Happy Independence Day! ...I unfortunately don't have anything seasonally relevant to post, BUT, since development has been slowing down a bit this month as I shift my focus to ArtFight stuff, I figured a nice way to hold everyone over would be to show off some old development sketches and talk about how the vision for the game evolved over the course of development :D

The game actually started being worked on as far back as mid-2022, shortly after Frickbear's 2 was released, although at this point it was pretty much entirely just conceptual stuff. The original idea was that it would be a Pizzeria Simulator-type of game, just with the twist that everything you bought - be it attractions, office equipment or animatronics - would have some effect on the main nights in some way.

I pretty quickly realized that having to draw every single possible combination of animatronics and attractions in the cameras would be a huge hassle, and I wasn't really able to think of a way for all these mechanics to interact with one another that I liked, so this idea never got super far. That being said, some stuff DID wind up carrying over - most notable of which is the presence of Michael Afton and Vanny! Early on I had the idea of giving the game a sorta Shadow the Hedgehog-esque morality system where you could do "good" or "evil" actions each night and doing so would push you closer to a certain route. For some reason this particular idea managed to persist all the way to the final game, even when everything else about the game's direction completely changed.

Now, this idea was never scrapped, necessarily - more so it was just put on the backburner while I focused on other stuff. This leads us to the current version of Frickbear's 3!

Around the same time I was coming up with all these ideas, I was also learning GameMaker for the first time, after pretty much only using Scratch up until that point. Learning all the new possibilities using an actually Good game engine brought with it, I had the idea of remaking some of my old Scratch games to learn the ropes before I jumped into anything new. As such, I began work on a remake of Frickbear's 1 and 2! Here's a SUPER EARLY SCREENSHOT from this point in the game's development.

Now, if you've ever wondered why Frickbear's 3 just feels like an expanded version of 2 in a lot of ways, that's because, at least at first, it was! Frickbear's 2 was actually a similar story funnily enough, starting development just as a UCN-esque expansion to 1 before it became its own thing. Likewise, as I continued working on this remake and came up with new ideas, changed certain mechanics, completely changed the story, redid all the visuals from the ground up...I realized that the game has changed so much that I might as well consider it a new entry. After all, I'd argue it has a lot more new content compared to 2 than 2 does compared to 1.

Now, even once this direction was decided on, there were still quite a few changes made over the course of development - most notably was the shift in direction with the animatronics' designs. In the beginning I was going to continue with the art style established in 1 and 2 with the animatronics sticking pretty close to their original designs aside from the dot eyes, after some deliberation, I decided to go in more of a stylized direction.

Now, this was a couple years ago, so my art style was a LOT less refined compared to how it is now. At this point, the main animatronics looked a little something like this!

A lot of assets made early on were based on these designs - in fact, if you were wondering why the tiles in the demo's custom night menu don't entirely line up with how the animatronics actually look ingame, that's because all those tiles were based on these old designs. (This is probably most obvious with Chica.)

And check out this old scrapped jumpscare sprite for Freddy! The jumpscares for the main four were some of the few assets I made prior to the shift in art direction.

Now, fast forward a bit, I take a hiatus from working on the game for a while as I focused on other stuff. Then, sometime around last year or the year before, I suddenly became VERY fixated on FNaF stuff - I think I reopened the Frickbear's 3 project file after getting burnt out working on some other projects of mine, thinking I might mess around with it for a couple days, maybe draw an asset or two...only to wind up getting so much work done on it that I had a demo ready in October.

I'll probably talk more about that era of development in NEXT week's post, but I hope you found this walk through the game's development history interesting! There's definitely a lot more concept stuff I could share, so look forward to all of that. For now though...I have some people to draw cartoon animals for.

(...By the way, if anyone else is ALSO doing ArtFight this year, feel free to attack me :3c https://artfight.net/~SpookyRick)