Hey, everyone! It's that time of the month again, so let's go over all the work I've done since last devlog. Unfortunately, since April 1st I've had an incredibly annoying and persistent cough, but I didn't let that stop me.

So, for the first time in 4 years, I made another actual April Fools joke. Yes, that's right, another Woodmantale game. Except this time, it's a story-driven game made in the same engine as the actual main game. Due to time concerns (I literally forgot about April Fools until the day before and spent 12 hours working on this non-stop), it's not actually finished, but I'm happy with what's there. Thanks to running on the same engine, this was a nice test run that helped me figure out some oversights with the engine that I hadn't previously noticed and was able to fix thanks to it. Here's a short summary of this game.

Like most April Fools jokes, this one's a classic bait-and-switch. Its labelled and presented as a public BETA build of the game and starts off as one.. until you get to the title screen, that is.

Woodmantale: Infinite Wealth is a game focussed on a heavily meta-narrative storyline. Following the plot of "Woodman stealing my PC to work on MYSTERYTALE for me" from the original Woodmantale Online back in 2018, this game is all about Woodman's hunt for infinite wealth to support the development of the game.

Oh, also, y'know how typing "B-A-L-L" on the Undertale title screen plays a little jingle? This was changed to, uh.. a peculiar sound clip playing when you press C, then B and finally T.

The game starts with Woodman entering the currently unfinished H&D version of MYSTERYTALE to find something to help with. One aspect of this segment I really enjoyed working on, was giving Woodman unique dialogue for pretty much every interactable object, some of which even includes development fun facts!

Ultimately though, Woodman comes up with a perfect idea to assist the game's development - travelling into MTO Legacy and fighting people for money to acquire infinite wealth to pay for servers.

This section of the game is full of meta jokes about MTO Legacy and its weird quirks, and Woodman walking around as an outside entity.

Additionally, certain parts of the game behave differently once you enter this section. Movement is reverted, which disables the iconic "Frisk dance" glitch, things render slightly differently. It is a little strange to make a complete remake of a game meant to improve all the flaws of the prior version, then use that same improved engine to emulate the old game, but it was definitely fun to do.

Technically, the outlines of the nametags are slightly incorrect, but there's only so much I can notice in 12 hours, I guess. Regardless, every "player" in the game is directly based on an actual player I've seen in Legacy, and if I do ever revisit the project to finish it, you bet there'll be a lot of names and faces to recognize.

Ultimately, Woodman makes his way to the training dummy and decides to hone his abilities before he sets out to acquire the infinite wealth. I'll just let this video recording speak for itself.

Well, that's basically it for the April Fools joke for this year. I do intend to revisit this and make it a short little joke side-game. But for now, let's get back to the actual main game.

Before we get into the new additions, let's talk about some of the changes I made to features we've already been over.

So, you know how I just mentioned that the nametag outlines in Woodmantale aren't actually accurate to the ones from MTO Legacy? Well, because of this, I decided to add the old outline style as a separate option to the new game. Again, there's still no actual in-game menu to configure them just yet, but the actual functionality is there. Here's a comparison between the two styles.

In addition, I changed some things related to nametag rendering to optimize memory usage. The surfaces would previously be at room scale, which, although probably not too bad on modern systems, isn't exactly ideal. So now, the surfaces are just about as big as they need to be.

I also made some changes to the skin menu. The previously empty space below a skin's name now displays their set of battle buttons (due to the fact that they aren't the same across skins).

Additionally, I added functionality to make specific skins or costumes have unlock requirements. This may sound scary at first, but currently, the plan is that the majority of skins are going to be available right away and most unlock requirements for anything not available right away are planned to be as simple as using an easy-to-get secondary currency that rewards social interaction.

TL;DR: Most skins (barring spooky wing gaster man related ones) will be available right away. Costumes will be easily obtainable using an in-game currency you get from logging in, fighting with other people, making new friends, etc.

This way you have more things to work towards, without actually locking any substancial content that people would be majorly upset over having to unlock.

Furthermore, "skins" have been renamed to "forms" to better represent what they actually are within the context of the game world - nothing more than a different shape to take for your player character.

That should about cover it for notable changes to things, so let's start talking about the new stuff.

Obviously, the big, main addition is the chat system. There are.. still some quirks with it that need some fixing, but overall I'm very happy with how it turned out.

From the looks of it, it looks pretty similar to Legacy's chat, doesn't it? But oh, there's so much more to it than that. For starters, as you can see, chat messages now support 3 lines as opposed to only 2. Additionally, the text spacing is now 1:1 the same as Undertale's... for better or for worse. Honestly, in a few cases it just looks worse. But hey, I love that accuracy to Undertale.

Wordwrapping! Y'know, that thing that every damn program on this planet has? Yeah, that's a thing now and it improves the experience by SO much. This is genuinely about as huge of a new feature as the third line.

Modifiers have been greatly improved! There are now plenty more text colors to choose from, even a wave option! Re-enabling your portrait doesn't delete your message anymore. Oh, and there's an option for the speed of the message, too!

But, what's that? "Set Voice"? What does that mean?

Skins, er, forms are now able to have different preset voices to use for their messages! For instance, most skins will have a "quiet voice" alongside their default one, which is based on a font that appears a few times in Deltarune when characters talk quietly.

Importing this font was kind of a pain. It's supposed to be a scaled down version of DotumChe (the same font used for monster dialogue during battles), but I wasn't able to get it to look the same as in Deltarune at first. There was a fan recreation, but the positioning of all the characters was incredibly off. UT Mod Tool was able to export the font texture and glyph data, but the format wasn't something I could've just thrown into the game. So, I set up a Python script that converted the glyph data into a compatible format and now it looks just right. Which is a lot of effort for a stupidly niche font, but hey, that's just perfectionism.

Alright, so that's all nice and dandy, but this doesn't address the big main problem with the chat system; the fact that everyone keeps cutting each other off. Well. Well, well, well. Welly, well, welly, well, welly, well. I actually did fix that problem. You see, when another message would "interrupt" an existing message, the previous message will now simply just shrink down to a smaller, transparent textbox above the speaker's head.

And that's still not all! Every message is given a range based on the selected voice and whether or not the message is in all caps. If you receive a message outside of that range, it will spawn as a small message and not shrink down any previous "big messages".

There are some other small changes. The typing indicator (the little speech bubble icon with the "..." in it) now uses a similar sprite from Deltarune Chapter 2 and is animated. Additionally, it will only animate while the player is actually typing, so you can now tell whether they're typing or just looking at their chat history. The logic for text pausing is much simpler and arguably much better.

I hope you're all looking forward to this new and improved chat system. I plan on adding some configuration features, such as to disable big messages altogether for those who dislike them, and to adjust the scale and opacity of small messages, but from personal experience I can say that these changes already greatly improve the game.

I added the AFK option and redid the indicator for it... That's something, I guess?

Anyway, after that it was time for a huge feature. The log-in screen.

It's much like the one from Legacy 1.0 BETA, but with more added DELTARUNE flair and an option to quickly log in as your last used account.

Due to difficulties with e-mail systems, there will be no option to link your account to an e-mail address. However, I intend on writing a custom Discord bot that allows you to link your MTO account to your Discord account, which you'll be able to use to reset your password.

Yes, writing a custom Discord bot somehow seems easier than setting up the things required for doing this via e-mail. Additionally, the Discord bot could have some additional features for managing your friends list without joining the game, or interacting with certain sidemodes. I do have plans for a tamagotchi/chao garden-esque thundersnail mini-game, so maybe you could use the bot to take care of your snail without having to join the game.

Regardless, there are things here that I'd rather not spoil. So let's move on from the login screen to..

Hm.. Well, technically this is still part of the same screen. But I do still really enjoy this design and felt like showing it off. The idea for this design was Cubert's, and I like to think it came together pretty nicely.

Anyhow. I've begun adding a few forms to the game, so let's go over those, shall we?

The fallen human. Their name will be set to whatever you name them in your singleplayer campaign. They aren't much different from their MTO Legacy counterpart, though their pose is now positioned correctly and plays at the same speed as it does in UNDERTALE.

Sans Undertale.

Sans benefits decently well from the new engine, as now you can just switch between his regular voice and his Ominous voice pretty easily.

Additionally, just like Papyrus, he has a bunch of new expressions. Most of these are ones previously only seen in-battle or in his shop. Also, he can sleep now. Hooray?

Notsans TS!Underswap.

Once again, a form that benefits from the new systems, as he can now swap between his superhero voice and the regular old Sans voice. ...and also the ominous voice, obviously.

He also has, like, two new expressions based on ones from TS!Underswap that weren't already represented before. Also, that one where he's blinded by his own mask? Yeah, that one actually lines up with the others properly now.

But now, for the one you've all been waiting for.. I'm sure you're expecting everybody's FAVORITE character.

TOO BAD, WALUIGI TIME!

Waluigi's talking animations have been redone, he may or may not have some new portraits, but most importantly... He has been re-gifted his scrapped jump pose.

You might remember that Waluigi used to have a jump pose in very old versions of the game, before it was removed due to its janky implementation. Well, it's back and it's better than ever.

That's mostly it for new features, but we aren't quite done yet! I've been meaning to share some of the music that BartRed's been working on for the game. So, recently, I've started uploading some of them to YouTube. Here are the uploads so far.

Here we have a remix of Earthbound's song "Cease to Exist" (more commonly known under its fan-name "Pokey Means Business"), mixed in with some motifs from Mother: Cognitive Dissonance and Giegue's battle theme from Mother 1. Now, despite the original Cease to Exist's heavy association with Pokey (I mean, y'know, the fan-name literally directly mentions him), this is not intended to be a theme for Pokey. Rather, this will be Giegue's battle theme. Yes. Giegue. The villain from Mother 1 who became the eldritch horror known as Giygas in EarthBound. Giegue will be joining the roster in the future and have this kickass theme when you fight him in PvP. Besides, I have some other ideas in mind for a Pokey theme...

One thing that's unique about this song, compared to most of the rest of the soundtrack, is that it has a unique loop point. Because of this, I figured I'd include at least one proper loop in the YouTube upload.

Expecting a similar track? TOO BAD, WALU- anyway. Waluigi Pinball meets Bonetrousle, this should be pretty self-explainatory.

And here we have DIO's theme, a remix of his theme from JJBA Heritage for the Future, and the track "DIO's World" from JJBA All-Star Battle. The idea of a DIO theme has kind of a meme status in the team, due to it just being a track that was delayed constantly by a previous composer, before ultimately Bart just ended up making it himself.

So, where are we at with development? Well, my Online Functionality checklist is at 50% completion (though that's kinda skewed, given that's treating every single point like they're worth an equal amount). We've started BETA testing in private and might begin public BETA testing on the Discord server within the next 2 months.

Once all the online functionality is done and the game is stable, it'll be time to implement the actual content. So, all in all, progress is good.

This is the point where I wish you all a good day, because that's most if not everything there is to say. However, I'll leave you guys with some screenshots from private BETA testing.