So, four years since The Other Fredbear’s released, huh? To be honest, I thought it had been longer. This game feels like it’s been by my side for a decade somehow.

Today marks its fourth anniversary, and as a little something, I wanted to talk about what this game meant to me. But I should probably start from the beginning…

Around six or seven years ago, this game’s idea first popped into my mind, I thought of it as a small side project that I’d work on alongside a bigger, more ambitious game.

I first thought of the gameplay: simple, straight to the point, easy to make, just a way to better grasp the process of creating a FNaF fangame before tackling the big thing.

Thing is, I managed to release the “Night 1 Demo” pretty quickly, perhaps a month or two after I published the game page. And, when I did, something happened… A Youtuber played it, in no other than a stream titled something along the lines of “playing bad fnaf fangames”; of course, that stung a little, but I watched it anyway. Even though I was hurt, I remember him saying that the game could be improved, that there could be actual passion behind it, and, as I finished the video (or at least just my section), I deleted the demo and began reworking EVERYTHING.

Now, I know this seems like it’s heading towards a conclusion that goes something like “and then I put my effort into it, and I did it! I made a good game, hooray!”, and, in a way it kind of was, but the road to get there was… really bumpy.

That video motivated me to make a better product, yes, but it also gave me a lot of anxiety when it came to releasing content for this game. I wanted the game to be good, so I redid stuff again, and again, and again, and AGAIN… Ever wonder why there were so many versions of the same office? Because there were as many versions of the game as there were offices. I constantly remade it, over and over, never satisfied, never settling. What was supposed to be an easy to make side project of a game that wouldn’t take long to develop eventually became a 3-year long development nightmare. And, what about the other game I was supposedly developing alongside The Other Fredbear’s? Cancelled, obviously, I needed to focus on one, only one.

At a certain point, I couldn’t take it anymore, I had to do something. It was either cancel the game and be over with it or stop trying to improve it and just finish it, even if it wasn’t as good as I would like and it would underdeliver in comparison to the amount of time it spent in the oven (which, honestly, was mostly just me remaking the same assets over and over). As you know, I chose the second option.

Leading up to the release of the game, I was super nervous, I didn’t feel the game was finished, it wasn’t my vision and it was a mess all around, but I had already settled, I had to have guts and prepare for the impact.

And so, the game was released.

Surprisingly, I felt… relieved. I managed to publish a game, made by me! I even felt proud at times!

However, many months later, that feeling changed. I felt a disdain for this game, for how sloppily made it was, for how badly I managed it, for how it failed in certain areas. I hated it. I cherished its fans, don’t get me wrong, I just hated myself.

Later, I managed to enter university, and a new “stage” had started in my life. I had moved on from making FNaF games, I was just gonna secretly retire.

So, what changed my mind?

Well, simply, I showed my fangame to my friends at university and… they were impressed! They said how cool it was that I made a game to begin with and… It kind of changed my whole perspective on things, because, well… I made a fully fledged game and released it! That’s an achievement! An achievement not everyone can say they’ve done. That realization brought back my motivation to make games.

While The Other Fredbear’s had its issues, they were mistakes I learned from. And, consequently, I know how to avoid or fix them. That’s how I started developing “Distorted Mind: True Humanity”, the sequel to “Distorted Mind: The Other Fredbear’s”.

And let me tell you, the development of that game was almost heavenly: It took about a year to develop (mind you, while I was still at the university), , and it even used characters and ideas from the canceled FNaF fangame I mentioned earlier (you can read more about it in this post).

Safe to say, I loved making that game and I learned from my mistakes.

 If you haven’t played it yet, please do! Click here.

So… Now, we get to this exact moment in time.

Just before writing the first draft of this post, I was watching some old videos of various Youtubers playing The Other Fredbear’s, and I think I can finally say, confidently, that I feel proud of this game and I’m happy I made it.

Thank you for reading.

P.S: I'm planning on making a more in-depth post about the specific problems I faced during development and how to overcome them, in hopes to help aspiring game developers, so look forward to that.