Lake · @IagoAnims
21st Mar 2022 from TwitLonger
Answers reguarding FNF Minus & Apologies
Hey there folks, you all must be confused right now about what happened with minus, I'm seeing a lot of questions like "is minus canceled??", "what happened to minus? What the heck is going on???", things like that. And so I'm here to tell you all the answers regarding it.
TL;DR: it's not canceled.
However, the version of Minus that the team have been producing is canceled, and now I with some closer friends of mine that both me and ash knows will be restarting the mod from zero,
and let me explain to you why.
(For the sake of everyone's safety, I will not be mentioning any names from the team.)
Ever since the last update for Minus came out (Minus Mommy Mearest week 4) me and a team member wanted to step things up, making Minus it's own thing while also keeping the simple nature for it, cuz that's the whole theme of minus its "Simplicity", so we hired a bunch of voice actors for the characters so that they can read short pieces of dialog just to give the audience context to what's happening in the lore inside it as well as some artists and animators to help us make the mod, because at the time i had to accept a bunch of commissions at the same time (12 i think) to help my family pay off our bills of the house. So we made a discord server to organize everything and bring in the new dev members. Eventually, it became hard for me to manage both the project and the commissions at the same time and trying to direct Funkin' with Dalia as well, so from forcing myself to work everything at the same time obviously i got burnt out from it, which wasn't a rare thing to happen to me, i feel burnt out quite commonly, but this time… it hit HARD. I couldn't do anything for almost 7 months, and i had to pay the consequences for the commissions and for Minus, because i couldn't direct it properly it wasn't going good for the devs, and from all the drama happening in the community in a very frequent rate, it made me lose motivation all together for all my projects related to FNF, so i said i was going to move away from the community as well canceling both Dalia and Minus all together.
Dalia was indeed canceled, however my team member and the dev team from Minus wanted to keep things going, they all knew the potential Minus had and they didn't wanted it to go to waste, so we all made an agreement that yes, minus was still going to be developed, however i was going to give leadership to my team member while me and ash only supervised it, making our jobs to only direct it while the team works in it. But well, things did not go the way i expected them to go, because thanks to the problems i was facing in real life it became hard to direct the mod, the devs were not getting the inputs they wanted from us which resulted in things getting messy. Eventually when my issues were calmed down, i took the shot and went to try and direct it again, and in the server there was quite a lot of new people, and lots of discussion about ideas and concepts for the mod, such as backstories, the character's personalities and a script for the mod, which me and ash felt confused because those weren't the things we visioned for the mod, we felt that it doesn't match the theme we wanted for it in the first place (which i understand it was a mistake from us not directing it properly), so we discussed about those things with the team, and we wanted to keep things simple, with not having the script and some things about the characters. And from how me and Ash expected, the reception wasn't so well. We saw how down and disappointed the devs sounded once they heard about what we wanted which made us feel… overwhelmed..? I don't know what word to use, but what I know is that we felt a lot of pressure. We felt like we would suffer confrontations if we said something on how we wanted our mod to be 'this' way instead of 'that' way, and we had a bunch of problems to deal with already outside of FNF and we didn't want more. We are both very anxious people. So after a discussion with ash, we both decided that it was best if we made them have minus completely and let them do however they want with it, giving them freedom to everything, keeping the script, keeping the backstories of characters things like that, while me and ash try to focus on another project to do (which still didn't got so far). But with that, some of the devs making the script suggested that we still stick around to answer questions about the characters in general, so that we can help them make the script based on how we visioned the characters to be, which both me and ash took the shot and agreed on as long as if before they assuming something about a character is canon or not, they should ask us first so that we can confirm it.
But these issues regarding the characters started happening, with sudden trivia posts with info that we didn't confirmed were true, the script still having issues we reviewed before, and some complications with the team in general with (not all) some people neglecting others ideas, and task management getting messy, people not knowing what they needed to do, and so eventually the current leader (my team member) didn't wanted to lead it anymore, so they gave the leadership to another member in the dev team. Once things calmed down for me once even though i technically wasn't in charge of the mod in general, i tried helping organize the task management as well as volunteering myself to help the animators animate some sprites missing for the boyfriends so that they don't have to stress out over it, while also giving the time they needed to complete it all taking away the current deadline for the mod because it was stressing everyone out and i absolutely did NOT wanted that for them, because i know how that feeling can be. But even trying as hard as i could eventually i just couldn't keep it up with it again, and it made me feel useless for it cuz i wish i could have helped more at those times, but customers from my commissions started asking for refunds, and since money is VERY hard to save here in my house i had to 'somehow' get the money back to refund them, since the money i get isn't exactly mine, it's for all of my family. So months passed, and I started hearing more complaints again about the team as well as an update for the script with the intention of making the characters closer to what me and Ash wanted them to be as I said before. And the script itself had some improvements that we liked a lot, but the highlight issues that we pointed out months ago were still there, making me and ash a bit disappointed because we felt like even though the (some) of the script creators wanted our advice on it, at the end it wasn't taken seriously (something some of the team members felt the same thing), but we still were hopeful about it and we gave them even more info about the characters and even trying to change some pieces of dialog so that they could have an idea of how the characters react in some situations. But behind the scenes, me and Ash just felt...unmotivated about everything, we felt like what was our passion project that we were hyped for is not the same anymore.
Now to the present, last week I got to know of more problematic things inside the dev team, and that the neglect was still happening in other occasions, and so ash and i had enough of that. After a long discussion about it, we decided that with everything that happened in the team, we wanted to have only people both me and her are closely related to so managing things can be easier, as well as restarting minus from 0. I announced that on the main server, but well, it was really sudden and because of how my way of communication was bad, a lot of the devs from the mod got really upset about it, which is what me and Ash expected.
I don't wanna sound like I'm moping or being the victim, cuz I hate doing that and I know in all of this I'm wrong because of my lack of direction, but, when the whole discussion about it ended, I felt completely destroyed. I felt really REALLY down (hence the break i mentioned), cuz i felt that i let everybody down from all the sweat and work the put into this project, something i also dealt with when i was a kid at school and i hate having to experience that feeling again, having a HUGE fear that i would lose everything that i have, and i absolutely don't want that to happen, because my family depend so much on me and this account, and me losing it would lead into big consequences. And people spreading rumors and misinformation about me manipulating people and things like that it's just… not cool man.
But, even after all that, us and the dev team reconciled everything, and I'm so so relieved that it happened, and I couldn't be more grateful for that.
And for all the minus dev team that helped me make this project, all i want to say is that...i'm sorry. I'm sorry things lead into this, i wish i could have handled things better in all of this, so that you could have the direction you all wanted all along, even with this decision i took you all mean so much for me, i was a very bad director and from what i gathered from all of this is that, i might could have done this better if i at the time knew how to manage my time properly, so i could do most of the things i wanted to do with no complications, and to make it up to you all, in this minus reset i will try to honor your hard work as hard as i can, as well as try and give you all opportunities to work on big stuff not only FNF related, such as games, animations things like that, your talent deserve to be shared and i couldn't be more grateful for it. ❤️
And on a more positive note, with this being the first ever big project that i've directed i can at least gather all this experience so in the future i won't have to make the same mistakes again, and become better at it!
And for you guys, thank you all for your support with Minus, all the fanarts, animations, mods, it's all so wonderful i never thought i would have something like this in my life ever, so thank you so much, i love you all.❤️❤️❤️
Thanks for reading.
-Iago