Where is Six Hours 3?

Hello everyone, this is Tboogle, lead (and sole) developer here at Studio 7e.

On January 25th 2023, development began on the third entry in the Six Hours with Scratch Cat series. It has now been over three years. How far along is the game?

I never even finished the first level. And I hate to say it, but, it’s going to stay like that. Forever. Why? Well, it’s for three reasons.

Development Hell

The main reason development stagnated so much is that I jumped into development FAR too early before I had properly planned anything. Don’t get me wrong, I had ideas, but I didn’t have anything concrete gameplay-wise. I just couldn’t figure out a satisfying mechanic for each level (for context, the gameplay would have been more Sister Location-like, with different gameplay for each of the six hours of the night). Heck, the entire opening to the game got completely rewritten at one point, because it took way too long to get to the actual gameplay. I would often load up the project file, poke around a little bit, and then close it without doing anything because I didn't know my next step. I started without a concrete plan, and the game suffered because of it.

Quality

This is more of an opinionated thing, but I feel it’s important. Recently, I released Welcome to Victorville, a text adventure story set in the Six Hours canon. It’s my most ambitious game to date, utilizing an Actual Game Engine (GameMaker) and pre-rendered 3D backdrops.

Meanwhile, the Six Hours games look like THIS.

Yeah. Kind of a crazy quality jump. So now, I’ve essentially set myself a new standard for what my games look like. To go back to the quick and dirty vector style of the first two games after Victorville feels like taking a step backwards. I COULD technically use Victorville's engine and aesthetic for Six Hours 3, but then it would clash heavy with the first two, as well as… Well, that’s the third reason. And I feel I need to give a little backstory for this one.

Legality

One of the things I love most about Scratch is the whole idea of remix culture, where anyone can take things other people have made (with credit, of course) and make entirely new things out of it. When making Six Hours 1 back in 2020 I, as a 15-year-old kid who couldn’t do much in terms of art and music, took advantage of that idea extensively. Both Six Hours games contain characters I don’t own, graphics I don’t own, sounds I don't own, music I don’t own, and even the gameplay is straight up ripped from FNAF even down to how the code works. The only truly original thing in those games is the narrative (which to be fair has lots of inspiration from other media, but I digress).

Back when these games were actually available to play on Scratch, them containing copyrighted and trademarked material wasn’t really that big of a deal, due to the aforementioned remix culture and the fact that they were free to play. However, both games were taken down by the Scratch Team for being “too scary.” I personally disagree, but I am NOT fighting those guys. Nowadays, the Six Hours games are still available to play for free on this site and on Itch, but the whole context of the remix culture is lost, so what used to be remixes of existing media into original ideas, now come across as just… blatant copyright and trademark infringement. Because they are.

And you see, that’s the thing. With the release of Welcome to Victorville as my first ever Steam game, I’m well on my way to becoming a legitimate game developer. This is what I want to do with my life, it’s what I’m in college for, and I’m hoping I could do this for a living someday. So I can’t be going around making games with content that I don’t have the rights to use. (Undertrash slowly enters frame) OKAY THAT’S DIFFERENT. Kind of. Anyway.

Despite being canon to the Six Hours story, Welcome to Victorville exclusively contains material that I either made myself or have permission to use. Looping back to my second point about the quality jump, it wouldn’t be right for me to go from an original work back to the melting pot of stolen content that is the Six Hours series, especially now that I have more eyes on my work after Victorville’s release.

The Future

So what does this mean for the future of Studio 7e’s games? Well, the Six Hours story isn’t yet complete. The second game ended on a cliffhanger, after all. So if the third game is in the trash, what am I to do? Well, I actually got lucky in this regard.

The original idea for the story of Six Hours 3 was that you played as Benjamin Russel, a private investigator hired by the manager of Scratch Cat’s Tacos to investigate the fire that took place at the end of Six Hours 2. While exploring the building, Ben would come across Victor Adams’ secret facility underneath the restaurant, survive encounters with prototype robots, and Victor would show up at the end and wipe his memory (in the good ending, at least). This would lead into an original game I was going to call Detective Russel, which would follow Ben trying to figure out what happened that night. So basically the same story would be told all over again. Which is dumb.

These ideas were floating around before I had written Welcome to Victorville, but as I wrote that game, I had the idea to turn Detective Russel into Victorville 2, following roughly the same story as before. And at the same time, ideas to implement story elements from Victorville into Six Hours 3 also started floating around. And then it hit me: These two games… Are the same game. So here’s the plan.

As mentioned earlier, Six Hours with Scratch Cat 3 is permanently ceasing development. BECAUSE, the next game in the story will simultaneously be Victorville 2 AND Six Hours 3. It’ll be made in GameMaker, and will only contain material I have the rights to use. As to what the story and gameplay will be like… I’ll leave that as a surprise. I haven’t started development yet, because as I learned from Six Hours 3, I need to plan these things out before I start making them. Once I have something to tease, I’ll show you.

That's all for now. If you want to ask me anything more specific, there's a discussion channel in my Discord server where I'm most active. And if you haven't played Welcome to Victorville yet, PLAY IT! It's free!

See you on the flipside,

-Taylor "Tboogle" S.