Howdy, everyone! Been a while, eh?

I've been working on something a little special behind the scenes for a while now, and I've made enough progress to where I think I'm ready to reveal it. Based on the Henry Stickmin series, Saving the Person is a Choose Your Own Adventure game set within the Callan the Stickman universe. Like with my previous project, I assume there are plenty of questions that'll be asked along with this announcement, so I'll do a little Q&A to answer some of them.

What's a Callan the Stickman?

Callan the Stickman is a series I started back in 2013 starring...well, take a wild guess. It's something of a passion project for me, with a lot of stories I want to tell in it. But I felt like it'd work for the style of a Henry Stickmin fangame, hence why I'm using these characters.

Why are you making Saving the Person?

I love Henry Stickmin. I think they are hilarious, well animated games that are immensely worth playing. Seriously, if you haven't played them yet, buy The Henry Stickmin Collection on Steam. Trust me, you'll love it. Anywho, after said collection released, that reignited that love for the series, and that love manifested into a desire to pay tribute to it. Additionally, I was getting a little bit burnt out from mainly just making FNAF fangames for a while now, and wanted to do something different to shake things up. Hence, this game. Also Jenny said he'd really like to see it, so that helped too.

How big is Saving the Person?

Saving the Person will have 30 fails and 4 endings, so somewhere inbetween Escaping the Prison and Stealing the Diamond. It was initially meant to be 25 fails but feature creep happened. Oh well.

What is the game gonna be made in?

It will be made in Adobe Animate using ActionScript 3.

Hold on, like, Flash? Isn't that set to be discontinued in three days? Are you insane?!

Eh, not really. I've done some digging into it and learned that Flash being discontinued probably won't be a major setback. I'll link this video made by Two Left Thumbs about it, but the long and short of it is there'll still be many ways to work around it, such as the Newgrounds Player, exporting to an .exe and the in-progress Ruffle which will emulate Flash Player. (although it doesnt support as3 yet so that stinks.) I'll look into future ways around it as time goes on but for now, I'm not worried.

When is this game set to be released?

It's hard to say. You're looking at the guy who took 2 straight years to finish and release FNAN 2 so obviously it's going to be a while, and I did initially have a deadline of December 31st but...pff, like that's happening now, so if I had to give a good guess based on how things are right now, I'd say maybe....Fall 2021. Yes, I know, that's a long time, but that's what seems realistic to me. Maybe with enough motivation I'll get it done before then. We'll see.

How far in progress is this game so far?

I've intentionally prevented myself from talking about this project until I was far enough in to feel confident in being able to annnounce it without a likely chance of it being cancelled later, so there is plenty done as it currently stands. Right now the entire game is storyboarded, and seven scenes are fully animated. So, believe me, even if the game gets cancelled, you are gonna get something of a full experience. That's a Sonicyay2 guarantee.

Is this game canon to the Callan the Stickman series?

Oh goodness no. There's plenty of differences between this game and the main canon that makes it very hard for the two to co-exist. For example, in the teaser trailer you can see two people standing guard in front of Igor's Castle. No such thing would exist in the main canon, I just threw them in here because otherwise it would mostly just be Callan throughout the whole adventure and that would be pretty lonely.

Is every ending canon?

I think that's something that'll only matter if I end up making a sequel to this game, and if so then it'd probably be very difficult to tie everything together without drastically changing the setting. But until then, yes, every ending is canon. Even though I already know well in advance one got more love than the others.

Do you need help with anything regarding the game?

Later on down the line I will be looking for voice actors, but otherwise, no, I'm good. I mean I'll take suggestions for little fixups on current revealed stuff and ideas for small details, but like I said before, the game is fully planned out, so I'm solid for the most part.

What about Five Nights at Nutty's: Reimagined?

...i dont think anyone here on newgrounds knows what youre talking about but alright ill answer ya, Don't worry, FNAN:R is still in development. I know it's been real slow news-wise as of late, but that's still because we don't feel far enough in development to want to show anything off. Trust me though, a lot is going on behind the scenes. You'll see in due time.

Anything else we should know?

Alright let's see, uhh...there might be a Map system, but I havent tried programming yet, so if it goes poorly, I'll just do what Puffballs did for the first 4 Henry games with just "Retry", "Step Back" and "Restart", um...may have some post-game content like a developer's commentary, that might be nice...erm....oh yeah, it's probably also worth keeping in mind that being an animator isn't exactly my forte. Despite doing it since 2013, I'm still not very experienced with it, mainly since the hobby has moved from that to game development over the years. But honestly, it does feel good to be back. I'm trying something new with this project, all the limbs and facial features are entirely drawn with a pen, instead of being done with the line tool like I did in the past. I feel using the line tool here would make animation much more tedious, since it'd mean a lot of shape tweens and a lot of fixing said shape tweens. Besides, I think the results are pretty appealing regardless. I'm just saying, don't expect anything on par with the Henry games past Escaping the Prison. I'm probably not that experienced in animation just yet. But hey, maybe you'll disagree. We'll just have to see in due time. On the topic of animation, it's probably also worth noting that up until December 23rd, I was animating per frame, when the standard for animation is per two frames with intense actions using each frame. And I've come to realise that if I want to stay sane, I should probably stop doing that. So, the animation for the rest of the game (ie not the intro) probably won't be as smooth. But that in and of itself can be argued as a good thing, so...meh. You can see an example of the animation done after this realization below if you want to judge for yourself. Oh, and also, I hate animating walk cycles. God, the fact I had a harder time animating the arms than the legs makes me question why I even got into the art form in the first place. God.

If you have any further questions, feel free to ask them in the comments below and I'll try to answer them as reasonably as I can. I'm not spoiling anything about what happens in the game tho. You'll just have to see that as time goes on. For now, though, you can follow the game on the GameJolt page for more updates in the future. You'll probably find smaller updates on the game on my Twitter (@Sonicyay4), so that may be worth a follow. Just saying. Good to be back, everyone! A-buh-bye.