Hey guys, RyanTSM here. So this update post has been a long time coming and I’d figure it’d be best to share this post before the year ends to give you guys some important updates on the state of the AU, myself, and what will happen in the future. I also wanted to make this to review and reflect on the progress I’ve made and figure out where I need to go from here. Alrighty, I don’t want to make this intro too long so I’m gonna head straight into addressing what will most likely be the elephant in the room.

Recent events and what they mean for me:

So I’m pretty sure you’re all aware of this by now but in case you’re not: Recently, on November 26th, SmilerFurcifer was outed for being a Child Porn Artist. Shortly after this was revealed, the entire FNaS community freaked the hell out, for good reason, thus leading to the event that I personally dubbed as “The Collapse of ‘23”. The collapse happened incredibly quickly that it was kinda hard for me to process everything that was happening all at once, so I took a week-long hiatus from Discord to try and process everything that was going on and figure out what I would do next. And before anyone asks, no his departure has not affected the AU in any way whatsoever. Since his departure, a number of Maniac Mania remakes/remasters/mods/whatever the hell have been appearing and I want to make it clear that there won’t be a MM chapter in the AU because it would mostly be pointless in the lore. So yeah, I wanted to get this out of the way before I get onto the longer stuff and explain quickly what the masked man’s cancelation meant for the PR AU. Now that that’s out of the way, let’s get on to the next important thing.

The Current State and Why the AU’s taking so long:

So for a while I’ve been in this consistent pattern of working on it for a while and stopping, working for a while and stopping. Honestly I can think of many reasons on why this is taking so long to develop but a major one being that my mental health hasn’t been the best lately, in fact 2023 has had me go through a lot of mental episodes throughout the years with some good and some bad things happening to me. Not only that but I’ve been dealing with schoolwork and stuff outside of the AU and the internet in general that has severely affected the progression of the AU. I wish I was joking, but I’m not. Another thing was the recent inclusion of 4 Halloween Edition that I am currently trying to fit into the AU as of writing this. I am taking as much time as possible to make its inclusion feel like an actual chapter that I thoroughly planned out and not feel like an afterthought. I’ve also still hard at work on doing Gen 2 designs for the characters I feel did not turn out so well when I drew them which of course has caused some setbacks. And on top of that, I’ve had few cases where I’ve looked at the AU overall and feel disappointed about the effort I had put in to the point where I’ve thought about starting from scratch again, but when I’ve tried looking through for any specific problems that bug me, I was never able to find any, either because I’ve doubted myself too much where there’s actually nothing wrong or I’m blind and can’t find the issues on my work. So all of these has caused major delays with the progress of the AU and is my main reasons why it’s taking so long for me to put out the next chapters, but on the positive side of things, I am slowly getting back on track and hopefully will have the next chapter of the AU done early 2024 (no promises though)

The Future:

I’ve talked about it a few times but I’m sure people are still wondering what will happen when the curtains inevitably close on the AU. Well, I’ve thought of some things that I still might do with the AU after the roster projects all said and done, I have some drafts to make a game on one of the chapters so you might see that in the future, and idk how many will be against it but I’ve also thought about making a Friday Night Funkin mod based around it. I also plan on making a Stash where people can use transparent refs of the current AU designs for fanart and stuff like that, a personal archive where you can use the designs I’ve drawn for the AU to make fanart of to your hearts content. I ask if you plan on using them for anything else to ask me for consent before doing so. But other than the PR AU, I have some other ideas that I’ve put on the back burner for a while that I want to get back into once this is over, stuff like my take on Sinister Turmoil, Sonic.exe, and a whole retake on the FNaS Series that’s meant to completely remake the story from the ground up (unlike Pixel Robotics where it’s mostly faithful while also adding something new). But yeah, I have some ideas on what I want to work on once the AU’s said and done, and I even have ideas that I want to kick off before then, such as opening Commissions for example since next year I will be graduating High School and will probably need a way to get some money in my pocket over the summer. But until that happens, I will continue to be working hard and making stuff that you guys enjoy and hopefully you’ll continue to stick around once the Pixel Robotics AU’s story comes to a close.

So that’s my major update and some stuff that I plan to do during the next year, if you made it this far, thank you for sticking around through all my bullshit and madness and I hope that the wait will be worth it for you guys. Pixel Robotics has been a major learning experience for me and I hope that I continue to grow on this crazy journey that I’ve put myself in. But for now, I wish you guys good luck in the new year. You guys go ahead and make those resolutions (and never follow through with them), As for me, I’ll try to post more updates on a hopefully more consistent schedule. One update post a month at least! And I’ll see you guys next time… next year… the future looks bright!

-RyanTSM