Progress Update 02/01/25

There are more details on the progress of the game in the Discord.

I've been working on getting a build ready, but I've run into more and more opportunities to fix things that will improve the future development of the game. I'm hoping to have a limited version of the build with a team of 5 Fredrika's out soon to demonstrate the new features' capabilities. The TL;DR of the new features would be that Fredrika can use either door, there can be any number of Fredrika's running at a time, and her AI should be more robust and less prone to "walking in place". For details on how and why these changes were made you can read below.

First I've made an entirely new approach to AI for the bots, starting with Fredrika. The old approach gives each bot their own AI script, which gives a lot more flexibility when creating them but it means that I effectively have to write code 7 different times in 7 different ways when I want all of the bots to be able to do something. The new approach creates basic instructions which can be written once and slotted into each AI, so instead of writing 3 pieces of code to get Mangle, Puppet, and Fredrika to queue up in front of the door together I just write one blueprint that tells any bot how to queue properly and give each one to each bot.

The main and most apparent change this will bring is that I can invest the time to make those systems more robust and flexible. I can program exceptions to watch out for into the blueprints, like if a bot should be walking but has been stuck for an extended period of time, or if someone takes their queue spot before they get there, or if their light gets turned off before they arrive. As a result Fredrika is now able to queue up at both doors, is less likely to get stuck, and is able to work as a team with any number of other "HouseKeeping" bots.

But being able to queue up at either door lead to a significant problem for Fredrika in particular: she has animations which assume that the door closes to her right on entry (her "jumpscare" and her maledom scene). It's kind of a waste to animate things by hand just to mirror them so I needed to find a way to procedurally flip the animations. I found that my only solution was to restructure and rename the rig into a form which Unity would accept as a "humanoid" rig. This allows for much more than just mirroring the animation on Fredrika, it allows animation retargeting, which would open up the possibility for any bot to use any animation which is a feature that I've been asked for many, many, times over the years.

There are limitations to animation retargeting, though: the restructuring process destroys the animation for the hands and feet and causes facial animations except for the eyes to be ignored. I might need to make a way to animate the faces of the bots in a way that is universal, I'm experimenting now with making code that tells a bot how to smile, frown, furrow their brows, open/close eyes, etc. and seeing how natural that looks. Then I'd need to make a personality script that controls how happy a bot looks, it would be weird if Foxy was happier when doing Puppet's animation and Puppet was more confident when doing Foxy's.

These retargeted animations might have to be Toybox only or considered non canon because a lot of the personality of the bots is also communicated in body language, so they might always have issues. Alternatively, I might have to classify animations into personality archetypes, this will probably be F2's approach, so that "confident" bots like Foxy, Fredrika, Springtrap, Mangle, and Bonnie can do animations like the fleshlight humping animation, and "shy" bots like Puppet and Chica can do the blow job, boob job, and power bottom animations canonically. Blowjob animations in particular are going to be a problem, if you place Foxy's head where Chica's is during the animation her nose is going to dig into the player's pelvis. If a bot places their hand on their face or uses their feet that will also be a problem, I will have to cross those bridges when I get to them.

I understand it's frustrating to not have anything to actually play, and I apologize for that. The game has a lot of technical debt that had to be paid some time and I'm hoping the new direction and time taken today will help keep the game going for a long time.