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Kevin would like to congratulate you on your excellent job here at his Tortoise Sanctuary, and he is very pleased that his tortoise was able to get some sleep thanks to your efforts. I’m also pleased to hear that you enjoyed your time here as well!

Personally I have absolutely zero FNAF experience (Apart from “Five Nights At Friday Night Funkin’”, of course!)

same lol

One things stood out for me: “Yes, you almost definitely will lose the game at first”. Now that sounds like a challenge!

imma be real with you: that is actually a bit of a hyperbole. In response to some feedback received during that playtest livestream, I wanted to reassure players that, yes, trial-and-error would be a relatively important step in the process of conquering the game, and that they should not feel bad if they do feel overwhelmed at first. However, I’ll admit that the game itself is actually pretty easy when you know what you’re doing, but a bit of hyperbole certainly helps to deliver some pride and accomplishment from time to time.

And it turns out my blissful ignorance of the outside world worked perfectly!

Yes, that actually is the optimal strategy (although I wasn’t expecting anyone to instantly work it out lol). In hindsight, I probably should adjust the Intruder’s logic to get it to slowly start moving whilst the door is closed (maybe on a separate timer to its normal timer, with a higher move chance) as a way of penalising this strategy of ‘keeping the door closed constantly’ (as that’ll make Percival a little bit more frequent and everyone else get a little bit faster more consistently, and might even be a bit sp00pier when opening the door).

It seems very well put-together! There is a clear trajectory of people’s movements. It feels hectic and fun, and the characters are well thought out.

That’s a bit of an overstatement 😅. The Intruder was pretty much an afterthought all things considered (all it did in the initial release was just get close and then just stand there menacingly lol), whilst the Testudo’s legit tactical movement strategy was also a bit of an afterthought (and hell, everything about camera 7 was an afterthought, now that I think about it).

And when it comes to the trajectory: well, the layout of the sanctuary (barring camera 7) was actually the first thing I designed. I knew I wanted the map to be Tortoise-shaped (with an unsightly turd (which was always going to be for Bri’ain) right next to it for absurdity points), but, of course, whilst it meant that Tortelvis and the Esiotrot’s paths were very easy to figure out routes for, I genuinely was stuck for what to do with the Testudo. But, thankfully, there was some dead space in the actual scene geometry which corresponds to where camera 7 now is (initially, I had considered putting camera 7 in the “tail” instead and starting the Esiotrot there), without which the game probably would have ended up feeling a bit more shit (and the Testudo would have probably felt a bit redundant).

And, of course, Percival returned even though I tried killing him off last year, which is also mildly concerning in a meta sense (and the only reason why he returned was because I was going to Tesco to do my preparatory food shopping on the Thursday and then I had the terrible realization that Percival would be the perfect character to use for the obligatory exposition dump, seeing as Kevin canonically does not talk but his actions are usually merely referred to in the passive voice, and Ke’in is, well, Ke’in).

Anywho, Percival’s role as the accidental antagonist in this game actually came about from a bit of laziness. I needed some way of forcing the player to leave themselves vulnerable to attack in certain situations; initially, I tried designing the map of the tortoise sanctuary to have multiple doorways into the tortoise room (forcing the player to split their attention between the two), but those maps all looked scuffed in an unironically shit way. However, forcing Percival to shut up was basically the easiest solution I found to that problem, by having a threat that would force the single door in the office to be opened every once in a while.

I should admit that the main gameplay loop of this game (with the camera recharging, the door, and the asleepn’tness meter) was actually shamelessly ripped off from One Night At Flumpty’s 2. Granted, that game does have somewhat more elegant ways of solving the problem of ‘making the player use the cameras and not just sit in a corner and hide’, forcing camera usage (via the owl and the redman). Even though Percival doesn’t quite work as well for forcing the player to expose themselves to danger, I suppose Percival is mildly original in implementation.

I was annoyed that I couldn’t actually hear Percival’s Audio tracks 😅

I am mildly concerned about your music taste

So I decided to go to the github page and just download the audio files! Amazing covers of Sweet Caroline and Good Morning Good Morning. +1 sound for kazoo.

Thanks 😤 (didn’t want to put my voice through the exact same level of torture it went through last year though, hence the relatively paltry quantity of High Quality Covers™ this year). Of course, even if you did want to listen to Percival shouting ‘good night’ at the tortoise over and over again in-game, the tortoise will actually wake up before you reach the end of that song in the first place 😅. Anywho, there is one other bit of kazoo music hidden away in there (which you are probably a bit too good at the game to have heard lol) if that’s of any interest to you.

Overall, I had a fun time trying this out. Well done for putting it all together!

Thanks :)