Hello earthlings!

Wow! It's been a while since I wrote one of these. Forcing myself to enter the super "professional" NPC Andrew mode is a little painful... but I guess I'll endure since you all deserve some updates.

Well, how should I start this? Hmmm... I'll say three words: I like FNaTI

Have I talked to you all yet about how much adulting sucks? When we made FNaTI 2020, we were all mostly angsty kids still in high school without jobs, doing whatever the hell we wanted. Boy, has that changed quite a bit. A good reason why things have been going so slowly is... ALL OF US HAVE GROWN UP! (how terrifying)

To give you a rundown of my daily life: I wake up at 7 in the morning 6 days a week (to go to work), work for 6 hours a day on average, come home, take care of chores, and more. It's like I never get a break. Here's the best part: I'm not even the person with the most to do on this team! Imagine that life put on someone like our modelers. So yeah, there is rarely time to knock this project out.

People in the community take these incidents of silence as a sign that the project is going to get canceled somehow, but that's simply just not true. Listen, yes, there are times were motivation is stretched thin and we don't have time. No, that doesn't mean we are going to let this project die. In fact, if it did, it would probably haunt me for the rest of my life. Better to get it out of the way now before I near 30 years old, still making the same old game...

Ok, with that out of the way, let's talk about where we are with this project.

THE MAIN GAME (Nights 1-6, Custom Night, etc)

Would you all believe me if I told you Nights 1-4 were (mostly) finished a few months ago? Yeah, testers already played a good chunk of the game. They also played a barebones version of Night 6.

The game has been received incredibly well, with some people even saying the gameplay of this project is substantially better than Oblitus Casa and Chuck E's. That's crazy to even think about! I guess we'll see when this is publicly released.

The main game has undergone some minor changes since testing (mostly all graphical), and we still have some minor things to do with it (based on what I remember), but this part of the game isn't what is taking so long. Can anyone in the class guess as to what is taking us so long to make? You know, the thing that historically in since 2014 has been a pain in the backside to make...

PIRATE CAVERNS

You guessed it correctly!

As of writing, Floor 1 of Pirate Caverns is nearly finished. We have to do a few more minor renders, but the enemy AI for The Face has been programmed. That means it's pretty much playable, I'd say that's some good progress. Not much more to say about that. I think we'll do a new teaser for the game when Floor 1 is completely finished and tested.

We are also slowly making progress on Floor 2, which somehow has taken much faster to model so far than Floor 1 did (probably because this floor is just a giant cave). I think Floor 2 will probably be one of the scariest parts of the game, and I look forward to letting testers (and you all when the time comes) play it. Trust me, the wait is worth it.

MISC (Memories Mode, some TOP SECRET stuff, etc)

Memories mode has proven to be a bit more of a challenge than we all initially thought. You see, going for complete authenticity for each version is a lot more tedious than it seems. We've had to go over a lot of what we want to do with Anart himself when it comes to Nights 1, 2, and 5. This process has been very fun, but sometimes confusing and a little frustrating, because some things just aren't quite up to today's standards.

A lot of Memories Mode has had to change since the original build we made for it. Currently, we are in the process of redoing the unfinished rooms we made for 4.0, as the original versions weren't up to par and we (unsurprisingly) lost the blends for them. We are also trying to figure out how 5.0 should work, and we're even debating introducing a new character to it. We want these nights to not only be accurate, but also fun and interesting to play. God forbid it's another Classic Mode.

Besides MM, there are a few minor parts of the game we have to finalize. These are minor for a reason, as they are small compared to the other things I have mentioned. I also can't talk about them too much as there are some spoilers, but they are being worked on.

With all of that, I don't have much left to say. We are hard at work, and I think this devlog should show that.

Unfortunately, there is a slight chance that this game will not release on time. At this point, I've decided to stop caring about deadlines and release dates. This game will come when it comes. Please stop asking us when this will come out or any sort of approximation of that. I don't know anymore. All you guys need to know is we are working.

Thanks for stopping by, see you all again soon.

PS: here's the menu preview i promised you all months ago

ok bye