I already officially revealed this on the A:DI Final Mix page, but I thought it would be important for me to post it here.

Abandoned: Discovery Island was not the game I intended it to be. It was originally intended to be a revival that went back to the roots of FNATI but was meant to distinguish itself from other revivals in certain ways. Those ways were not supposed to be a cringe-worthy, half-assed story, many, and I mean MANY bugs, instakills, etc. Not to mention that I made the mistake of briefly making it open source leading to some reskins and derivatives, stolen credit, etc.

R1 was meant to resolve this, but the way I attempted it resulted in almost as much jank as the original, and on top of that there’s even more graphical inconsistency, with original FNATI assets, redone stuff, animation frames from A:DI… it led to a lot of stuff looking out of place.

I’ve tried to revisit A:DI multiple times, trying to redo it over and over again.

• FNATI:Found 2.0*. It had potential, but thanks to losing a lot of coding progress it never went very far and I lost the motivation to work on it. Also the overload of fan characters.

• R1. Tried to make what A:DI was supposed to be with extra things. A:DI already had far too much and R1 was never completed, with the released build having many mechanics that never got finished, bugs that didn’t affect A:DI, and other jank, but overall, it did do some stuff right. Although the endings weren’t completed, thank god there was no Undertale in there. I meant to finish the AI updates and custom night, but I never finished it before I lost the code.

• A:DI “1.2”. Barely even progressed and I found going back to 0.7.2 yet again to be annoying.

• Forever. Was actually a troll game that I ended up turning into malware later for the fun of it >:] (forces you to restart your PC, that’s all) Sadly, I lost the source code to that along with A:DI and R1 as well as all of their models and assets that weren’t made by or were modified from the ones made by AnArt1996.

• 2.0 version refers to my own one, NOT THE FANMADE A:DI 2.0 UPDATE/MOD MADE BY 13_Sonic_Games

His mod has reached a point where it’s far too bloated and it’s truly become a mess. I’ve requested him to change the name to something that’s still Abandoned: Discovery Island but NOT 2.0.

I’ve always looked down at A:DI, tried redoing it, but the one thing I haven’t tried was actually going back and seriously updating it. I thought I had completely lost the opportunity when I lost the external hard drives that the MFAs were stored on. But then I found that I had made a backup of the released version of 1.1. The MFA is still here. And with it, comes an opportunity to correct my past mistakes…

A:DI The Way it was Meant to Be, or TWIWMTB, is this attempt to fix A:DI and its problems. Its goal is to fix bugs, expand the depth of the gameplay without compromising the existing mechanics, and change up things that didn’t work very well. A full overhaul will be coming with FM, but there are a lot of important changes that I’d like to make to A:DI before I get back to work on that, and have something to hold you guys over. I plan on releasing this in the next couple of months. Keep your eyes peeled for more information.