Hey everyone, it's been a good while! With the project nearly reaching its second year of development, we decided to make this post to break up the silence and show the progress done in the last couple of months.
At the end of the article, I go more in depth as to why we haven’t been posting much on the game lately, but I still recommend checking the stuff we have to show!

Current State/Progress

Environments:
As of right now, progress on FN2R has mostly been focused on doing assets for the game, more notably, doing the house environment (as well as reworking the current office).
As you can imagine, this has been consuming us a lot of time and effort. A lot of unique models need to be done, while also trying out best to optimizing the most we can out of the models. Due to all this, the progress has been going really slowly, even with us trying our best to get things done.
However, to compensate, I (Tiag00) started to have a more prominent hand/involvement in making some props for the environments, in hopes of speeding up the progress. Before I was just directing, while helping a bit on the code of the game. However, I felt that it was best for me to have a more active role on the game, so it felt like a great opportunity to do so!
With all of that said, here are some props I would like to show:

I know I know, not the most jaw dropping stuff to share, but I really wanted to show some of this props for quite a long time now. I am also personally proud of how they turned out, since all the ones shown above were made by me :)
Finally, if anyone is interested on helping with the environments, feel free to dm me on my discord that is in my gamejolt profile. Any form of help we can have with the environments is greatly appreciated at this moment!

Character Models:
In terms of character models, progress has been going pretty alright. We are working on characters like Bonnie (shown in the render of the post), as well as his burnt version and on top of it, we are doing progress on Foxy. This is to hopefully prevent taking as long as we did with Freddy and his burnt variant.
In addition, we are currently in the process of polishing up the old models, by giving them new rigs, retextures and more. For example, here is a look at the retextured endo (still a WIP!)

Another thing I want to show is Bonnie's overalls, since in the teaser render you can barely see much of it due to the guitar covering it.

To top off this section, I want to share a little WIP preview of a human character model we started working on. Won't say who it is, but I am sure you all are able to have a pretty good guess on who it is ;)

Gameplay

In terms of actual gameplay, it’s been pretty good behind the scenes, I would say.
During the first year of development, I was still very new to Unreal Engine 5, so a lot of the coding was bad, rushed, and unpolished, even if I managed to implement most of the basic office interactions and animatronics behavior.
Ever since @Uriyra picked up on my code, they have been doing an amazing job on fixing my messy code, as well as improving on a lot of the interactions and enemy AI
As of now, we currently testing a big change in the main gameplay loop, that doesn't involve any animatronic AI changes. Really want to keep it secret for now, since we aren’t really too sure if we will go fully with the change, but if we do, I promise it will make the gameplay way more engaging than it currently is!

So, why is there not been that many updates?

Short answer: it's complicated.
We are doing a pretty good amount of progress on the game itself behind the scenes, I personally try to at least take some time of every day to work on something, no matter how insignificant it is. But the truth is, each member is just busy with their own lives. Studies, work, personal matters and even working on other fangames, are the main reason why most can't fully dedicate their time to this project.
Personally, I have been busy both handling this project and my university. As of writing this, the classes for my semester just ended, yet I find myself still busy until late June/ early Jully, with exams and projects. It's really been a stress juggling both, but I am trying to do the best I can with it!
I also don't want to show gameplay that contains a lot of placeholder assets, which is the reason why I really haven't shown anything of actual gameplay. We have a lot of the programming done, yet we are still missing a lot of finalized models, textures, animations, sounds, effects, etc. So, it's not worth to shown any of it at the moment.
Lastly, I don't want to keep generating hype with the little finished progress we have left. Honestly, my biggest mistake in the earlier days was making a gamejolt page too earlier in development. Even in the current stage, I feel its way too early to be able to shown anything of significance. That's another reason why, for the time being, I won't do monthly devlogs. I would only be able to show WIP stuff that I wouldn't deem too interesting to show, so for me it's not worth it.

I do want to apologize for the lack of development being shown as of recently, I hope this post was able to shine some light on the circumstances we are dealing with, and why it’s being much of a struggle to do a lot of progress. We want to make a good game and that takes a lot of time and effort! I also want to thank you guys for the support, seriously one of the main motives for me to keep going at this project! Still cool seeing new people discover this fangame and approach me about it :)
I am also hoping that I don’t have to do a lot of this posts in the enxt few months, that basically boil down to "sorry we are busy and can't work much on the game". Only really made this one due to the fact the last major showcase was almost half a year ago, yeah...
On some good news, there has been some really interesting development as of lately, however I can’t really show/talk about it at this time. But trust me, it’s pretty big for this project!

With all of that said, just like last time, I hope we will be able to share more progress on the game afterwards, but only time will tell. And with all that said, I will see you another day :)