The game is done. I finished it. Is anyone still here?

I don’t blame anyone for leaving or thinking this game is dead/cancelled. I haven’t checked on my gamejolt page ever since my last post six years ago. This was for various reasons…I guess I meant it when I said to wait and come back only when I had an update. I had no reason to update a page for a project that was very much in flux, most of the time I kept contemplating if the game would ever be finished. I couldn’t bring myself to draw more attention to it if I wasn’t confident it could release.

Now, that’s changed, I’ve had to learn and figure out many things related to making this project over the years. After my last update, I continued working on the game until the start of 2020. Covid’s impact on my personal life killed my resolve for working on this game. I spent much of my days cooped up in my family’s small condo, playing Minecraft to pass the time and to take my mind away from my living conditions. After a very tumultuous and difficult move, I found myself mentally numb. I truly thought I would never finish the game. However, in November when that year’s haze began to clear up, I began to pick up from where I left off.

The following year I hit a major setback for progress; I had built the game’s environments in Blender 2.79, and the render times for said environments averaged at 30 minutes per frame. Considering my plan for this game, those render times made it practically impossible to do.

Therefore, I spent the next several months updating my game’s environments to 2.9. I had to remake every material I had made, but once it was ready, my render times dropped to 30-45 seconds. I could now reasonably make the animations I needed for the game.

It took almost three months to render the animations, and a few more to compile and organize them with Python.

I finally was able to start working on the gameplay in Clickteam. It took two years to build the gameplay. Then I started working on the minigames, It took half a year to do the first set, and another year to do the second set. All throughout this, I finished up college, was working part-time, and worked on this game all seven days of the week. For me, it was grueling, isolating work.

Finally I reached the point where I could bug test the whole game. I had already been bug-testing during weekends, but I finally had a complete package to work with.

It’s surprising how much stuff you can miss when narrowly focused on a goal. I think I did my best, I systematically organized and dealt with each bug I could find in the limited time I had left. I still don’t know if the time I spent bug-testing, refining, and polishing was enough…I don’t think this game will ever be fully free of bugs, but I think, and I hope, that the experience is going to be smooth enough.

The theme of all of this is hidden complexity. I had many internal release dates in mind, but they all had to be delayed because what I thought would be easy or quick or simple, turned out to be hard, slow, and/or complicated. It’s a lesson I’ve been learning throughout this multi-year endeavor.

But that brings us to now. The trailer is out, the teasers are up, and I’ve given about two weeks to spread some awareness about this game.

The way the game will be uploaded will be a little different than usual. The game is too big for gamejolt to upload, so I will instead upload an EXE to direct users to a Google Drive link where they can download the zipped contents and then extract them to their computers. It’s the only way I can upload this game for people to play.

Finally, with regards to the original project this page was made for, Five Nights in the Future, that game is on hiatus, and has been since the end of 2017. I had spent 2015 and 2016 making assets for it, but with the progression of time, I need to seriously rethink how that game is going to be. A lot of ideas in the old version of FNiF have been done by various FNaF projects in the years since its conception. I do not know what will become of it, or how I will reshape it. We’ll see.

There will be a final post on release day.