Nikocado's and future plans

Hello everyone and welcome to five nights at niko-

 Ok, jokes aside, I wanted to write this devlog to clear up some questions people might have and also give some oversight on what is coming in the future. It doesn't matter if you just played the game for once for the memes, or if you follow my channel and my games. I'm making this as a self reflection mostly and also give some insight on my game design process.

The post is labeled into different parts, so feel free to skip into any section that interests you.

Why I made this game:

I've made it mostly out of spite for the memes, because I can. Originally, I started this game as a side project that I'd probably never finish, I just coded some AI and made some models in my spare time. The development took around 30 hours total working in my spare time. There was a lot of bugs with the AI at first, and there probably are some more bugs that I have missed, such as some people getting 2 nikocados spawning which shouldn't happen - but hey, I could market that as a feature 🥶.

Game design:

 It may not seem like it at the first glance, but I've really gone out of my way to optimize this game by a lot. The main reason for the optimizations was because initially I had VR in mind and especially the Google Cardboard type, as to it would be accessible to people without a 1000$ headset. 

 I had to get creative optimizing the game. First of all, the game isn't actually 3D but you couldn't tell the difference unless you knew what you are looking for. The only things that are 3D are the props in the office and the character models that look out from the windows. The footage seen in the cams are all 2D. How I achieved this is by using pre-rendered skyboxes that only target the specific cameras. Then, the cameras are outputted into different render textures to be displayed. This technique saved me around 2M tris in rendering, I know that I could have added some more optimizations but it wouldn't be worth it as this only solves the GPU bottleneck while the CPU is still getting the same draw calls and also the scripting of the AI is making the game more CPU intensive. 

 All the characters are based on the same script that manages AI, but I won't go more into detail about how the AI works as that would spoil the gameplay. If you are still curious and don't mind spoilers, you can look at how each character moves from this pastebin page: https://pastebin.com/raw/1FAn4zCh

Future Updates & Plans:

 The plan is that I'll make this game into a trilogy. I will be adding a main menu and also do some bugfixes in the near future, but other than that this game won't get any feature updates. However, I do plan on making a sequel game to this called "Five Nights at Nikocado's 2" and also a simulator type of game (which won't be related to fnaf) after that will be named "Mukbang Simulator". 

 The third planned game will be a major installment featuring a fully fledged simulation gameplay where you can eat in either first person or third person, and live life as nikocado. The simulator game will be paid, but there will be a playable demo so you can try it and decide to pay if you want later. The game will feature and open world, customizable house, driving, cooking, interactable NPCs and also you will be able to feed cats! If you want to support the further development of the future games, feel free to donate to my current nikocado game...