Jun 23rd - Questioning ourselves

 Hey everyone! Glad to see you.

If you don't know us, we are Elite Games, a small indie team, currently working on a Five Nights at Freddy's fangame called The Minigame Investigator. For more info about the project, click here.

We have been hard at work lately, trying to learn new tools and trying to use them as best as possible. 

We've also been reaching out to people on musescore.com to use their arrangements in the fangame (best to use something readily available than reverse engineering the source material). All people whose arrangements we use will be credited, such as anyone whose help we might use in the final game!

In any case, we'd like to let something out for you guys to think about.

If you remember correctly, the Fazbear Update was recently released. It introduced the main Fazbears (Freddy, Fredbear and Shadow Freddy) and gave us the maps for FNaF 1's location, even if they were still using vanilla Pokemon tiles.

It was a great achievement for us: finally we had something to show off to the public! Not much (and with a lot of technical difficulties, sure), but it was still something! Most importantly for us, it was something that we were proud to say "Yeah, we did this! If we did this, we can do so much more!". It was a huge morale boost for the team.

However, something that has been keeping us anxious (and that keeps us anxious every time we work on a project) is what Miles (one of our play testers) likes to call "overhype".

You might remember the game "Hello Neighbour", a hide and seek experience, with fenomenal AI (at least in the Alpha builds) and crafty puzzles.

The hype for the final game was huge and was getting bigger with each new update but the final house (seen in Arc 3) is practlically the same as the one seen in Alpha 3. The AI was getting worse and worse the more complex the levels were and most of the secrets and story were already seen in earlier releases, with out of bounds hacks and all.

These secrets and hacks were great! They gave more depth to the world of Hello Neghbour and were the stepping stone for the hype regarding the game. What was the Neighbour really hiding in the basement? What were his secrets? Did he have a family? Where are they now?

However, and as the project was nearing its completion, people just got bored of it. The final game didn't recieve the same hype and the ones that did check it out were mostly disappointed. They had created expectations that the team at Tiny Build simply couldn't deliver on.

 We are afraid to do the same.

We want the FNaF community to notice our project, we want the Pokemon Rom Hacking community to tell us what we are doing right and what we are doing wrong, we want you guys to give us feedback.

But we are afraid. We are afraid that hiding the lore we want to show is going to create too good of expectations for us to deliver on, we are afraid that showing everything we have in store will make it impossible to surprise the community in the end, we are afraid that if we don't show anything until the project is ready, there won't be any hype, no reason for anyone to check out our little fanproject.

What we have now is not good enough to present to anyone as a reason to be excited about. In fact, and since we are starting everything over, we want to do it right. What do you think we should do?

If you have any suggestions, please tell us in the comments or message JK on Twitter.

Thank you for being awesome, we'll see you next time.