What was 'ACN'?

ACN, aka Archived Nights were the "Ultimate Custom Night" of FNaTI which started its development in early 2021 and lasted few months.

It was a collab between me and Enlain, before we cut contact.

It included most characters from 1.0 to 5.0, including characters from the Nightmare Before Disney series

and, at the time, some 6.0 references.

As the name suggests, it used most information and characters from the FNaTI Archive released by Radiance Team.

Additionally, the NBD 2015 concept from ACN was based on a NBD fangame, "NBD 2020" and most Nightmare/Ink-Blot models are the recreations made by the community,

some even made exclusively for this game.

What was the gameplay like? Was it just UCN for TI characters?

Many people, including some team members, thought it would either be a cheap UCN copy or "the mashing space simulator".

In reality, no. This might sound surprising, but FNaTI UCN was a possible concept.

The mechanics for this game were thought of to the point most mechanics didn't repeat themselves, they were still similar but were not a copy of each other.

As for the UCN part, it wasn't the main part of the game. The player was meant to unlock characters by playing the "Night sections".

Night sections were the recreations of original games, beating them would unlock characters in the UCN mode and unlock the office skin.

Probably the only UCN related features were office skins and a secret roster. Occasionally, a Voodoo Mickey would appear, summoning a new character.

It was basically a DeeDee character, except a character would be unlocked and customizable after the first encounter.

Why was it paused?

Many people have asked me this since 2021.

During its 2021 development phase, it got a lot of progress in just few days, with about 5 characters already coded in as a result.

While there was a lot of motivation to continue the project, nobody really seemed interested in it and considered it a waste of time.

I can't say team members weren't interested, they were focused on Casa at the time, since early 2021 was "Casa's first steps" and it was more important than a random UCN game.

Without Enlain, I'd not get as far in development of this game, and after the drama, I struggled to find any other coder, which caused the project to slowly fall apart.

TL;DR Working alone on a project that nobody would play made the game get paused.

Is the game scrapped at this point?

Personally, despite me being a dev of this game, I have no idea if it's cancelled or not.

You see, it's been almost 2 year now, there was no major update since, but I open the project and code it a bit more from time to time.

As I mentioned 5 characters already being in the game, the game was supposed to have a "demo" version, showcasing all gameplay mechanics along with few characters.

However, the game is not in a state that could be released publicly, it's using placeholders and prototype code that haven't been replaced since 2021 and is pretty much outdated now.

Why work on it if it's outdated? Well, why not? I can simply use it as a prototype for other projects, it's not like I have to release it anymore anyway.

In short, it all depends on if there's still any interest on the game or not.
It's a decent concept, but I have no idea if it will be brought back to life or not, I hope you understand.