First of all, I want to thank everybody who's stuck around following this game.

Back when I created Scooped, it was nothing but a fun little side project for the Freddit Game Jam- just a quickly programmed, scrapped together build of a fun idea I had. I never expected it'd grow anywhere near this big.

But now, I have questions to answer. Nearly half a year since the last update, and no signs of anything new. What happened to this game? It's complicated, but I'll try my best to answer.

Back when I released the 1 year anniversary edition, I made a realization.

Unreal Engine runs VERY slowly, especially on older hardware. I'd consistently get messages about people barely able to- or sometimes entirely unable to play the game due to framerate, or startup crashes. But at this point, I chalked it up to the fact it was built on top of the mess that is Legacy edition. So I kept working.

It was at this point I made my first mistake, trying to introduce lore.

By introducing lore, and the idea of a story mode, I had essentially quadrupled the scope of the game, whether I realized it or not.

However, this issue is so much more complex than just scope.

Scooped goes against the entirety of the FNAF lore related to Circus Baby. And if I were to make my own alternate universe of the story, I'd have to explain it all, and make tons of changes to both Scooped and the story to make it fit.

Worst of all, I kept changing what the actual story focus was meant to be. I may go over these ideas eventually, but for now, just know that the story kept shifting every time I thought of something that'd work better, Made worse by the fact the game was never meant to be story driven in the first place.

But now, Unreal Engine's sluggish performance was starting to worry me. If I released deluxe on Unreal, would half it's followers even be able to play it?

And so I made my second mistake. Trying to switch engines.

At first that sounds tame, right? What's so bad about switching engines? Well, it's probably the fact I've never attempted programming a game outside of Unreal Blueprint. BP is fundamentally different from a standard programming language in the way it's assembled, being put together by connecting nodes rather than typing code.

So I jumped head-first into the Godot Engine, with little former experience, trying to make the biggest game I've ever made. I was trying to run when I didn't even know how to crawl.

Just as quickly as the build started development, it just sort of stopped. I didn't know enough to keep going.

And now we're here. For a very long time, Scooped has been weighing on me. The expectations of one thousand people, on a sequel with a scope too big to handle, split between two game engines.

But now, I've thought about the game. I've realized how big the scope got, and with that view, I can scale it down. This game will never have plot, it will never have a story mode. It was always meant to be an arcade-type game, not a complex story driven series. And I think with that mindset, The game finally seems interesting to work on again.

So now, I have a question for you guys. I know one seems more likely to win, but I still want to ask - Which answer would you pick?

A: Continue development on Scooped Deluxe, Built on Unreal Engine. It may run a bit slowly, but It's better than nothing.

B: Abandon the project indefinitely, and return once I've gained enough knowledge in another programming language to make the best version of this game.