After a lot of thinking, I have come to the conclusion that it's probably best to put an end to the Mystery Meat Collab and not pursue making a second, bigger game for it. The collab's basically already been dead for a while, and the ownership issue is messy, and at this point I've moved on emotionally from wanting to fight over it.

However: That being said, I still want to make this game project for its own sake. I just feel like having a looser theme would put less pressure on me to make it perfect, and to outperform my competition on this site.

Gameplay-wise, it will still be the same, except for the omission of planned story-related elements, collectibles, and NPCs, all of which would have made the project more complicated than it likely should've been for a first game. Gamedev is frickin' hard, and I wish I had known years and years ago that the right way to begin a first project is to isolate one aspect - whether it be doing the code first by making simple games with no story, or the story first by creating D&D modules or the like that don't require coding.

Theme-wise, we're also still keeping the dark comedy aspect, but expanding it outward to make horror spoofs of various types of kids' Flash games - not just the Pokémon ones that inspired the minigame approach in the first place. Expanding the theme opens up even more possibilities for minigames and aesthetics, too!

Working title is "The Forbidden Arcade". Perhaps I'll make a devlog of this, we'll have to see if I remember to post regularly about it. Either way, I'll see ya in the next news post!

-Theta