I’ve been holding off on making this post for a very long time, because I’m honestly not happy that the game had to come to this either, but I think its better that you guys know what’s happening rather than me leaving you in the dark for any longer.

Bottom line: After Hours, at least in its current state, is cancelled. I am not focusing development on it any longer, nor have I been for a while.

There are a lot of different reasons why I ended up cancelling the game. One of the main issues with the game’s development were a lot of technical difficulties in the game itself. I don’t have a super computer, and I was experiencing a lot of the same lag problems which you guys were when I was developing the game. As many of you are developers yourself, I’m sure you understand that this can make developing your games a nightmare. I managed to fix most of the major issues by the end of development, but a lot of core problems within the game itself were the root of this issue.

I also tried updating the game to Unity 5 which worked very very well, however doing so did bring up some more minor problems. Beyond all of that, most of my code was a bit of a mess, as it was my first time creating a game at that scale, and maybe I over-estimated my abilities at the time.

A couple of times during the game’s development, I tried remaking the game from the ground up in Unity 5, and making sure I didn’t make a lot of the amateur mistakes I made the first time around. But most of these attempts just ended in me moving on, either because of technical problems, or because I moved onto other projects.

Here are a couple of screenshots of one of these remakes. My intention was that the game would both have a better code structure, but also have better graphics (lighting, shadows, GI, volumetric light, etc) from Unity 5, while also being more efficient. As you can see from the screenshots, these attempts didn’t end up going far.

Some of you noticed that I updated the game banner with new models by EverythingAnimations. When I brought these into the game, a couple (like Foxy) worked fine with the animation retargeting in Unity. However, a couple (like Freddy) caused a bizarre glitch which made the character controller slide out of control, making the character impossible to move around and control. After I posted on the /r/Unity3D subreddit about the issue, nobody could find a solution.

And in the end, perhaps one of the biggest issues is that I’ve simply moved past Five Nights At Freddy’s and I just have no passion for the game anymore. That is one of the most crucial parts of any long time commitment to a project, especially one as large in scale as a video game. I was only 14 and a half when I began developing After Hours. I am close to 17 now. I just don’t have the same passion for FNAF and After Hours as I did when I first started creating it.

It’s very difficult for me to build up such a large fanbase around one of my games, only to cancel it after nearly a year of inactivity, but sometimes projects just don’t work out, and announcing the game only 3 days after I started development didn’t really help either.

I wish it didn’t come to this either, I was hoping to have the game done before mid-2016, so I could start development on After Hours 2 with the larger cast of FNAF 2 characters, more abilities and multiplayer (hopefully with a character creator!), but after the development of the game has been plagued with problems and me losing faith in the project, I think it’s for the best, and I just wanted to quickly update you guys and let you know what’s happened.

I’m not giving up game development. I’m going to continue developing games, and when I find success like I did with After Hours, I’m hoping some of you guys will be there to celebrate with me :) and although the game is cancelled, i may return to FNAF and After Hours at some point, but at the moment, I have no plans.

Thank you guys for your outstanding support during the development of the game. It’s been amazing making a game for such a devoted and enthusiastic fan base, and I’ll never forget my first truly successful video game.

Thank you everyone.

• Romejanic