Did you know that the original models of the animatronics were finished on November 15, 2019? The image is brightened, and these models were used in the original project file, titled "Brought to Life".

Speaking of those models, these models pictured above were also included in Brought to Life. These were "living" incarnations of the animatronics with a deep and now unused lore. These models were finished on November 6, 2019.

Here was the cover for Brought to Life, inspired by Five Nights at Freddy's: Help Wanted's cover, as the game was more heavily inspired by Help Wanted in a way. This explains the "flat mode" feel that The Awakening has with it's camera movement. Brought to Life had a few incarnations before the one that would become The Awakening. This one being started in February 2020.

Jimmy the Elf was first an endoskeleton in Brought to Life. Its animations weren't as good but it was still unsettling nonetheless. Jimmy's movement cycle was done much better and was an overall improvement. Also did you know when I was making the endo, I got very upset because he was not working right. Actually, I had something inverted, and just needed to click something. A lack of hydration was causing me to go delusional. Pretty funny.

In Brought to Life, there was two other sets of levels you could also play. This screenshot being from a house level set. It played out like FNaF 4 in one way or another with the living "fleshy" wiggles. This is behind the player in the bedroom. Ignore the purple textures, that just means the textures were no longer in the file. This happened when I did "cut", then pasted the project's folder elsewhere. I lost all the original renders of the camera views from the warehouse levels. This did not happen during production, however, this happened when I was organizing all the other versions of the game I wasn't pleased earlier this year.

Here is the hub area, like Help Wanted's. It wasn't finished, but also again the textures to the warehouse level's images are missing.

Did you know I actually cried a few times out of frustration while developing this game? Also, this is from the third set of levels titled "Playtime". The goal was to find the five dolls and bring them back to a box. Each level took place in a different location, this one being a house. The house was unfinished but it's layout was done. I soon realized the the warehouse levels, the house levels, and so far only this one level out of four still needed finishing details and much more work. It was VERY overwhelming and I was trying way too hard with literally no roadmap to follow. It was a MESS.

This is Murray in the warehouse levels of Brought to Life, walking up to the player. His animation was much slower and also not as good as the new one. The animatronics were much higher in quality when it came to the model's polycount, and when Murray and Jeff were moving in the halls, it would slow my older computer down from 60 frames per second to a whopping 40-29 frames per second. To put this into perspective, Murray in Brought to Life was 43,367 faces (a face being a cube-like shape the makes up a part of the model for those who don't know), and Murray (in the 3D spaces) in Phobia: The Awakening is only 7,841 faces, a very big difference, and the new game ran at a perfect 60 frames per second on my old computer with no drops! Also note that the newer Greg poster is there, which is because I just put the newer textures in to restore as much as I could. This means all camera views are the newer ones as well.

This is the older poster. Note how Greg has segmented fingers. Those were one of the main reasons besides the heads that took up the most faces, as every one had a default blender UV sphere joint, which alone are pretty high in their polycounts if there are many.

This is the newer poster. Note how now I gave him more simple hands (that also looked nicer) and his overall model looks much better. In the rendered images in Phobia: The Awakening, their heads are actually higher in quality than they are in the 3D spaces, as the shading would not look as good. Also, did you know the animatronics are cleaner and not broken looking in their posters?

Old Murray poster.

New Murray poster.

Old Jeff poster.

New Jeff poster.

Old Anthony poster.

New Anthony poster. I think he had the most drastic change.

Old Captain poster.

New Captain poster.

Bonus old Greg poster.

And finally bonus new Greg poster. Another thing you can see is how much I improved their models, and also gave them textures too. They look more like the puppets and look a lot less friendly, which was the aim. The older clean animatronics in their posters I didn't give textures due to me just wanting them to appear more simple, and also they didn't have any textures assigned to them with no UVs saved either. This was not a very good thing and I learned a lot after cancelling Brought to Life in July 2020. After some time away from working on game related stuff, I wanted to go back to work on this again. I first wanted to fix the higher quality models, make them look better and make them more optimized for a 3D game, rather than a 2D one like they WERE supposed to be for but 3D was just so cool. This process started around August to September 2020.

Alas! Phobia: After Hours was going to happen! Everything was running good, the player was in a simple FNaF 1 like office but they could walk around just a little, with the same vent mechanic used in Brought to Life's warehouse levels. It looked amazing and the hype for FNaF: Security Breach was real! But wait! What about a different project idea? What about this one instead?! Then I looked at Brought to Life's file. What a mess, and look at what I've learned and improved with. I took that file, and got rid of everything but the warehouse levels. I called it Phobia: The Awakening. I went through the camera views, changed ALL the animatronic masks on the shelves, edited some endos to make them more like the new models, and redid all the character's location renders, and all their animations too. No AI was needed to be redone, no mechanics, it was all there. This happened around November to December 2020. After doing it all and being happy with it along with adding some stuff for a fifth night (Brought to Life only had four), I realized that it was lacking something. It felt too easy. I had removed the endo because I didn't know what to replace him with. I decided to start fresh. AGAIN.

Woah! Phobia: Descending Stability was going to be awesome! It used a 2D method I had, which would mimic the way of making a fangame made in Clickteam Fusion. To this day I liked the lore, and it sounded cool, but I may save it for another project or something. This was around February 2021.

Here's the render of the room you would be in. Isn't it neat? I'm still very proud of it to this day! Hmm, wait, this one is cool and all, but what about 3D? That Brought to Life fix was really cool. UGH. After some hair-pulling and laying around doing nothing, in March 2021, I picked up the The Awakening again. I finished Jimmy the Elf's model, which had existed before for Brought to Life, but it was more made for fun. I put him in and kept working. I went on and off the project multiple times for the next few months, wondering if it was what I wanted. Again I was filling it with more other levels, which were the tapes, but that got overwhelming, but not as much as Brought to Life. I stopped again there. But something happened.

Scott Cawthon retired. I won't say much on the situation, but that was frustrating as hell, and I'll probably never make an account on Twitter because of what happened. I thought "No, this is going to be it. This is my thank you", even if at the time I had no plans to release it at all. I decided that the tapes could instead be inspired by the whole FNaF VHS thing that had been pretty popular, and I loved the way some were done by people. I had some fun putting them together and I can't be happier with the results! I finished Phobia: The Awakening on June 28th, 2021, just for me and @the_Wolfdog to play for fun. They don't know the lore and I kept (and still am keeping) a lot a secret just to make it more fun for the both of us. Afterwards I wanted to relax, then I got an overnight job at Walmart. I made my Reddit account and then started to think: "Would people be interested in my game?" I talked to one of the other employees I worked with and she thought the game looked very cool. She encouraged me to ask the FNaF community on Reddit, and one morning upon getting home, I decided to. For a while it was silent, but then people came and said they were interested. The post made it onto the first "hot" page of the Subreddit for a while! I heard some very nice things from people, so I made an account here on Gamejolt and made a page. It got some attention to my surprise. I then made some edits to the project file, mainly a proper return to main menu feature. This ended up causing a nasty bug with the tapes, but thankfully not many people had found the tapes anyway. I got those issues fixed, and slowly over time the game got more popular. Seeing people playing my game on YouTube was super surreal to me, and I'm super thankful to know that many people love what I have made, and I'm also very happy to see people would love to see more of the games, and also I'm surprised people are actually a little interested in the story too!

The Phobia games aren't trying to be anything new or special, gameplay-wise and story-wise. This is just me putting some work into something I think is cool that I want to make for fun. I'm thankful to have the support I do, but I'm also pretty surprised about that as well! There is much more to the past of these games, dating as far back as 2015 in a game called Little Big Planet 3. As a final fun fact, "Phobia" has no true meaning, but it can be applied to many things in the game. Phobia was the title of a series of six games very similar, all made in LBP3, and the logo is also the same. These games were never public on the LBP3 community, and I don't think they ever will be. These new Phobia games are pretty much a reboot of those ones, but way, way, way WAY better.

Thank you guys, and they will be seeing you again in the future...