Version 0

He's the first ever Crafty mascot from Crafty-HQ! Version 0's a very old character of mine which dates back to my game Crafty's Crafts from 2019. He was originally a secret character which pre-dated the other versions of the Crafty mascots. He's gone through a few design changes, but now he's here with a custom model and everything!

His voice box is broken, ending up with it becoming this horrific garbling noise. So whenever he comes over to your office, this ends up with him disrupting your cassette player and getting in the way of the other characters. The vintage "Teddy Bear's Picnic" tape seems to soothe him, returning him back to his closet.

Version 0 himself didn't go through many changes throughout development, however he does have some scrapped gameplay mechanics which you can see next!

Scrapped Gameplay Mechanics

Some parts of the game were changed a lot up until the final release.

The very first mechanic idea involved letting the animatronics into your office, then having to use a monitor to calibrate their movements in order to reset them back to the stage. This would've been cool and creepy to do at first, but I felt would get frustrating and old quickly in later nights. The cassette idea was thought of instead, which felt a lot more natural with how it would work.

Originally, it was planned that you could roam the establishment and pick up items and powerups that would help you before your night starts. This was an interesting concept, but it ended up feeling unnecessary and way too niche. Plus with the minigames after every night, it would take too much focus away from the main game.

Mama was originally going to have the same mechanic as Crafty and Tricksy where she would attack the door and walk past the window. Her only difference was that she was slower than them but did a lot more damage to the door. This felt too boring for her, so the Mama story tape was introduced. She'd changed so that she can't be backed up at all, and was only stalled by her tape. This felt too harsh for the player, so was eventually changed to how it works today with her being backed up from her tape.

Version 0 went through A LOT of changes in his mechanic. Originally, after leaving his closet in the Tricksy Towers, he was meant to climb up the play structures slowly and reach a vent at the top (which can still be seen in the camera nowadays!). He could only be backed up by playing his vintage tape on the camera. Once he got in the vent, he would make his way to the office and permanently disrupt your cassette player. This seemed cool on paper, and I really liked the idea of him climbing through the play structures. But I felt it was way too similar to Mama's mechanic, and would be too much for the player to track on top of everything else, so it ended up scrapped for a much simpler mechanic.

Originally, all three Cublets were going to do different things. Sun would go to one of the breakers and chew the wires, the same as they work now. However, Pan would cling to Crafty, Mama or Tricksy and speed them up until you looked at him. Then Blu would try and enter your office and start playing/pausing your cassette player randomly. This gave each of them more variety, but it was way too much for the player to have to learn and deal with. So the breaker mechanic was instead given to all of them.

The sides of the building that the characters would navigate through went through a lot of changes. Originally, Mama would go through both sides of the building. But once her current mechanic was introduced, she was changed to just take a single path down the left side. Then Crafty was intended to take both sides to balance out Tricksy's extra mechanic of breaking the shortcut, but this was also scrapped. It eventually turned into how it is today, with Crafty and Mama sticking to the left, and Tricksy and Version 0 sticking to the right.

It's a very small change, but there was originally going to be a Restrooms camera in the hallway connecting to Tricksy Towers and Mama's Splash Down (they can still be seen on the map, but just don't have a selectable camera). This would've just been an extra side room that the characters could go into. It was removed because it felt kind of pointless, plus there was no extra side room on the left side of the map to compensate.

Those were the main scrapped mechanics that Crafty's Play Zone went through! I'm not sure what I'll discuss in the next dev log, but you'll find out in a couple days!