A horror game about uncanny animatronic mascots, the perfect project for Scott Cawthon and his particular modeling proclivities. But Clickteam is not a 3D engine, so all the graphics must be prerendered. The player will have to stay in one place, then. They'll get bored just staring at the walls, though; maybe we'll use cameras, for visual variety. A security shift. You have the night shift at Freddy's, and the eerie animatronics are coming for you. Why are they coming? Well this is a horror game, so they may as well be haunted, I suppose. By murdered children, of course, as would be fitting for the location.
So we have Five Nights at Freddy's. The stars have aligned, and it's become very popular very quickly. Scott, prolific as ever, seeks to capture this popularity before it escapes, so he jumps straight into work on a sequel.
The "Bite of 87" was an unexpectedly strong subject of interest in the first game, so the second will give it some proper focus. The game is about monitoring a restaurant filled with animatronics haunted by spirits, so the sequel will need a new restaurant with new animatronics haunted by new spirits. The first game was at Freddy's, so the new one can be the new Freddy's. While we're at it, the new animatronics can just be new versions of the old animatronics, and the new murders can just be a new version of the old murders.
But since fans are interested in this story, and since we'll want to make more games down the line, we should probably start making room for a larger narrative. The first game was fairly compact, straight to the point, so if we want to build a full story out of this thing, we'll need to expand the scope of the world. We need a timeline, with several locations and tragedies from across the years. That leaves plenty of room for a story, though at this point all it amounts to is a series of murders.
All that expansion was exhausting, so for 3 we'll zoom back in for a more personal story. The original children, their murder, and their murderer, those should be our focus, shouldn't they? What suit was used to lure them? Where were they lured? How did he get away with it?
At this point it is clear that the games' surface level antagonists are victims, while the killer is the "true" villain of the story. Let's resolve this mismatch, then, and turn the guy into an animatronic so he can be a proper threat already. Anyway, it's a fitting conclusion for him, isn't it? This all seems like a fitting conclusion, in fact, so let's put the victims' souls to rest and finish this story for good. Fazbear's Fright, all of Freddy's history brought together in one place and burned away, tying the end of the timeline off in neat bow. Though, we'll also sprinkle in some hints at a "sister location", leaving open the opportunity to jump into a side story in the same universe afterwards.
Well that's all great, but the jumpscare turned out shit, so the show must go on. We've got some ideas for improving the scares, but what about the narrative context? We've already ended the story, so where is there left to go? The beginning, of course. The original location has been teased a couple times, but it hasn't been "revealed" explicitely, so it's the obvious place to shift our focus on now. 3 brought everything together for the end of the story. For 4, we'll do the same thing in reverse: Tie up any and all loose ends in the beginning. One singular event, the original spiritual spark which would kickstart everything else, taking all the random scattered mysteries fans have latched onto and tying them together into a meaningful narrative. Now, we have another "fitting conclusion", a conclusion we're committing to, declaring this one "the final chapter".
Ah, but it was a bit vague, wasn't it? Nobody can seem to put the pieces together as intended, and this conclusion feels a bit less fitting with no one to recognize it as such. Maybe we can use this silly spinoff to spell everything out explici- oh, I guess they're just ignoring that one. Fair enough. Well, there's still that sister location idea...
Let's clear all this up already. Here is the plan: We take the most important part of 4, the "inciting incident" and how it inspires the killer, and expand on that concept. He's obsessed, he has a whole underground facility dedicated to studying the phenomenon (this time in his own daughter). That's where this one can take place, and in the secret ending, we can reveal everything. The plush is not the Puppet, the year is not 1987, and it's certainly not all just a dream (even the part that was). Here's what it means to "put [someone] back together", and here's the person who does it. And if the mysteries don't get across this time either, we can always clarify in an update.
But now we're in a pickle. You see, we've already tied our story up into a bow. Two bows, actually, for both ends of the timeline. We've run out of bows to tie. Then, we immediately went and added a bunch of new threads that need to resolve somehow. Mike's a corpse, Ennard's on the loose, and Springtrap's survival is starting to feel important. What now?
This was a tough question, and it took some experimentation to finally land on the right answer. We do FNaF3... again. Bring everything together and burn it away, but with some new twists this time. We have a strong gameplay premise, we bring in some novel characters to tie together the narrative, and we make sure that each of the antagonists are a big deal. Springtrap, the missing children, the Puppet, and Baby. We've cheated a bit to get the missing children here, but at least now all the pieces, new and old, can be brought together in one big epic finale.
UCN is the encore, making up a quick narrative excuse to drag out the finale a bit. We never really saw the characters' reactions to their own demise, after all, so it's worth exploring that. That's where it ended, as far as this era of games are concerned.
Anyway, who's this boy torturing Afton? Someone should write a book about him...