(monty image in the post by etti)

Hey guys! As of today, Ultra Custom Night is four years old! That’s old enough to.. hm.

For reference, four years was the time between FNaF1 and UCN itself.. which, at least for me, felt like so much longer than 2020-2024..

This does mean that UltraCN has existed for over half of my entire game-dev journey so far (which started in late 2016).. crazy.

First off, i must say i couldn’t be more grateful to the people that stuck around this lil’ passion project of mine for so long. Without the support of you guys i really doubt i would’ve had any motivation to continue with the game’s development.. for better or for worse.

With that in mind, i do also think the project has ran its course.. kind of.

It was really hard to figure out an appropriate way to say all this, so let me take you through my thought process:

The original release of Ultra Custom Night (back on May 23rd, 2020) was made in.. two weeks. Looking back, i have genuinely no idea how i had both the time and determination to do all that (then i remember this was mid 2020 and i understand how I had the time.. but still..)

However, the sorta rush to get this done, combined with my inexperience as a still just thirteen year old making games for only 3 years by then.. did leave some marks for the next four years which i wish were not there.

The base code of the game is incredibly unoptimized and hard to manage. Adding any new features to the game is so needlessly cumbersome to implement due to my four-years-ago-self (kind of understandably) not thinking about the potential future. Just adding a functioning icon for a character in the roster screen requires like 10 tedious steps every time that would have easily been avoided if i thought about the game having any more than 60 or so characters when originally programming this stuff. Not to mention how much just adding one skin takes.. That’s probably the biggest thing i took out of the process, and it's something i’ll try to keep in mind for everything going forward.

Other than that, i do want to move on to other projects ..and obviously i could and very much did do that without having to end Ultra Custom Night in the past, but the looming thought that this project is still something i have to continuously manage just doesn’t let you sleep sometimes, y’know?

It is not easy saying this though. As i said, the game’s been such a big part of my life it’s difficult to just leave it. I hope that’s all understandable. The current state of the game just isn't something i *can* leave, for the sake of myself.

So to hopefully bridge the gap a bit better, for the past month and a bit we’ve been working on an update, adding some characters people have really been asking for for a while, hopefully enough for me to be satisfied with it in the long run. Announcements for these will be happening throughout June, as is tradition. I’m thinking of making a post here on GameJolt as well when the time comes, and update that over time so everyone can see these.

This isn't something i’d want to call “the final update” or whatever, just for the case that if i want to go back for whichever reason, i can.

Just working on this update was kind of a nostalgia trip, and i got some newfound motivation for the project.. but, well, I gotta stop myself.

I've had a different project on the backburner for almost 3 years now and i’d love for it to actually someday finish.. and i hope at least some of you will be interested in it by then too.

I think that's all i had to say about UltraCN specifically here..

In other news, i got the permission to say i’ve been helping out with etti’s next game (they made the Walrus games), specifically a pretty lengthy soundtrack (more tracks than all the other OSTs i made for their games combined!) The game should be something Ultra Custom Night fans like (i’ll be promoting the hell out of it when the time comes, don't you worry.)

So, the character reveals are starting in June, then 1.6.7 will release to beta-testing sometime soon after that, then the full version releases.. see you then.