For those who have been following the game more closely on Discord and Twitter you're likely already up to speed. Yet for everyone else, this is unfortunately an announcement I need to make for transparency.
Here's What Happened
In late May, Mike Desjardins (Co-Creator of Bendy) made a tweet announcing that they'd be reaching out to all violators of their fan content policy to remove anything that infringes on it.
Shift in the Master's Pen unfortunately violates this policy with its usage of ripped official assets from the Bendy games (textures, models, characters, sounds, etc.).
While our fangame violating the policy is nothing new, Mike stated last August that fangames using their assets wouldn't be taken down- they just couldn't be officially endorsed.
However, as the tweet from May states, things have changed and fangames using their assets are at risk. We've attempted to reach out to Mike both publicly and privately to confirm this, yet have received no follow-up.
Here's Our Thoughts
Now to be clear: nothing here says that Master's Pen can't continue to exist- it would just have to be with none of the official assets from Bendy. And unfortunately... that's a lot of the game's content. All environments would need their assets swapped with custom meshes and textures. Most of the sounds would need copyright-free alternatives. And probably the largest obstacle would be redoing all of the animations for the Projectionist (assuming we can't migrate them over to a new, fanmade model).
Unsurprisingly, this situation has dealt a gigantic blow to the team motivation... most of all myself. None of the game's most active development members work much in asset creation, let-alone a style as unique as Bendy's hand-drawn visuals. Having to concern asset creation with this fangame would also make an already ambitious fangame significantly more difficult to develop.
Despite how dire these words sound, I'm extremely hesitant to properly pull the plug. It's why I've held off writing this post for so long. There's still so much passion on our side to bring this fangame to life, and like the demo said, there are so many surprises we'd love to share. Part of me wants to divulge all of our plans in one giant video dump, but if I did that there would be no going back. I still want to work on this fangame so everyone can see those surprises in their intended state. It's just that motivation for the time being has drained significantly, so here's what's happening.
Here's What We're Doing
Consider the game on an indefinite hiatus. It's possible development will properly resume one day, but the opposite is also likely. I really don't know what'll come of this. All I know for right now is that game isn't going to be my main focus for the foreseeable future. I might try my hand at some smaller, more Dark Deception-centric fangames for the time being. Maybe? You'll just have to see I suppose.
Thanks for reading, and have a great rest of your day. Goodbye.
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