Happy Frickbear Friday! This week, I wanted to put a special focus on the nightguards and other human characters seen throughout the game, since there's quite a bit of interesting development history tied to them specifically.

The idea of having multiple playable night guards actually came a little late into the game's development, at least relative to most other elements of the game's general structure. At first, the night guard you played as was gonna be Billy, who is the protagonist of Frickbear's 1.

This particular reflection sprite of him was made SUPER early on, and was used for quite a while during the game's development! (As you could've probably gleamed from this, the idea to have the guard's face in the reflection of the monitor went super far back as well.)

Eventually though, as the game moved further and further away from being a straight remake of the original Frickbear's games, he seemed to fit in less and less. I wasn't entirely sure who the new protagonist would be at this point, although the answer would come to me eventually after playing a certain other FNaF fangame many of you have probably heard of!

...So, I'll admit, I kinda stole the idea of having multiple playable guards from TOO MANY NIGHTS, or at least the initial idea for it. The idea eventually morphed into something more unique, but I figured having you play as a different character for each difficulty level would not only be a cool bit of in-universe contextualization for the different difficulty levels, but also give players an excuse to replay the game on the other difficulties to see each guard's dialogue, since replayability is what the game's all about at the end of the day.

At first, the idea was that easy mode would have you play as Jeremy, normal mode would have you play as Mike, hard mode would have you play as Fritz, and lunatic mode would have a completely unique story and have you play as Michael Afton. Here's some very early, very rough concept art of the guards drawn by Cactus Companion, another person on the Frickbear's team :D

These were based on only some very vague descriptions I gave of what I had in mind for the characters at the time. I thought pretty early on that it'd be cute to theme each of the playable guards around a different member of the main band, with Jeremy corresponding to Bonnie, Mike to Freddy, and Fritz to Foxy. Jeremy was taller and had his face covered in bandages not only to reference the unfortunate fates of most characters named Jeremy in canon, but also to make Jeremy sort of resemble Withered Bonnie specifically. Mike was designed to be very square and a little intimidating to match Freddy, and Fritz generally unkept to match Foxy. My own initial sketches for these three came shortly after, and as you can see were quite a bit different from these initial concepts, but quite a bit closer to how the guards look in the final game.

As you may have also noticed, there's no Vanessa to be seen here! I originally wanted to run with the idea of her and Vanny being the same person, and because of Vanny's importance to the game's plot even from the very beginning of the game's conceptualization, I figured there was no logical way to have her as a playable character as the same time as Vanny being a constant presence in the game's story. ...However, it also really bugged me that the set of guards didn't have a stand-in for Chica, so I eventually folded, making her and Vanny separate people, assigning her to hard mode, and pushing Fritz to lunatic. Vanessa was based on Toy Chica specifically, with design traits like her big three-strand ponytail, pink blush and lack of a nose meant to resemble her.

A few other guards were tossed around as well, with the idea with these guys being that they would each have unique gameplay gimmicks not too unlike TOO MANY NIGHTS, although these ones never went any farther than just fun ideas.

Of course, the night guards weren't the only human characters who had concept sketches made for them! To cap off this post, here's a look at the various ideas I had for how a Frickbear's William Afton could look at different points in the game's development.

(The Henry design here wound up being used for Aftonblast!)

Now, which of these William designs did we ultimately settle on? ...You'll have to play the game to find out :D

Anyway, thank you for reading! As the end of July nears my summer classes AND summer internship are both coming to an end, so hopefully I should be able to start consistently working on the game again soon! But, until then, I hope you enjoy these looks through the game's development history :D