Hey! Welcome to the first official devlog for Hatsune Miku's Magic FestivaI, my FNaF fangame where you do tasks while fending off Hatsune Miku and her friends.

These big devlog posts are different from my other posts on the game, as they're more of a big summary of what's been done so far, as well as extra insight into what my overall plans are. All the other stuff is more like silly lil teasers, lol.

Expect the first few devlogs to be a lil all over the place while I find a format that works.

Since this is the first devlog, I'll give a quick run-down about the game.

As mentioned before, this is a FNaF fangame based around the popular virtual singer Hatsune Miku. (I'm trying to avoid calling her specifically a Vocaloid, since she technically isn't solely that anymore.)

The premise of the game is that you're an employee at an unnamed theatre assigned one last job before you leave for good. The job being to make sure everything's working and ready for the upcoming event, Hatsune Miku's Magic Festival, an event that's pretty similar to Miku Expo and Magical Mirai if you're familiar with those.

The big thing that sets this event apart from the others, though, is that rather than using holograms like they usually do for the virtual singers, they're using animatronics. Cue "raaaah miku's gonna kill you" shenanigans.

One thing I probably haven't clarified for people, is that this game isn't really going to try to be "scary." It might have a bit of a tense atmosphere, and provoke that sense of "unease" when you see the animatronics just smiling at you the entire time, but nothing outright terrifying. This game is gonna be much more geared towards people that prefer the gameplay. If that doesn't appeal to you, that's fine.

With all that out of the way, lemme answer a question some people might have:

When will the game come out?

To put it simply, the game will release once it's done.

This game is still WAY too early in development to give a release date for, or even an estimated year. I'm a complete amateur at game dev, and I'm still learning the ropes of GDevelop/making a FNaF game specifically, so I don't wanna make any promises as of now. I'm also the only one really working on the game at the moment, and I want to wait until I have a solid foundation for the game before I bring along people to help.

All I know for sure is that it'll take a while.

Current Progess + Plans

Okay now for the actual "devlog" part of the devlog. Last week, I finally finished implementing Len's AI. He approaches your door, and kills you if you leave it open. Pretty basic stuff. Basic stuff that took me (I think) over 2 weeks.

Why did it take so long? Because GDevelop still confuses me sometimes and I was also fighting against my own bad code, lol. I had to redo the ENTIRE structure of the office in order to get it to work the way I wanted it to. I think that was the main thing that was taking me so long to finish him.

Alongside the doors, I also made the lil plushie that you can click on (what's a fnaf fangame without a boopable object?), and basic jumpscare system (literally just a png and fnaf 1 jumpscare sound for right now). Still have yet to finish the rest of the assets for the office.

Now for character design! I've already hinted this a couple of times with Miku's design (shown below) as well as the name of the game itself, but I'm going for a Magician theme for the animatronics' designs.

Originally, this was going to be in the form of basing each character on a magic act, but... I wasn't entirely satisfied with that. I'm probably still going to keep that idea, but they moreso have elements of those acts rather than it being the whole basis.

[Miku's design for the game. She has a lil top hat, which is supposed to be the hint about her being a magician.]

[Len, Rin, and Luka's now scrapped designs. It shows Len as a rabbit, Rin as a dove (which I executed HORRIBLY btw), and Luka in an outfit that's supposed to be reminiscent of cards in a card deck.]

I think how I'll execute it now is Miku is the "magician," while everyone else is her "assistant." I'm open to ideas, though! If you want an idea for what this might look like, I'd look at the phantom thief modules for Meiko, Miku, Rin, and Kaito from Project Mirai/Diva. I might take some inspiration from those.

And in case it wasn't clear, the sort of body design for these animatronics are more like ball-jointed dolls. A lot of it is just covered up by clothes :')

Oh yeah, I've also written basic scripts for most of the phone calls! These are just drafts at the moment, and no, I don't need a voice actor right now. Since I'm feeling nice I can give you a little peek :3

These have helped quite a bit with fleshing out the game a lil more, but things will definitely still change as I adjust things. I haven't fully completed the last couple phone calls since I can't seem to settle on mechanics for Meiko and Kaito :')

Also, this doesn't mean this game will have crazy amounts of lore. It's only going to have as much lore as is necessary. Phone calls are basically just a tutorial.

Main priority right now is to make a proper main menu. Used to just be a gray background with start and exit buttons, but I'm actually starting to put more into it now.

If you've ever played PDFT/MM+, I plan on using a similar style of menu for that. That being, when one of the menu options is hovered over, an image is displayed on the side with one of the characters. I just thought this would be a fun detail!

One last thing before I sign off for now, I do want to talk about one thing regarding the game's release:

Sometime, maybe right before/early next year if I'm efficient enough (no promises), I want to release a sort of "alpha demo" of the game. This is essentially a fleshed out prototype. It'll have one night, as well as a custom night, with the basic mechanics worked out.

The purpose of this will be to collect feedback, tide people over until the game's release, and give an idea of what the game will actually be like.

You can see the exact progress of this demo, among other things, on the game's Milanote board. There will be times where I'll be quiet on the game's development for whatever reason, so this board serves the purpose of giving you a precise idea of what I'm doing as well as whether or not I'm working at all. I try to keep it as up to date as possible!

That's all! Thank you so much for reading, and I wish you all the best. ^^