Hey guys

I wanted to discuss how PSFC 3 is way out of my reach in terms of a reasonable time frame of development. I spent the entirety of 2021 working on the testing facility night and I haven't even gotten close to making any kind of gameplay loop, which to me sounds like bad design.
I wanted something complicated, stupid and hard to play and that resulted in something complicated, stupid and hard to develop.

Now, the way I've been able to force change in my life for the past 8 months was through a concept called progressive overload. Progressive overload (in the gym) is where you start off with an easy weight for a number of sets and repetitions and over time you slowly increase the weight / sets and reps of the same weight. Now what if we applied this to other parts of life, let's say to game development: I started off with PSFC 1, which wasn't anything special gameplay and graphics-wise but then I moved onto TSFH, which wasn't anything special either, but it offered slightly more than PSFC 1. Then I wanted to add 10lbs to my overhead press in one week (which is stupid), aka I wanted to add like 12 nights to the original PSFC 3 (not the remaster) and thus I broke the progression curve.

Ever since I've been fucking around with random weights, sets and reps (aka random game ideas and shit), going nowhere really. I then managed to progress one level again, to PSFC UCN in 2018, with very simple gameplay, in the process making a well-received game, because it was just on the edge of my comfort zone at the time to develop.

And then once again my ego was like, I'm gonna add 15 lbs to my deadlift in 3 days aka I worked on TUPN, I kept trying to lift the same weight, breaking my back in the process (talking about TUPN).

So now I need something which is on an equal level to PSFC UCN in terms of progression difficulty before I can go the next level up.

I think I was onto that in 2020 when I started development on this game, making the original phase 1. It wasn't anything crazy, just more than last time, and it worked. I was comfortable developing it, I was enjoying the process and everything came together nicely. It was a bit repetitive and I would occasionally lose myself in ideas but I managed to pull myself out of most ruts and I continued to work on the game.

The gameplay was pretty fun, testers said it was decently challenging and some of the quirks, like Ket's funky AI made it all the more enjoyable.

But then, 2021 came around. A few personal events in the beginning of the year lead me to start to reconsider things in life and I wanted to make drastic changes quick. I remember going on a walk in the middle of May last year trying to come up with the ideas for the next chapter of the game, the first one being mostly finished (I say despite the fact that I was heavily procrastinating on making in-between night minigames for the first chapter).

Within the next few days I made this elevator thing, which I haven't ended up using in the game.

I started mindless experimentation and idea overloading, which doesn't really get you anywhere if you don't apply progressive overload to the thing. I then proceeded to overcomplicate myself on the Testing Facility phase creating all kinds of procedural / modular systems mostly due to the anxiety of starting the things that actually mattered for that part of the game.

All of these are great on their own, don't get me wrong, but the combination of them in this game and the overall game design experience is far from the best. If I had just kept things simple, I would've made progress to be able to make a better game in the future. Like this, I only made myself more susceptible to this happening again in the future.

Now, the title of this article mentions that the game is cancelled / on a long hiatus. Although I have made quite a few mistakes during the development process for this, I've reached and surpassed my limits and I've learnt quite the number of things. There is a very slim chance that I do this but I might revisit this in the future, when I'm able to handle the complexity that this game has essentially required.

Within the next few months I'm looking to create a simpler game, reminiscent of PSFC 1 / TSFH, but it will include all the experience I've gained over the years in a nice package, sort of aiming for what this was meant to be.

That's all for now.

- A.