A bit of an intro

With the last few updates, besides the obvious "content additions'', the features I've been adding and reworking have been taking a very particular path that you may or may not have noticed, that I will elaborate on now.

FNaF: Forgotten Pizzeria, while maybe not in every single aspect, but has always been similar to SCP: Secret Laboratory. My game design sense was evolving as I went on with its development, and having a very good, established concept to rely on while developing was most comforting indeed, and allowed me to fast forward many decisions and ideas straight out of a vague draft to implementation, without additional brainstorming and having the un-overthinked concept ultimately not turn out to be a good feature (which would be certainly possible otherwise). Was that good for the progress speed of the game? Certainly. Was that good for the quality and an 'original identity' of the game? That's a different matter, and if I said it was, I'd be lying.

Since it's been a while and the game is now pretty much functioning properly and stably, it's high time I start actually implementing features that transcend 'features inspired by SCP:SL', and start giving FNaF: FP a notably more of its own twist at things.

And this is what 6.0 truly starts, with a bang :D

Dynamic animatronic switching

Take a look at the first screenshot. You can notice how now, with the start of a round, all 4 animatronics are spawned. The player still becomes just one, as up until now; however, every 25s they have an option to boot up a terminal, and switch to a different animatronic. The animatronic they just left simply stands around motionlessly right where it was left, until the player decides to come back to it from the different one they were occupying.

This opens MANY, MANY new gameplay possibilities and strategies, makes animatronic gameplay infinitely more interesting and effortlessly solves the problem of people not getting an animatronic they like for too long. This feature is honestly an absolute blast to play around and experiment with!

Interaction system rework

Another problem this game was facing was lack of visual feedback when hovering on an interactable entity. This made the game tough to understand when you're trying it out for the first time, and ultimately led to many people giving up on it. Fixed!

Every single interaction (picking up items, opening/closing doors, interacting with the lifts, and even jumpscares) now display their respective icon when available. Also, an overly huge progress-bar we had earlier was entirely removed, in favor of said new interaction icon recoloring and starting to fill up progressively. Lastly, all interactions were rebound to leftclick by default (meaning all interactions are under leftclick now, not only jumpscaring and kicking the door).

This is something I didn't expect to improve the game quite too much, but it actually did a bit! Especially since now there's no need for a dot laying around in the middle of a screen anymore.

Outro

There's some smaller changes and bugfixes as well of course, but these two will be the absolutely main 2 features of 6.0. You can expect it to come out most likely next week. See you there and please leave comments with your thoughts, I'm starving for some x)

Deci