Happy Frickbear Friday! Some pretty big milestones have been reached in regards to this game's development, so I figured now would be a good time to give an overall update on progress.

PROGRESS ON THE ROSTER

As of now, this is how the chart for each animatronic's level of completion is looking.

Pretty impressive, huh? As of right now, while there's still quite a few characters who need their voice lines recorded and the one recent addition who still needs their render drawn...every character is both functionally and visually complete across both the main nights and the salvage locations! This includes the seven bonus characters as well, all of which went from zero progress to pretty much all finished since the last update ;) There ARE still a few characters I wanted to polish up the visuals of a bit though, hence the orange rectangles.

Beyond the animatronics, every salvage location is finished too! Location 4 was especially a doozy - it's probably the single biggest AND most unique location out of all of them. You can a little preview of it in the article's header image! I hope you look forward to reading all the animatronics' goofy now-fully-written dialogue as well.

In addition, other stuff such as all the shop items, upgrades, minigames, and sidequests for the special animatronics involved in Vanny's route are finished too. While the game has been technically playable from start to finish for a little while, it's now at a point where every animatronic and mechanic at a player's disposal on a normal run is accessible and visually complete. As a matter of fact, me and the playtesters have already been doing quite a few full runs through the game :D Check out this lousy photo I took of my computer monitor after beating one! (I should note that this is a screenshot from before the end screens were finished, hence the black void and weird ordering of the animatronics.)

Someone on the team actually managed to beat a run on Lunatic difficulty with all four Vanny animatronics and zero deaths. I personally haven't even done anything beyond hard mode yet!

WELL, IF EVERYTHING NEEDED TO DO A FULL PLAYTHROUGH OF THE GAME IS DONE, WHAT'S LEFT?

As of right now, I'd consider two of the game's routes to be complete, aside from some balancing and polishing that'll inevitably need to be done to the game as a whole once development nears its end. These two routes include the most basic one, where you just finish your work week and don't seek out many secrets or talk to any special characters, as well as one that acts as a sort of expanded, more challenging version of that basic route. (I'm trying to avoid saying too much, it'll make more sense once you play the full game!) The other story routes are where the bulk of remaining development will go!

I touched upon this a bit in the last update, but these remaining story routes are quite a bit more ambitious. They really only deviate from the main route in terms of dialogue and endgame content, but that endgame content will be quite a lot of work - as such, I can't really say when they'll be done, especially since development will most likely slow down over the summer due to a combination of me starting my summer job in early June and also just really wanting to play Deltarune. Probably not the most exciting news, but I hope you guys understand if things are a bit slow in terms of updates over the summer! While I do get some help from my friends on certain aspects of the game, the majority of the time I'm working as a solo dev - as such, the amount of progress on the game is pretty directly dependent on my personal amount of free time, and with less free time, there'll be less progress.

HOWEVER, this brings me to something I wanted to ask YOU guys.

THE FRICKBEAR ULTIMATUM

Since two of the routes are stupidly close to being in a final state while the others will inevitably take quite a while to finish, especially with me being busy over the summer, I wanted to ask...

Would you all prefer if I release a lighter version of the game sooner, possibly within a month or two, that contains a fully realized main route but has the rest held off for a future update, or would you rather wait anywhere from a couple months to possibly a whole year for the full game, with every story route and planned piece of content included from the get go?

I feel like there's quite a few benefits and drawbacks with both of them - while the former may feel incomplete in some regards, especially when it comes to the story and endings, the game would still have a metric buttload of content to play through considering the now 47 animatronics to unlock and huge amount of minigames and upgrades. There's also the obvious upside of getting the game a lot sooner! A big reason people fell in love with FNaF in the first place was its simplicity, for all I know the game might be better off keeping things streamlined.

However, giving the game more time in the oven means you'll have a full experience right out of the box, including the pretty exciting stuff I have planned for the alternate routes. The experience as a whole will probably be a lot more memorable and have a lot more to talk about from the start - and even if with the other approach all the planned content gets added eventually anyway, it'd probably be a lot less exciting than the sum of its parts if you had to wait a while just for the game to be finished. However, if I went with this approach, you might not get any new Frickbear Friday posts for a while - both because I'd be busy with my job and stuff but also because everything left to work on is a massive spoiler.

What do you guys think? I'm genuinely interested to hear other peoples' opinions on this matter, since I'm pretty split on it myself. Be sure to let me know if you'd also be cool with more non-gameplay-related Frickbear Friday posts too - stuff like early concept art or dumb bits the VA's put together, maybe even individual overviews of each animatronic's mechanics. It might become a necessity as the amount of stuff left to show off that isn't a huge spoiler gets smaller and smaller...

Either way, I hope you guys look forward to what me and the guys have been cooking up :D I can promise you, no matter how long it takes, it WILL be awesome.