What did the aggregate feedback say?

In general, people were interested in where the story was headed, and the quality of the overworld and battle sprites. The largest problems stemmed from pacing, player choice and battle readability (for bullets and spare conditions). I'll go over a couple of the common concerns.

The Game's Pacing is REALLY fast.

To some degree, this was expected because of the short runtime in the Ruins and the (intentional) removal of one or two slower cutscenes from Snowdin.

Why leave out the cutscenes?

The cutscenes were removed because I couldn't quite figure out what to convey in them. I fully intend to add them back now that I know which narrative points were too muddy.

Why keep the Ruins a stub?

A lot of Undertale Promise is structured around one person, for development, art and music. Because of this, the game's vision was plotted out in a very specific way.

The bulk of Undertale Promise is in Snowdin, and a large segment in the Ruins would simply be too large of a scope.

The stub Ruins makes Toriel feel underdeveloped.

There was some narrative feedback asking why Toriel and Harmony were so distraught, especially when you consider Toriel with Frisk (or with Clover).

This specifically is a bit tricky to answer, because it ropes in a massive spoiler, but it is also a fully objective concern given what you can see - I am just "telling" you that their relationship is deeper without really showing why. I'm not fully sure if the spoiler will fully resolve this problem, but it will definitely explain it. It's a particularly sticky setup because even a full-length Ruins wouldn't fix the problem, but I am aware of it and I do acknowledge that the issue is there.

The Game doesn't let me explore or choose anything.

(This also relates to pacing, because the whole path keeps pushing you linearly in one direction at high speed.)

This appears to stem from the lack of optional rooms and random encounters, along with the overuse of text-blocking for denying backtracking. The last cause was the removal of FIGHTing for most of the game.

Optional rooms and backtrack denial are simple (albeit time consuming) problems that can be dealt with. The lack of them can be attributed to moving priorities around during development to save time, but this was evidently a tad too overdone. I will bump their priorities up.

What about random encounters?

I'm still quite hesitant to add them, both because they're not very good for conveying story, and because they're a lot of single-use effort (Civilian encounters likely won't show up in the kill route for narrative reasons).

They may become more viable as optional rooms are added and I will keep it in mind, but no promises for now.

Why can't you fight things/Where's the Geno demo?

In short, the kill route is going to be dramatically different from the pacifist route in the demo - including pathing, enemies and rooms. What you see at the end of the demo is not a cut-off before more Pacifist route content - it is the end of Act 1 and the start of the kill route at the Ruins door right after a LOAD. The largest decision you'd be making starts during the kill route: you'll have to figure out how to pivot back to Pacifist while Harmony forces you to fight.

This also makes the idea of this demo a little weird, because most other fangame demos showcase an entire area's pacifist, neutral and geno route. But if this demo had a kill route, it would basically be the full release. This was a part of why I was hesitant to release a demo at all - most of Undertale Promise is in Snowdin.

Battle Readability

Most of the complaints about weird mechanics are about Harvus or Kanako's magic meter. Harvus' log fall bullet pattern was just nerfed and his flavour text now directly references what to do. I'll be monitoring feedback to see how those changes are received, but more importantly, I will keep this in mind when designing more spare conditions.

There were also several attacks that could have used more lenient hitboxes or better indicators. These have been noted down, and I'll keep them in mind for future attacks.

I'm not entirely sure what to do with Kanako's magic meter for now. It does maximum damage if you don't press Z, and a sizeable number of players found it really weird, though the reason why they found it weird didn't quite come through to me in overall feedback. I'll probably source for ideas on conveying that better.

What about the music?

The music's feedback was mixed - even for the most well received tracks, it was not uncommon to get both ends of the spectrum ("this is the best" and "this is the worst").

In general, I've found it quite difficult to get actionable feedback to improve tracks, so if you do have specific things that you can tell are off about individual tracks (and importantly, if you can explain roughly how people tend to fix them), do leave comments on the OST playlist on Youtube.

What comes next?

I'm likely going to start work on the additional cutscene rooms and plan for the optional rooms. I'm not sure if I'll be pushing more updates to the demo, because this may involve the kill route, but if the work happens to be fully contained within it, I may.

A full release will likely not be quick - this demo took about 1.5 years because I did it across my bachelor's degree (this is roughly the starting point). I'm not out of academia just yet, and things are probably going to get more packed for at least one more year, starting very soon. Hopefully the full release can eventually come.

Thanks for reading, and thanks for playing the demo! If you believe that something important was missed, do leave a comment!