Agony Arena

Flyer posted by Francis on Twitter seeking devs, artists, and animators for Agony Arena.

Agony Arena was a Creepypasta-themed Roblox battlegrounds game "directed" by Francis with coding and art done by a handful of other unpaid developers.

In November 2024 during his Ϫth DFE crashout, the Discord server for the game was deleted, and the project was cancelled in favor of Printern.

Premise

Battlegrounds is a Roblox subgrenre which is essentially a 3D fighting game, in which players fight each other with Overwatch-style charged abilities in destructible environments. The original Battlegrounds game was The Strongest Battlegrounds, whose mechanics became would become the basis of the subgenre. Most games in the subgenre are nearly identical, with Agony Arena's selling point being that its cast consisted of Creepypasta and Creepypasta-inspired characters, including Sonic.EXE, Mario 85, and Shucks, an SML character created by SlingMingo. It should be noted that Francis was not the first to have this idea, two Creepypasta-themed Battlegrounds games had been released in the time Agony Arena was being worked on.

Little else is known about the gameplay, because the project was shitcanned before anything substantial could be released.

Development

Early Concepts & Promotion

The earliest mention^{(that I know of)} of what would eventually become Agony Arena was on May 17th, where he talked about his enjoyment of the Sonic.EXE fandom and stated he intended to add the titular character to his game, then called Fallen Fighters. Francis first announced his intent to get back into Roblox dev in July, shortly after leaving the psych ward. On August 2nd he posted a teaser image for a project called Irida, along with an empty list of credits for it.

On August 19th, he posted about starting a new project called Pasta Battlegrounds, a "BG with Creepypasta characters." On the 28th he posted more concepts and a potential roster, stating that the game had been renamed to Agony Arena. He would then post more promotional material over the next few weeks, including a finalized roster and art and music for some of the characters. On 9/11 (in the middle of the Sharty raid geg) he posted a flyer on Twitter seeking more developers and artists.

"Development"

According to dev testimonials, Francis' only real contribution to the project was his 2D art. The only other thing he did was write moveset and add and remove characters from the roster, confusing and delaying the rest of the team. Much of his communications with the team consisted of them trying and failing to give him Advice, as well as talking him out of suicide at least once. Francis would ignore all feedback unless heavily pressured by the team. The team would work in his absence whenever he was having a sperg meltdown (ie, all the time). There was common frustration about Francis underpaying or not paying the team at all. Zach states that he paid some of the devs out of pocket, and that only one person was ever paid by Francis.

All of this compounding eventually led the team to quit the project. This included the lead coder forbidding Francis from using his code. It was hinted by Zach that they may be working on their own project without Francis, but nothing relating to this was mentioned after the "lover's quarrel" ended.

Cancellation & Fallout

On April 15th, Zach, one of the developers of Agony Arena, entered the thread and answered questions about Agony Arena as well as posted testimonials from the rest of the team. Datsclungo throwaway, claiming to be the lead coder, also posted stating he "did most of this guys work for a fraction of what I should have been paid," having only been paid 50k Robux total.

On April 19th, Francis announced that he had opened a 'cord for his next game project, Printern.

Gallery

• 
  Screenshot of the character "Maw" from the original Wiki.
• 
  Early model of "Shucks." Likely the furthest he progressed before the project was abandoned.

Trivia

• One of the terms of the "deal" with LiquidChungus was that he would use the original FallenChungus account to advertise Agony Arena. This never happened because the game never came out.
• Francis attempted to get Femtanyl, an (in)famous troon musician, to write music for Agony Arena. This collaboration fell through after Femtanyl stopped responding to Francis' DMs.
• The Agony Arena page on the original FallenChungus Wiki was written by AI and contained almost no useful information about the game. View an archive of the page here.
• A .rbxl project file for the game can be found here. (Offsite archive forthcoming)