Hello! Just yesterday, I released update v0.0.6 of Fredbear's Adventure! with some changes, mainly to Day 2. Of course, if you haven't played the latest version of the game, please give it a try before you continue reading. Some stuff I mention won't make sense unless you play first. ...All done? Great!

After playing the game a bit and having someone else play it, I've got some ideas for Day 2 that I wanted to share. Currently, Day 2's gameplay is a bit... bland. Playing it is, at least to me, not very fun. I took some time to realize that, instead of continuing to tweak values with the ovens and children and whatnot, it might be better to go back to the drawing board. That's what this post is. Here's some of my ideas in-detail, including ideas for days past Day 2.

Idea 1 - Papa's Fredbear's Cupcakeria (Day 2)

As the game currently stands, to complete Day 2, you have to bake cakes at the ovens in the kitchen and continuously feed them to the children around the restaurant. Similar gameplay to this works in FNAF 2's minigame because it lasts for less than a minute, and there's other gameplay beyond this. However, in Fredbear's Adventure!, this is the main gameplay, and it's boring as hell.

I identified the main thing to work on was how the player gets cakes. Right now, the player can simply stand by an oven, hold E, wait for a time, get a cake, and leave. That's it. My idea for making this segment more engaging is by adding a baking minigame. When an oven is interacted with, it will open a menu that requires you to put together a cake yourself with various ingredients. Perhaps, there are specific recipes that have different effects, or specific recipes that each child likes more.

I don't have anything else right now to potentially add some more gameplay to the segment of taking the cake to the children, but I'll keep thinking. For now, this idea of making the cakes yourself is really enticing to me. What do you think? (assuming anyone reads these)

Idea 2 - What's an Indie Horror Game Without Puzzles? (Day 3)

The objective on Day 3 is to "clean the restaurant." I came up with this objective at the very beginning of development without thinking about it much, but now I have to. After a lot of time juggling different ideas, one concept stuck out to me. Instead of having another 12PM-6PM arcade-esque day, my idea involves an untimed day of puzzle-solving.

On Day 3, there would be many piles of debris and puddles scattered around the restaurant, with no children inside. The player would have to use various tools found in the backstage to clean the entire restaurant. However, as the player cleans, more and more clues are revealed to an overarching puzzle. Solving this puzzle completes the day. For example, maybe cleaning off a table of trash would reveal a single number in a numerical code. This sounds much more intriguing to me instead of monotonous E-holding.

Idea 3 - A New Home?

This idea isn't really a change to the gameplay per se, but rather a much larger change to the game as a whole. As I've explained before, I started working on this project as a challenge to myself to see if I could create something more complex using Scratch and its limited tools. Development progressed, and I found myself treating Fredbear's Adventure! more like an actual game rather than a challenge. However, I've also found myself getting more and more frustrated with Scratch as a game engine.

Look, I know Scratch isn't a game engine in any sense of the word--it's a coding education site for children. I came into this project looking for a challenge, and I've certainly found one. But, as I continue expanding this game into something more fleshed out, I've found myself missing the features of a real game engine more and more. My idea is this: port the current build of Fredbear's Adventure! to Godot (a game engine I'm comfortable with) and continue development there. This would give me a lot more super cool tools to use (such as easy layering/Y-sorting) at the cost of moving the game off Scratch. I'm really conflicted about this, so I wanted to mention it here.

Conclusion

These are just some of the ideas I have for Fredbear's Adventure! going forward. I'm still exicted and (more importantly) motivated to keep working on this project, and I hope you're just as excited to see it update. As always, feel free to leave any comments or suggestions on this post or the main game page.

Thank you guys so much for your time, and thank you for playing my game. Have a wonderful day!

- Silicontent