DSaF 10 Year Anniversary RETROSPECTIVE!
Hey, all! Admittedly, I considered putting together something small to play for the 10 year DSaF anniversary late last year, but with so much already on my plate, I didn't have enough time to finish something. So, I figured I'd discuss some of the fan favourite characters and give a retrospective on developing the series to mark the occasion!
Warning, this post will be disjointed, STUPIDLY long and full of strange hyperspecific information intended more for mega fans of DSaF than anyone else. You have been warned. This is also not gonna be exhaustive, as that would easily more than double the length of this 10k word essay. Okay. Onto the thing now.
A surprising amount of my ideas come from dreams in some way and DSaF was no exception. Back in mid to late 2015, I had a recurring dream where I had to wear a springlock Golden Freddy suit, often in odd locations (like at a swimming pool I sometimes visited.) Usually in the dream, I'd be wearing the suit, hear a muffled click and feel something shifting inside the suit.
I'd then have to suddenly contort my body to keep a latch from snapping back, before searching for someone to help me take the suit off. I never found anyone to help and had to contort my body to try to escape the suit. Most times, I failed and got lacerated by the suit's inner mechanisms. I'm not sure how common it is to feel pain in dreams, but the failures always felt agonizing.
Don't get me wrong, those dreams were terrifying in the moment, but every time I woke up, I had a weird sense of wanting to go back and see more. Something compelled me, I guess. I kept getting the dreams until I started making DSaF (and haven't gotten any since.)
The very first version of DSaF started out as a series of minigames where you'd have to navigate a Freddy's pizzeria while repelling really stupid animatronics (one, I remember, was Nightmare Foxy with his feet slapped where his knees usually would be.)
However, you'd be transferred to the Dayshift near the end of the game, which opened a visual novel segment. You'd wear a springlock suit (with a minigame to prevent the springlocks from failing) and then get bitten by Breadbear, who was a huge community meme-character at the time. While testing some ideas out for this part, I quickly realized that it had way more potential than the unfinished night segments. So, I started again from scratch.
Like with Dialtown, the intro for DSaF was also the first scene I wrote for the game. I implemented it before writing anything else because I was genuinely terrified that I'd fail to create anything worthwhile. RPG Maker isn't exactly a visual novel engine and this was my first project in the (then) new iteration of the engine. I whipped together a phone guy sprite, found a stock background, a cheesy Kevin MacLeod track, implemented the first 10 seconds of the scene and then pressed playtest...
All these years later, I still remember the moment when the screen loaded, the music started playing and Phone Guy appeared on my screen. As silly as it may sound, I genuinely felt like I'd just discovered fire.
Character spotlight: Jack Kennedy.
Talking about Jack Kennedy now is a bit funny, as Michael Afton in the games wound up following a very similar trajectory to Jack. Undead former nightguard who stalks Freddy's locations, traveling around trying to free the souls of the kids who lost their lives there, using the names of dead people and hoping to find out what happened to his family... That DOES sound a lot like Michael Afton, huh?
The more interesting thing is that DSaF 1 heavily implied many of these plot points pre-SL, before 'Michael Afton' even meant anything (mentioning the player stalking other locations, being able to pick your own name despite playing as a pre-set character, which was meant to tease the false name thing, showing the player with dull eyes next to Dave's glowing eyes in one shot to represent soullessness, etc.)
What's even funnier is that the FIRST iteration of the character was named... MIKE Johnson. Yeah. I wanted something that felt truly generic, less of a memorable name like William Afton, so I went through a bunch of presidential surnames and picked the one that felt by far the least memorable. A name you'd hear and think "That's it?!"
'Mike' was just intended to be a call-back to FNaF 1 at first, but I changed it to Jack when I cemented the lore more to separate the character more from Mike Schmidt/Afton.
The name 'Jack' was selected to reference the Irish legend of Stingy Jack, a drifter who cheats the devil to stay out of hell, but winds up dying and is barred from entering both Heaven (for his sinful life) and hell (because the Devil cannot take him due to their deal.) This leaves him to wander earth with no hope of an afterlife. This story is where we get the jack-o'-lantern from! Given Jack's orange appearance, this seemed like a good pick and served as inspiration for Jack's inability to pass on to any afterlife.
His surname changed when, and I'm not making this up... I mentioned Peter for the first time to a collaborator and they pointed out that if Jack's surname is Johnson, then Peter's surname would logically be… Johnson, too. 'Peter' + 'Johnson' are both slang for schlong, meaning his name is Schlong Schlong. That would've been par the course for 2016 DSaF, but it gave me the push to choose something else.
I went back to the list of presidents and went one president back on the list. Kennedy. Given the Irish origins of Jack's name, something felt right. I hemmed and hawed about making my protagonist's name the EXACT same as a popular US figure... but then remembered that the F. in JFK stood for Fitzgerald... A surname used in FNaF 2 AND the surname of the guy who wrote The Great Gatsby, the book Dave's catchphrase originated from.
I couldn't pass it up. Jack became Jack Fitzgerald Kennedy.
Jack's personality was originally designed around what I thought would be the funniest possible protagonist for a game where you have to interact with customers. I had a few part time retail gigs before (and during) DSaF development. The first of which was in a pet shop (which was, at times, quite chaotic. I still remember the time we had a bird flying around the shop and I had to catch it) and the other was at a dollar store. We had some truly cursed recurring customers.
No exaggeration, many of the customers in DSaF were far too normal in retrospect. That's something I could've leaned into more.
There's bits of 'me' in most characters I write. Less the murder in Jack's case and more, y'know, the little stuff. Believe it or not, Jack and I eat our pizza the same way. We're both Irish (though in Jack's case, Irish-American.) Some stuff from Jack's family dynamic was ripped from mine too, and oddly enough, I didn't notice this until a few close friends pointed it out.
However, one thing I really didn't want Jack to be was inherently likeable. I felt like having a more flawed protagonist would make him more interesting and round out his more sympathetic elements. He's openly hateful to customers, spiteful about his (un)life and occasionally, openly offensive. It's fair to say there's parts of the character (and the games) I'd write very differently now, but I'm glad that I did not try to make him overly sympathetic right off the bat, and especially in the evil routes. I think it made his gradual character development in the good routes shine more.
I've spent a lot of time talking about Jack over the years, and obviously specific choices I made about his relationships will come up later, so I won't ramble on for much longer. But, one interesting thing to note about Jack is how many trans fans found Jack relatable and viewed parts of his tale as a trans allegory. The number of trans DSaF fans online was something I noticed even back in the old days, which was rarer in the broader FNaF community at that point, and I genuinely wondered about until I saw someone finally point the connection out.
The same could be said of DSaF fans with Dissociative Identity Disorder, though this one I understood quicker, due to Jack/Dave's split personalities, something a lot of the protagonists I write have, (Phonegingi being another notable example.) I can honestly say that I didn't intend for Jack to be written with this in mind, but I was pleased to see a number of fans who don't often feel seen or represented by media feeling that way about his portrayal.
I had an inkling that people may get attached to the character, but this was something that I did not anticipate. It's neat.
I don't really have as much to say about DSaF 1 as the others. One fun tidbit I'm not sure I've said is that the MCI victims in DSaF 1 were named after old friends of mine. When FNaF 1 came out, we had a fun time tying each of us to the robots ("Oh, I'd possess this one!" "Well, I'd possess THIS one!") and I thought it'd be a fun callback. The names even line up with our castings. My friends found it amusing when I told them at school about it after. A few had fairly distinctive Irish names, so not all of them are 1:1, some are in-joke replacements. But, yeah.
DSaF 1 was essentially just me screwing around in RPG Maker and throwing stuff together at random while having fun, trying to see if I could find something that I liked. It is by no stretch of the imagination a good game and I could talk endlessly about the issues that resulted from this haphazard approach. It's mostly community in-jokes and a general parody of the idea of FNaF in its purest form, for better and for worse. But, I'll admit, I do still feel something when I go back to the intro of DSaF 1 and see the prize corner load in and that cheesy Kevin MacLeod track play.
While fleshing DSaF 1 out, I had vague ideas of what I'd do if I made another one. Mainly the fact that the game would be a FNaF 2 parody set in California and that the restaurant would have a cursed eldritch ballpit. That was my starting point.
I definitely already had some lore sketched out, like Jack's soullessness (which was implied in DSaF 1), Dave's rough backstory and... Henry, naturally. But, it wasn't really until DSaF 2 production that I decided to cement what wound up being the base for the rest of the lore, such as Dee's identity, Peter and Blackjack, which came from a question: if Jack is soulless in a world where souls often linger... What the hell is Jack's soul even up to?
A bunch of Youtubers picked up DSaF 1 and I watched the footage very closely. I'd screwed around and made little RPG Maker games to amuse my friends with (one funny example was a Pokemon fangame set at my school where the teachers had teams based on their personalities/the subjects they thought), but it wasn't until I started seeing other people play my work to audiences that certain things clicked. Obviously, I felt the need to plan out things MUCH better from the start now.
Admittedly, I was unsure what to do with the Phone Guy of the DSaF 2 location at first. Initially, Phone Guy (Steven) was just a single tortured guy in my head. A singular freak that was as much a victim of the company as the player. At first, my plan was to give Steven a remodel and develop his relationship with Jack more. But, then I had the idea that Steven was just one of many. You see, DSaF's premise basically revolved around a single idea: that with each official FNaF game, the number of locations + bodies just kept piling up.
If Freddy's WAS a genuine fast food giant, surely there would be at least 50 locations ALL with crazy incidents/lore, if the pattern kept up, right?
Freddy's is a capitalist amoral company that has found a way to profit from institutional misery, one that it's established does NOT let go of its employees... I mean, a springlock victim is probably a good waste of an opportunity, right?
Fans had tried to tie the suits to something other than William Afton for years to explain where the ghosts of dead employees went. That was actually a solid theory for what Shadow Freddy + Bonnie were back in the day. So, naturally, I ran with the idea.
When I developed DSaF 1, Jack was never exactly meant to get too close to Steven. After all, you turn up and on your first day and things go horribly awry. So, I decided to go for something different this time around and introduce a new character. But before we talk about him, let's jump back.
Character spotlight: Dave Miller.
A lot of the design decisions that went into Dave Miller seem quite random, but I'll try my best to explain. I guess I'll start with the easiest thing to explain: the name. To be honest, I always liked 'Dave Miller' better as a name for the Purple Guy when I read FNaF: TSE and was admittedly disappointed at the true name being William Afton.
DSaF 1/2 were largely written between the gap between FNaF: The Silver Eyes and Sister Location and one thing that always drove me nuts about certain FNaF naming conventions was how atypical many of the names sounded. "William" is a fairly delicate sounding name (not one I'd typically assign a serial killer, personally) and the only cultural reference I've ever seen to 'Afton' outside of FNaF was a cigarette advert for an old Irish brand of cigarettes.
I think Dave would appreciate having this be his Legacy, but honestly, I wanted to lean more into the 'Miller' identity, creating this sense of a split identity of sorts, with William Afton being the 'dead' identity and Dave Miller being who the character WANTS to be… what he wants you to see you as. Not a delicate inventor, but a killing-machine party animal who's always the life of the party!
...Who you would NEVER want to abandon. It's no coincidence that in the DSaF 3 good route, the two identities split and Dave finds salvation… and in the evil route, the two identities merge and Dave quickly meets a gruesome end.
I got into FNaF at the end of August of 2014, when Markiplier played the first game on his Youtube channel. For several years, fans speculated about the identity of the Purple Guy and what his story was. A lot of these fan portrayals were of edgy, composed psychopaths and leaned into the horror of the idea. I decided to do the exact opposite for Dave.
I found his TTS from a youtube video called Garfielf (when I heardthe TTS, I vowed to use it for SOMETHING, though I didn't know what that'd be at the time) and I pulled his iconic catchphrase from The Great Gatsby, which I'd read in school.
It just seemed really funny to me to have a player finally come face to face with the Purple Guy… and to have him appear and say "why hello there, old sport" in a silly New York accented TTS. Similar to my original idea for Jack's name, sort of a 'That's it?!'
Many already know that I even debated whether or not I should have Dave appear for much of DSaF 1. A common trope in fangames was to have the player character turn out to have been the Purple Guy at the end of the game. An original idea I had was to not have Dave appear UNLESS you did the evil route of your own volition, making players naturally assume that they were him, only to come face to face with him at the end of the game. He would NOT have been happy about being impersonated.
Another funny scrapped idea from around this time was the idea that instead of just having a purple, pink + orange guy, there'd actually be a TON of barely talked about sprite guys all with different palettes. Fangames frequently copied the Purple Guy in an attempt to create their own edgy killer OC, so the idea that a bunch of weirdos were doing Dave's schtick (but worse) across the crowded Freddy's location map at any given time, all competing/socializing with each other, felt like it had a lot of potential.
In particular, I remember a beige guy was going to be mentioned only, with Dave alleging the other killers don't talk to that one as he was just especially fucked up, even for them. I never wound up using this idea, but I thought it'd be fun to mention.
At first, I didn't really know what Dave's 'thing' should be outside of his appearance/funny demeanor. I liked the idea that he's simply trying to shut down the company because he hates working there and wants an excuse to party with someone in Vegas.
But the more I thought about him, the more I was able to pull from his existing characterization. William has always been depicted as someone who 'always comes back' and his victims are left eternally haunting his place of work as specters. I guess in that, I saw someone who can't let go, even of his own mortality. This was the base I worked from.
Something I noticed from DSaF 1's reception was how much people liked the Jack + Dave pairing and admittedly, the most fun I had working on the game was when I was writing their scenes, so I developed their relationship more in 2, with Dave being more Yandere than he was in the last. I already had Henry envisioned by this point, so I finalized a dynamic for him + Dave that led directly to his weird surrogate relationship with Jack.
I guess I should also take the opportunity to acknowledge Davesport, easily the most notable fanship from DSaF. This is a weird one for me to talk about because I think like most of the fanbase, I honestly didn't expect to see them that way when they first appeared on my screen. This was admittedly challenging for me because, naturally, their whole arc was them doing horrific crimes together. Painting them as an uncomplicated romantic pairing in-universe would've led to some nasty implications that were so obvious that even occurred to my young/dumb teenage self.
So, I leaned more into 'They have chemistry and could obviously be a pairing if their relationship wasn't them doing THIS and they weren't constantly lying to each other.'
DSaF 3 plays with this idea, with Davetrap's "I love you" to Jack in the evil ending being him frantically begging for his life after Jack + Dave's lies are finally out in the open, while the good ending, where the two finally truly understand each other, uses the more sincere and gut-wrenching "Thanks for putting me back together" after Jack literally gives Dave his soul.
'Jack' being unable to pass on was established a long time ago, but the answer of where Jack's soul would go wound up being wherever Dave's soul ended up was a fitting ending for their dynamic, imo and a great way to show just how deep their connection wound up being.
The theme of DSaF characters' missing potential was emphasized heavily for Dave in particular. DSaF 1 and 2 make a point of showing how much of a natural genius Dave is at anything robotics related. If he used even a fraction of his mind for good, who knows what he could've achieved?
The split Dave thing was something I'd toyed with the idea of from the start and something I kinda regret in hindsight. It wasn't well understood and mans fans couldn't reconcile the two distinct story threads, wehere one half was redeemed and one was burned 'alive'.
They felt I was trying to redeem a whole that was irredeemable, with the irony being that Jack himself had been 'split' right from the get-go… so it felt natural to me that he would help Dave find peace with that too.
I'll speak more about his backstory with Henry in a later spotlight, but one notable thing I'll mention about writing Dave is that in one of the DSaF 2 side endings, he gets into a comical brawl with Peter and then goes off on a monologue about how Freddy's is a monster, one that rolls over dreams and people. Here's the funny thing: When I envisioned that ending and began writing the script, I had NO intention of making him say any of that. It just sorta came to me around the time I was wrapping up that part of the script, like I could hear his voice in my head.
It felt completely unexpected and I was unsure of it, but it felt too interesting not to use. I later saw people praising the scene for the extra depth it gave Dave, so I'm glad I went with it. I'll have more to say about Dave later on, but for now, I should jump back to the main timeline.
DSaF 2 Development Part 2:
In early DSaF 2 development, I cemented the rest of the lore and quickly released I had my work cut out for me. I was still in high school and was fairly inundated with work preparing for my SAT(-equivalent)s by this point.
An artist approached me and offered to do pixel art for DSaF 2. Until this point, I'd just pulled the FNaF 3 sprites for the Purple Guy for Dave. Initially, I turned this offer down, not wanting to rely too heavily on anyone else to finish my game. Y'see, a whole slew of fangame were announced from late 2015 to late 2016. Many were followed by the community with great enthusiasm and most of them involved large unwieldy teams of developers.
…Almost none of them actually released and the few that did usually came with significant delays and drama before they saw the light of day. I figured that if I could do everything by myself, my work would be flawed, but people could still PLAY it.
The artist then came back to me a second time, asking again if they could join the project. I was considering it more heavily now, but still turned it down. Then, they approached a third time, this time was a mockup Dave sprite based on his FNaF World appearance. I said it was excellent, but I'd pull more from his FNaF 2 sprite, the one with the long neck + grabby hands. The artist revised it and I invited them on to help me complete tons of minigame art.
It was my first time making real pixel art too, but we created tons of pixel art together, with me doing bits and pieces while they completing the DSaF 2 restaurant tileset. We also collaborated on the overworld sprites, with them doing bases and me adding detailing. It's a shame I don't still have the different files anymore showing how they evolved over time. Oh, well.
It was at this point that I couldn't bear the difference in quality between DSaF 1 and the new DSaF 2 assets and I quickly patched DSaF 1 to include some new pixel art, with a few new sprites added.
Character spotlight: Henry
Oh, where to begin… I guess I'll start with the name?
As I said earlier, I preferred 'Dave Miller' as the canon killer's name to William Afton when I read TSE. When Henry's surname was later revealed as 'Emily' later on, I was definitely pretty disappointed.
Since an actual surname had not been revealed for the canon character yet, I rolled 'Dr Henry Miller' around on my tongue and realized it was pretty much perfect. At that point, I wondered if Dave should be related to Henry, only to remember a popular fan theory by a theorist named BlackfootFerret, where the FNaF 2 Purple Guy was a copycat killer.
This wound up inspiring parts of Dave's backstory too, namely the idea that Dave was emulating Henry's dead son, David... Which also wound up eerily lining up with another future FNaF plotpoint.
Another funny thing to bring up is Henry's theme. Chopin's Waltz in A Minor. I've had people ask me before why I chose this one, but it's fair to say it sorta picked itself.
FNaF 1-4 had a tendency to include music box covers of famous classical songs, like the Toreador March, Schubert's Serenade, Swan Lake, and I wanted something similar for him, as the guy who basically caused the series to happen. But, what theme to select for him? Beethoven, maybe? Bach? Tchaikovsky? What would sound right?
When I was making DSaF, my dad was going through a lot to say the least. He spent most of his time alone in his study, listening to Chopin. Randomly, he'd come into my room and rant a little about how the fabric of reality is not as it seems, about the nature of consciousness, etc... then return to his study, and I'd hear muffled Chopin from the other side of the wall. I guess you could say Henry chose his own theme.
Henry's philosophy was something I was genuinely very pleased with. I was never that crazy on stuff like Remnant and Agony in canon FNaF, because I felt like it was the series trying to turn something as intangible as the rules of possession in a fictional universe into something a scientist could define…
But, I did wonder what an actual mad scientist would do if he discovered that ghosts existed. Probably run a series of tests to put the strain of the phenomenon to its limits, right? I even figured a way to tie it into that old FNaF 1 'Joy of Creation' audio reference, with Henry trying to figure out what life is by understanding death.
The fundamentals of life is something scientists have always debated. S1 of Breaking Bad has a pretty notable scene where Walter White discusses the nature of a soul with a former colleague in a flashback while the present day character disposes of a dissolved body, showing it as just inanimate gore. In college, we had a lecture about the characteristics of organic life. Which included stuff like viruses, which flaunt our practical definitions. It made sense to me that Henry would naturally want to make a name for himself by exploiting a tragic phenomenon to answer this age old question.
Henry's approach was based somewhat on some real scientists/speakers. One example was Alan Watts, who gave lectures about theology from religions like Hinduism/Buddhism from a western academic perspective, phrased as thought experiments. These ranged from the nature of consciousness and the fabric of reality to the idea of the Godhead. For a character with a god complex who is trying to unravel life and reality itself, this gave me a place to start.
Another inspiration was Sir Oliver Lodge, who was one of the first discoverers of electromagnetic radiation. His work was fundamental in the development of radio technology. He named the coherer and held many radio related patents. A landmark figure in radio technology.
Lodge owning so many patents made me think it felt right to make Henry a doctor, one who also patented technology like the Springlock… which wound up obviously having a secondary sinister purpose, which Freddy's fell into the trap of also using for their Phone Guy project.
Oliver Lodge also had some interesting views on the paranormal, believing that radiowaves inhabited a realm that the dead occupied and that technology such as radios could be used to summon spirits to talk to them. You may sense where I'm going with this, but it goes even deeper than that.
Lodge lost a son in the first World War and never got over the grief. He wrote a whole book about his attempts to contact his son's spirit. This inspired Henry's backstory of having a dead son, whom he heard on the radio (though this part never made it into the games), which catapulted Henry's research. In hindsight, a part of me wishes I'd used Henry more, due to how much characterization was left on the cutting room floor.
The idea that he experimented on Dave, removing organs + parts of his brain was partly a callback to FNaF 1 + the Bite of '87. The bite victim was lobotomized, after all. But, it also felt like a great way to show what kind of person Henry was deep down. That if someone clung to their corpse in order to stick with him, he would instantly try to use it in his work, even at that person's expense… and as soon as it wound up inconveniencing him, he'd just leave.
There's a lot I wish I'd have fleshed out more for Henry, but I can't deny that a lot of fans liked the ending to his story and felt gratified that I actually let him die, right after stating the obvious: that he thought he was the protagonist all along. To this day, I'm still glad that so many fans liked him so much as a villain, even if I feel I personally fell short with my portrayal of him.
DSaF 2 development part 3:
I drank a lot while developing this game, so parts of it are a blur to me. Don't do that, by the way. Sorry, off topic.
One thing I do remember very specifically was how I decided to draft the endings. I watched many Youtubers play DSaF 1 and most of them got an underwhelming ending and were confused, as I'd hidden the good ending just as Scott had for FNaF 3's good ending… but, most people did not expect to have to dig for it, leading to them getting a not so great ending. For DSaF 2, I decided to make the choices more clear cut, but also add some complexity.
DSaF 2's story has you align with the Puppet and/or Phone Guy for the good route or Dave for the evil, but you can also tell everyone to go to hell and go alone, naturally. However, a fun idea I had was that you could betray each alliance at several pivotal story points and get a different ending for each betrayal, making the game highly replayable.
This wound up giving DSaF 2 roughly 20 separate endings. On top of that, I even added little lore cutscenes showing stuff like your first meeting with Dave from HIS perspective and a conversation with William + Henry at the start of the timeline to some of the betrayal endings to flesh them out more and reward players for scrubbing the game for content.
While some endings were not as well-developed as others, I was proud of some of them, trying much harder than I did with DSaF 1's endings. I even added an ending where you can stop Dave before he even gets up to his usual malarkey, because I anticipated players would want to do that. To this day, the sheer number of choices/endings 2 has still gets praise to this day, so I'm glad the effort wasn't in vain.
Character spotlight: Peter
I guess it's time to launch into Peter now.
I was honestly confused at what to even do with the character at first. I changed the backstory a few times during early-to-mid DSaF 2 development and there's even a few lines that I forgot to modify, like Peter mentioning he has a teenage son around the midpoint of the game, which obviously doesn't make sense in the final timeline (and is only resolved by assuming his memory is compromised, which is true, in fairness.)
Deciding to retire Steven, partly to show that DSaF 1's plot had consequences for at least someone, Peter's personality wound up being something I put a lot of thought into during the early parts of development, deciding to show him as a fairer boss who cared more about the restaurant, customers + employees. This wound up having a pretty monumental impact later on on the plot, of course.
Some of Peter's traits are based slightly on my own IRL brother's, though I have no clue if I ever even told him that. He knows the character though, obviously. Peter's 'voice' was something I struggled with while writing the character more than anything else. No, not the remixed stuttering. How he actually talked.
Sometimes, it came naturally to me. Other times, not so much. The scene I struggled the most with was, ironically, the scene that's usually cited as his best-written scene in any of the games. Which is, of course, the scene from the DSaF 2 evil route where he finally confronts and fires you for taking innocent lives.
I swear, I don't know how many times I started over writing that scene. DSaF's whole premise was that it was a pisstake of FNaF lore, but I couldn't really ignore the inescapable conclusion that the player's actions in an evil route were beyond grotesque and so far, not one person outside of the Puppet had really acknowledged that. I was leaving a big opportunity on the table. Peter, given that he actually gave a shit, was clearly 'the one'. So, I wrote the scene… And then I scrapped it and rewrote it… and then tried again. I wasn't sure what it was missing.
The closest I came to being happy with it was when I realized that I was thinking at the wrong scale. One death's a tragedy, a million's a statistic. That quote is often attributed to Stalin, y'know, who'd obviously know what he's talking about there. So I scaled it down. The game took place in November, so I focused on the fact it'd be Christmas in a month… and in 5 households, someone was absent.
Blood and gore are shocking, but a noticeable absence of something that should be there, whether it be light, sound or… y'know, a person, is something anyone can understand. So, I went with that idea.
The irony is that, when I wrote the final draft of the scene, I showed it in a few FNaF discord spaces, asking what they thought of it. The responses were basically universally tepid to negative. Not having a better idea and being exhausted from the rewrites, I used it anyway.
Today, it seems to be considered the best written scene in the game and I've seen it clipped + posted to Twitter, where it was praised as an uncharacteristic gut-punch in an otherwise jokey game. I can't tell you how funny that is to me now.
DSaF 2's development was hectic and very, very messy. At the start of development, I'd sketched out ideas for a DSaF 3, DSaF 4 and even a rough sketch of what a DSaF SL could be (keeping in mind that the actual SL hadn't come out yet), but by the midpoint, I was fatigued, trying to balance schoolwork and a challenging home-life with a game that had ballooned in size.
Not to mention, I was informed that I had to go on a vacation to visit some distant family abroad, so I had a hard deadline I needed to release the game by. As such, I spent the entirety of late DSaF 2 development scrambling to add in more and more content while friends helped me test the parts that were done.
Around the last few weeks of development, I had two ideas for 'capstone' scenes, unlocked by completing the pure good/evil endings with the protagonist named 'Jack', but I only had enough time to complete one of them. One idea involved Henry speaking to the player after the evil route concluded, thanking you for your cooperation and urging you to finish Dave off when he least expects it in order to complete the story.
The other involved Jack visiting Peter and Caroline at their home and finally finding some modicum of peace. I pitched both to my best friend and he convinced me to implement the second one, feeling it was a nice ending, especially since I believed that would be the final entry for the series at the time.
DSaF 2 definitely blew the first out of the water, got way more attention than the first one and Markiplier even played it. Y'know, the guy that introduced ME to the series I was parodying in the first place. It felt like things had come full circle and TBH, I was glad to be done with it. I got a LOT of comments asking me to make a third. Initially, I wasn't interested, just having finished a tough project whose scope kept growing the more I worked on it. I was honestly so fatigued that I didn't want to make anything and enjoyed the brief respite of not having ANYTHING on my plate for a time.
Of course, that didn't last for too long.
Dee is another character who's a bit weird to discuss now, as Charlie Emily pretty much became a 1:1 equivalent of Dee in the main timeline. However, unlike Michael, who you could tangibly argue was always in the stalker zombie pipeline, Charlie being the puppet was an explicit retcon.
In the FNaF 2 minigame that shows the Puppet's backstory, the kid who possesses the Puppet is referred to as a 'him', and that was only changed in FNaF 6, months after DSaF 2 released. Dee was written to be an intentional point of divergence as so many of the other characters had direct canon counterparts. Oops.
Dee's role definitely evolved over the course of the series, being a straightforward stand-in for the canon puppet in DSaF 1 and then developing more over the course of 2. Obviously in FNaF 2, the Puppet box is something you have to constantly wind, or else the Puppet comes for you.
Dee's role in the narrative kinda fits a similar theme. She's a reminder of the various tragedies that happened at Freddy's, something the company tries to sweep under the rug for the sake of making money. Dave, correctly, realizes early on in the evil route that the box must remain sealed in order to get away with his Handy Dandy plan and as mentioned earlier, letting her out prematurely is a valid way to end the game before any harm befalls anyone.
Dee completes DSaF's 2 tragic narrative, namely the tragedy of the Kennedy family trio, who all end up working at the same cursed pizza place and only realize it by the very end. She's kind of the balancing act to Peter in the narrative.
While Peter gives us a sibling in the part of Jack's arc that relates to his testy relationship to Freddy's itself (and handles his general lack of accountability as a Freddy's employee, as Peter callsJack out when he does shitty things), Dee represents someone who does the same for the paranormal part of the plot.
Initially, this seems to be the same deal as DSaF 1. "Free the souls and it's over!" But the Happiest Day is noticeably different. This time around Jack has undergone character development, thanks to Dee + Peter. He winds up apologizing to the crowd of ghosts, on behalf of the company, for failing to keep them safe.
What I liked most about this scene is that it wound up having tons of subtext hidden in it, which people did not pick up on release. At first the scene seems to be mainly about the ghosts in the room with Jack + Dee, but the scene contains a notable but small change if you replay the scene with Jack as the player name.
Dee calls Jack 'bro', the first (and iirc only) direct indication in DSaF 2 that the two were siblings. Jack's apology is also for her, for failing to protect her and it's only then that she gets an opportunity to pass on. Noticeably, she can't pass on following DSaF 1's happiest day, only after her business is settled with Jack and she sees that he's capable of change.
Dee gets more screentime in 3's Flipside segments. I think parts of her intro scene are written pretty roughly, but my main approach with her in the ridiculously vast amount of optional Flipside dialogue was to show her as more sibling-like. Bickering, banter. I felt she deserved more than a few scenes of exploration outside of her tragic backstory.
Jack even leans into the sibling dynamic himself, referring to her as sis and at one point telling Dave to not curse around his sister, only for them to point out that it's been 50 years since they were both alive, that it's foolish for Jack to think swearing would upset her after decades of horror at Freddy's. But, to Jack, she's still his sister and he still wants to go back and redo the past.
For a while after 2 ended, I really didn't do much. I socialized with friends, I tinkered with a few side projects (like a small FNaF text game + a small charity game to pitch in for one of the subreddit's moderators), but then FNaF 6 came out. It had a tycoon and actually sorta wrapped up the games' original story. You may remember that earlier on, I said that I had drafts for what a DSaF 3 and 4 could've looked like. DSaF 4 would've had a tycoon, which made me extra curious what mine would've looked like.
Even more interestingly, a fandom developed around DSaF during the autumn of 2017. When DSaF 2 first released, it got picked up by Youtubers. But, outside of a few fairly barren community hubs, DSaF was kinda regarded as a lowbrow series without much else to it. DSaF 2 included a lot of clues that you could use to solve the remaining lore, such as Blackjack's actual identity, Peter + Dee's identities and more… but initially, it didn't seem like anyone was digging, even after I pointed out that the game had deep secrets still buried within it.
So, I kinda felt like I'd wrapped it up at a good point when I finished. The game was well-received but I wasn't sure if people would necessarily even enjoy a sequel, especially if it was comparatively more serious than the last game.
Then, out of nowhere, DSaF suddenly gained fans of it specifically. There were fans with DSaF profile pics coming to me and asking insightful questions about the characters, looking for clues to solve the timeline. Tons of neat fanart, fan videos… It was engagement I'd never seen before.
I didn't immediately rush to make another game, but over the next few months, I softened up on the idea, initially planning to create a spinoff called DSaF World, which would've basically been the DSaF 3 Flipside segments on their own with only a few cutscenes around it to explain how Jack got there…
Then, as I said, FNaF 6 came out and suddenly, a bigger idea clicked into place, one that cannibalized different ideas from all of my scrapped DSaF projects. So, I got to work on it, quickly drafting a plan for the game, plotting out its main endings and planning to show the wider DSaF fanbase the stuff that they'd missed in the 2nd game.
Character spotlight: Steven
Steven was the purest take on what I thought the funniest depiction of Phone Guy could be when I made DSaF 1. A company man with nothing to his name who claws desperately to hold onto it.
He veers between being overly stiff and genuinely unstable, trying to warn Jack not to sign the red company contract at the start of DSaF 1 that more or less promises his soul to Freddy's. Steven is NOT meant to be your friend. During DSaF 1's plot, he even tries to pin the murders on you despite being pretty sure it was Dave, figuring as the new guy, you'd be easier to throw under the bus. Y'know, in order to try to make the company (and therefore himself) look less responsible.
There is, of course, an ending where you can get a favour from him and use it to pin the murders on Dave, but you have to go out of your way to do this. Despite how much of an asshole he is, like when Jack dares to eat the company salad, he's also shown to be completely and utterly miserable, crying in the toilets when you view the CCTV cameras. A small detail in DSaF 2: Jack was given Steven's head by the company as a keepsake, which he proudly displays in his old childhood room. Weird.
However, Dave gives a more positive/nuanced view of Steven. In DSaF 3, Dave explicitly states that he actually kinda likes Steven and explains his stance, but even back in DSaF 1, there's hints of this. Dave and him are, weirdly enough, on a first name basis and Dave calls Steven 'Scott', the name assigned to all Phone Guys.
You may assume that Dave is being the usual ol' insubordinate Dave, but this isn't the case. It's a odd (but genuine) bit of humanity to see from Dave. An acknowledgement of his boss as, y'know, a person. Especially since he spends the whole game calling YOU 'old sport'.
Steven, being a company veteran, knows Dave pretty well. Dave knows that Steven could not give less of a shit about the company or the customers. He's trapped there and just looking to survive… and would potentially fuck over other people if it saves his life. So, the two aren't true adversaries and Dave is willing to acknowledge his humanity easier than, say, Peter's, who he sees as a pawn fighting for a corrupt and monstrous company.
Steven's design, namely the shape of his phone head and the fact he wears a suit (which makes him noticeably overdressed for the job he has) was actually inspired by an illustration of Ness' dad from Earthbound. The trope of depicting Phone Guy as having a literal phone for a head (as we only see him speak from the other end of a phone) was not my invention, but the trope the community used has been around for a long time. This very illustration plays on the same concept, so I thought it'd be neat to use it for the few who may recognize it.
Steven received more depth in DSaF 3 (perhaps somewhat to Peter's detriment as I definitely should've added one more Flipside segment to give him more dialogue with Jack + Dee), and there's a lot I could say about how happy/unhappy I am with how I wrote his dialogue in 3, now that years have passed.
To focus on a positive though, my favourite little moment of his may genuinely be the bit where Jack ogles at a Foxy the Pirate poster. Dee + Dave look at Jack with confusion and disgust and Steven just uncharacteristically finds it amusing. It's a crude gag, but it's a rare instance where it made sense for the character to let loose, even if just a tiiiiny bit.
I kept moving with DSaF 3 development. Like DSaF 2, the game certainly ballooned in size from what I initially pictured. Not only did the tycoon debatably end up more detailed than FNaF 6's (with very basic room placement being added with a few variable layouts), but the decision to have THREE Phone Guys in the game with entirely variable dialogue (outside of the tycoon segments) wound up vastly increasing the size of the game's script.
I wound up adding a lot of nods to different community references to the game, even using that ancient William Afton springlock audio for Dave's death scene, something I promised during a FNaF community movie night.
I worked with more artists than before on DSaF 3, including people like c0da, GlitchedPie, WitheredBBFilms, SPDesign and many others (who are all visible on the credits section of the game's download page!) I was still apprehensive about depending too much on others, fearing I'd have to swap through artists if any quit and may find myself in development purgatory (and there were a few delays relating to artist availability, but nothing that wound up delaying development too much.)
There's a LOT more than I could mention. At a point, I almost gave up and tentatively cancelled the game. But, I felt bad about disappointing everyone and wound up quickly getting back to work.
By the time development wrapped up, I felt like the Flipside and the tycoon segment could've used an overhaul (like adding free placement to the tycoon, more room layouts, a graphical UI for selecting things), but I was honestly just grateful to finally be able to get the game out that year and given that the game was almost cancelled, a lot of fans were understandably pressing me to finish it as soon as possible. I didn't wanna keep people waiting forever.
However, the ending parts of DSaF 3 development wound up being more impassioned than you'd expect, given that I almost gave up. I wrote a bunch of scenes for Harry, Jake and Roger, which wound up making it into the final game. The scenes don't impact the ending that much, but gave the characters more depth and relatability. Hell, they included an HOUR of new dialogue, a good chunk of which was voice acted! Jack also finally had a voice actor cast, Dyl in the Dark, who did a phenomenal job narrating some of Jack's dialogue in the main endings.
Harry, Jake and Roger could really get their own character spotlights, but given how much I've spoken about them in the last few years alone, I'll keep this briefer. The three characters basically wound up acting like a narrative timeline of the setting, with Harry being a stand-in for Steven's generation (the stiff and overly formal older phones who'd lost their former selves, with no real ideas on how to improve Freddy's beyond sticking the book), Jake acting for Peter's gen (the newer phones who could think outside the box, remembered more of their past lives and witnessed the ending of the company) and Roger's gen (a kind of phone Jack hadn't met before, who were around only for the aftermath of the company's decline + death. The generation who failed to save the dying company.)
They all humanized the company to an extent and I was proud of each of their backstories. It's insane to think that I once almost didn't add in any of their scenes. I doubt people would've gotten nearly as attached to them otherwise.
In hindsight, I wish I'd made it possible to choose between Harry, Jake and Roger from the get-go, instead of treating them like a linear upgrade, since I wanted to hone in on the DSaF 1->2->3 thematic progression with how they were written. Harry definitely got the most attention of the trio and as much as I like the character, it did lead to Roger basically getting very little screentime in comparison.
I was also proud of having three equivalents of Peter's DSaF 2 evil route confrontation scene for each of the three Phone Guys. While I'm not sure any of the three hit quite as hard as Peter's did, I liked using it to show how differently the three think.
Harry focuses on your lack of humanity, Jake focuses on how badly you failed at your responsibilities and Roger desperately tries desperately to see good in you and fails. Only when we combine the three, do we get what Jack really deserves to hear. The scenes also get nastier if you unlock the Phone Guys' backstories on the same save, with Jack threatening Jake's family and Roger's scene even being voice acted, just to make it sting more.
Another interesting thing to mention is that the game also had some guest musical artists! Notably GlitchedPie, one of the game's main sprite artists, composed the Flipside theme, which is an original melody. Hollister, Roger's VA, also composed Blackjack's theme… which gives me a good intro into the final character spotlight.
Oh, there's also Godred. I forgot all about him somehow. Uhhh, I actually don't have much to say about him, funnily enough. He'd snap my neck if I dared to, after all. So, uhhh, I'll move on. Glory to Godred. Thank you!
Character spotlight: Blackjack
Welp, we all knew this was coming. Jack was the first spotlight, so his severed soul would logically be the last. The Alpha and the Omega and whatnot. Surprisingly, I have a lot to say about this one for how little screentime he had.
Okay, let's start with the name. Prior to DSaF 3, I just referred to him as what he was. A shadow doggo. DSaF 2 does actually contain clues as to who Shadow Doggo is, but I guess I didn't really feel a need to name him at that point. When I got around to 3, I felt it was right to assign a name to him.
I messed around with a few ways of combining words like Phantom + Shadow with Jack, but they all felt a bit like they didn't really 'fit' the character. That was when I thought of Blackjack. It's a card game… played in Vegas. Duh. It's also one word, which solved the problem of the other double barreled variants being too unwieldy. Bonus.
I also wanted to work it in because it's a nod to one of the character's inspirations, Black Shuck.
(image sourced from the illustrious cryptid wiki)
Similar to how I decided to use Irish folklore as inspiration for Jack's backstory (which I thought contrasted the extremely American setting of the games), I turned to the British Isles for Blackjack.
Black Shuck in particular was a hell-hound who allegedly stalked the British countryside. One account alleges that amidst a thunderstorm, the hound burst into a church, started mauling people, and then it fled, leaving a pair of black paw-marks scorched on the church door. This inspired Henry's fate and Blackjack appearing suddenly to drag him to the void by his neck in that one cutscene.
Black hounds showing up as omens, or being associated with the movements of lost souls, is common in British Isles folklore. The other inspiration for Blackjack + Henry was the story of Richard Cabell, a man who apparently sold his soul to the devil, a hunter who was also alleged to have killed his wife. In one version of the tale I heard years ago, the family winds up leaving a supernatural seal on his tomb. Satan's hell-hounds then stalked the outside of the tomb, desperately wailing for the soul they were promised - but couldn't reach.
There's also Church Grims, black dogs in folklore who are buried alive and then come back to guard the souls of the dead. This gave me the idea for Sparky's burial on the day Dee died, setting up the whole sordid Kennedy tragedy, giving me a good reason for Blackjack to look like a dog that would make sense outside of the UK + Ireland.
It's a representation of Jack's fatal mistake - leaving the party to bury the dog, so his sister wouldn't find out their dog died on her birthday and then getting drunk. It was a REALLY stupid + irresponsible idea and Jack has to think about every time he sees his soul.
Blackjack's ability to jump timelines was an idea I initially got from rewatching the FNaF 3 Shadow Bonnie minigame, namely the fact he glitches as he moves and jumps between scenes that seemingly take place years apart. I'd also wondered what separates the shadow souls in FNaF from the brighter ones used for the kid characters.
I think mainline FNaF has a different answer for them now (like they're the manifestation of agony or something?), but I went my own way. They're souls that die with regret. The reason they glitch and bounce between timelines is because they're desperately trying to turn back the clock. Henry even mentions this as a theory in a DSaF 3 log.
The next thing to talk about, naturally, is the question of whether Jack or Blackjack is Jack Kennedy. It seems obvious at first, but I mean… Both were one being until Jack's death. People seem to acknowledge that the Puppet is uncomplicatedly Dee because it contains her soul, but what if her body jolted back to life? Would Jack's mission be accomplished if he had her back, even if her soul was still trapped at Freddy's? Would the revived Dee just be an impostor that shares all of her memories?
Jack and Dave each explore differing versions of this concept, like two equally fucked up Ships of Theseus. Blackjack and Flipside Dave are as much counterparts as Jack and Dave are, so it's fitting that they enjoyed the same fate while Jack's final moments were putting an end to Davetrap. Equal and opposite. I'm sure Newton would've liked the ending.
So, DSaF 3 came out. First a demo, then the whole thing a few months later. People really liked it and… I got a lot of requests for a 4th, naturally.
I guess I figured that if I wrote the ending in such a way that the story COULDN'T continue, people would accept it. And as well as the ending WAS received, obviously not. People really wanted a prequel or a spinoff or something.
Admittedly, I did have a few ideas. One involved a prequel with Harry working at the factory, one was a stupid existential spinoff based on DSaFifying Five Nights at Candy's, another involved a DSaFSwap AU where Henry broke out of Blackjack's temporal prison and wound up having to do DSaF 1 in Jack's place in a strange scrambled timeline.
The final idea, one that actually entered pre-production was a spinoff of DSaF 3, featuring the time between the Davetrap confrontation in the neutral ending and Jack dying on his deathbed. Nice.
Basically would've been a heavily expanded tycoon with multiple locations, free room placement, a few new phone guys, more of a DSaF RPG basically. I never would've tacked on a complete 4th entry to the existing canon, but it seemed like a small capstone that'd finally allow me to get over how much I wanted to redo DSaF 3's tycoon without having to restructure all of the game's content outside of the Flipside.
I got a better (but barebones) tycoon prototype set up, created some renders + assets for it (including a few new music box themes, like Nowhere Man + Starman) and then… I wound up showing off a design document for it, which included "Hey, what if you could date a phone guy instead of just giving them therapy? That'd be a fun sidequest!" and my buddy Phil suggested I could do an original game about dating Phone people aaaand the rest is history!
Honestly, you have no idea how much I'm leaving out. I think people would probably read character spotlights for characters like Matt, Ronaldo, Caroline, Jimbo and the original managers if I wrote them, but honestly, the post is 10,000 words as-is... Just know I didn't forget them.
My own relationship with the series has been strange. People aren't static. They change. Their abilities and tastes change. The frustrating thing about art is that unless you want to let a singular project consume your life for the rest of time… you have to let go of it and let it remain as it was when you last touched it. Soon, it represents your tastes less and less and you find yourself seeing it more as something you wish you could change, if only there were more hours in the day.
I know the series has a LOT of fans to this day and believe me, I'm very pleased that something I threw together as a teenager, with all of its flaws and the parts that aged very poorly, STILL make people happy! I get a lot of people telling me that and feeling afraid to approach me about it.
I'll admit, I was bitter for a time, living in the shadow of this zany and imperfect thing that I created, but I guess a part of moving past something is accepting it. I'm glad people like it. Enough time has passed that I remember how I felt about the idea more than the time actually making it and TBH, I'm sorta nostalgic for it.
I've actually been rewatching tons of old DSaF videos over the last few months and reading comments from people who've played the games and enjoyed the characters. 2016-2018 feels like an eternity ago now. Now, I have (some) leg hair and rent insecurity. It's crazy how that happens when you're not looking.
But, y'know, I guess it's funny to look back at my 2016 self, cobbling together an image of a suited man with a phone for a head, thinking "this idea has potential!" while having no clue of what was to come. It wound up being my life path, for better or for worse and I have to acknowledge that if Markiplier hadn't played a certain spooky bear game, I would likely be a brain surgeon, a Nobel prize winner or something boring like that instead of a guy who assembles RPG Maker visual novels. Phew. That was a close one.
Oh, and thank you to everyone who's supported me over the years! It's been a wild ride and I hope this trip down memory lane was at the very least somewhat interesting… if not- Well, why'd you read it then? Seriously, it was over 10 THOUSAND words long! What?! Did you think it'd get GOOD around the END?!
