoughts and continued working.

Even while working on this new, exciting content, I found my mood being dulled by my awful, messy coding. It was then that I thought, "Maybe I should just recode the game from scratch." I immediately pushed that thought aside, because if I do that, then I won't have enough time to finish the week 2 demo for 3 Weeks of Giuseppe (Which I plan to release on its intended original release date of April 1st).

But today, something in my brain clicked, and somehow, time was no longer an issue for me. I felt unburdened by the constant pressure of time forcing me to work on projects that I just wasn't motivated enough to finish. I honestly have no idea what changed things, but I'm happy it happened.

After coding in a scrolling tile floor and limiting how far the player can see (as they start in a cave), I thought, "I'm not doing this. I'm starting over." I feel it would honestly be a waste of my time trying to fix this game as it is now.

So I thought about recoding the game from scratch, but that felt like even more of a wasteful effort, so I am going to make an entirely new game. It will have the same story, but gameplay will be different. It will have more atmosphere and will not be as silly.

I have uploaded what remains of the scrapped update. It is unfinished, but that doesn't matter. What I have in mind will be much better than what there is now.