Now that Halloween has come and gone and I have had a bit of time to breath, I thought I would give an update with a rough idea of the future of VNAF:

As the Discord can attest, I’ve spent quite a bit of time getting the basic gameplay of the original FNAF rebuilt and balanced for this version of the game. You saw a little of that in the Halloween update, followed by an example of the things this rebuild allows me to do: with a fully modeled restaurant, a realtime camera system, and a more flexible event system, all sorts of fun creepy things are possible. And I’m pretty pleased with how all of that has worked out, and I have a lot of ideas for moving forward with that.

What I’m not as pleased with is the overall usability of the game. The controls need work, the graphics need to be optimized, and there are all sorts of features that have been added to Unity and SteamVR that I could be using to make this game (and any future games I make) better for everyone.

So that’s what’s next: SteamVR has recently added options for remapping controls, which I intend to implement to not only add better support for different VR setups, but hopefully also to add support for Mouse & Keyboard gameplay. I will also be transitioning to Unity 2018.3, once it’s out of beta, so that I can take advantage of some new features that will make it easier for me (and for you?) to create custom nights.

And, I will be working on optimizing models and lighting to make the game more lightweight, so that it will hopefully run smoothly on any hardware, even while recording. Models are an especially big deal: most of the models I use were created for use in renders and with high levels of detail and accuracy in mind, but that doesn’t lend itself well to realtime VR gameplay. Minimizing polycount, creating LOD groups, and atlasing textures are all things that I have to do after-the-fact with any community models I use, and those are very time-consuming. I would like to refine this process even further, to do things like re-use bodyparts in-engine when possible (this could dramatically reduce filesize and memory usage) and experiment with some shader tricks that might reduce polycount (maybe the whithering on the Nightmares can be done via shader? Worth trying!)

So, what’s the timeline for all this? Good question! There are a lot of unknowns, and a lot of things I will be learning, and that makes it difficult to give anything even resembling a solid timeline. But, if things go well, I would at least like to have a version with more content out for Christmas; maybe something that includes Halloween, several normal-ish nights, and a special Christmas event. No promises, but I’ll try!