I don't usually talk about specific fangames on here, but I've been seeing discussions on Deltatraveler specifically and I wanted to give my thoughts on it.

Context

I love Deltatraveler, don't mistake this for a hate post, far from it! But if there's something the game could address, it'd be the one thing that's holding it back: the fact that it's rooted as coming from a meme. The game will constantly remind you that it came from the "Kris where the hell are we" meme trend that was happening back then. While that's not a problem in of itself, it becomes a problem when the game is also trying to tell a serious story.

There are moments in the game where it wants you feel sorry for what you're doing to these characters, or just make you feel an emotion in a serious moment. Immersion is the name. But that immersion is immediately broken when you remember that the game spawned from a joke, so here's comes doobie Ralsei. Wanting to do a specific thing? Well you better hope you had saved cause you're about to get a random insta death scene.

You may say "but don't Undertale and Deltarune have silly moments as well?" Yes, but if you're doing doing geno/ snowgrave specifically, those silly moments are reduced or cut out entirely to fit the narrative that this isn't a time to be having fun. Deltatraveler wants me to feel sad for Ness dying, but I can only laugh my fucking ass off cause he's bleeding out to Megalovania

Section 3 especially has many writing-related problems, mainly the fact that it's too edgy. It's weird cause Sarah is doing the exact thing she wanted to avoid, Underfell takes being "too edgelord-y".

Fix

Okay, so how can this be fixed? Well, there's 2 routes the team could go down:

1) Make the game more serious

Probably the most laborious fix: just remove the insta death scenes and rewrite the dialogue for the entire game so that I can actually care for these characters. Apparently there's a problem of fangames being too serious..? Which I don't agree with. I think the people saying this really mean "there's too many Sans battles and Dust AU games" cause those are the only serious fangames I've been seeing as of recent. So no, don't worry about being serious. Or...

2) Lean into the absurdity

You want to be a joke-y game? Then be a joke-y game. Make the absurdity of it all part of the game's identity! Someone randomly exploding? Yeah that's just normal around here dw. Play into the fact that this doesn't all make sense, nor does it need to. You're just here to have fun, right? Give the players more funny and extreme moments! I'm sure you guys have heard of Undertale 2. That whole game is nonsensical and you're just in it for the ride. Why not do that as well? This would be a lot more immersive as well cause, well, all the memes and jokes around here are just the norm anyways. I'm willing to play along as long as I'm having a good time!

Again, don't take this as me hating on Deltatraveler. I love it! I will be there if/ when the game gets finished. But I can tell that the game reallyyy wants to be a silly game, but it also has a serious story to tell and those two things are conflicting with eachother. If you ignore the sillies and seriousness and just want another UT/ DR fangame to scratch your itch for waiting on Deltarune, then this is definitely for you! I can ignore all that cause the game is really fun, but the cracks start to show when you look into the deeper things.

that's it, stay soupy!!