Sorry for the wait!

Sorry for being late, as usual! Lately, I have been incredibly busy with my graduation project. Unlike most kids, I go to an Early College High School, and in it, we usually have to attend a grade after 12th called Grad Year. I'm currently a 13th grader due to this, and as some schools do, they make the students have a graduation assignment. Ours is incredibly huge compared to other projects, and it's been constantly getting added onto and eating away a majority of my time, the spare time I've had spent retreating to spriting and writing for UTTO, as well as playing video games. Why am I telling you this now? That's because, by the time I'm posting this, I'm totally finished with it, I won't have to worry about it ever again!
I did mention working on UTTO despite the grad project getting in my way every step of the way, so let's get into what we have done!

New Character(s) & Artwork!

Let's begin with the long-awaited Gamejolt announcement for a brand-spanking-new character release! This character was released in the Discord already, but I never found the time to post professionally on Gamejolt about them.

This is Rosmarus, a scientist in the Gate. He's a fat, fluffy walrus with huge self-esteem and ego. By biological design, he's handicapped in that his hands don't work very well as hands, so he used technology as a replacement, explaining the floating mechanical hands.

The big boof was designed and sprited by me, while the animation was done by Ethan. It's not as smooth as the Pierre animation, but we were all very busy in our own lives and on a time crunch, so this will certainly be improved in the future. Alongside this, in-game, the hands should be independent objects separate from Rosmarus himself, so they can go anywhere they want and animate however we want them to.

Rosmarus, like how Pierre represents our demo build, instead represents a part of the full game to look forward to, almost like how the character Martlet is to Undertale Yellow. We hope you enjoy him since his actions have some impact on the events of the game, even in the demo portion!

Still, on the topic of art, our Gamejolt page will start to slowly be updated with UTTO's graphical updates. We've been ignoring the evolution of the page for a long time, and so far I believe it doesn't really represent the art of the game that well, anymore. Thus, it would only make sense to overhaul it all!

To start, how about a true banner, crafted with love by our very own returning dev AngelFox! She still has a lot of final details to learn before she creates the full picture, but this is what she has so far:

Some of the design details are wrong, but that's because of poor communication on our end. She's just in the sketching phase right now, so it's exciting to even us wondering what the final product will look like! However, it will be finished when it is finished, and we will not rush her, so you shouldn't either.

You might also be confused about the tallest girl in the picture and the appearance of a 4th soul in the logo and everywhere else. This is Hui, the 4th playable protagonist in UTTO. She's been here since the start but has been heavily underrepresented, which is intended to change soon. Her origins date back to the original, very messy series. She was a protagonist in the ridiculously planned Demolitale 2, and when the impossible idea of an entire series was finally addressed and we rebooted with a fresh and more mature mindset, Hui was reborn and brought into the cast of UTTO.

Below are spoilers as to who Hui is and what her story is. If you wanna meet her 100% blind, you should avoid the big box!

Hui is a very intelligent girl, having lived in Mongale Island for nearly her whole life, all of which that wasn't spent on the surface, anyway. She can't quite remember well how she ended up there, as she was very young when her first journey took place with a group of other people that went missing. She grew up away from humans, and instead among monsters that took her in.

Unlike her friends, she cannot use WP. As a brown human soul, which is an independent class from the rest of the colors, she is totally incapable of using her true power. Instead, she is physically stronger. As brown represents the common trait of Innovation, Hui grew up tinkering with electronics and junk that she found, and eventually become a proficient gadget inventor, which is her core gameplay element in battle and sometimes in puzzles! She's also a very clever girl, having lived her childhood with monsters both oblivious and unaccepting of her, she's learned to be very quiet and sneaky. In certain parts of the game where technology or stealth is involved, she'll always be there to help as long as you're good!

Hui has to by far be the one to have changed the most in design, and that shows. She's not just gotten new clothes 5 times, she's also aged up in between those changes! However, she's still the Hui we devs used to know, just a lot more mature!

(A display of Hui's forward-facing design, the legacy design on the left and the reboot design on the right.)

Music!

Next, we can talk about music. There are quite a few songs that have been flagged for replacement or remasters in the ost, and Ethan's been working on that very diligently, lately. We have the most progress on the replacement of Storm Maker, which serves the same purpose but is a vastly better song. It's sure to be released sometime very soon, so definitely look forward to that!

Other than the Storm Maker replacement, Ethan has a super rad replacement for Toe to Toe, Let's Go! Ethan and I have discussed this idea that like Mother, we have various common encounter battle themes to keep the songs fresh and better reflect each encounter's personalities or physical attributes.

Lastly, story changes have called for Charlatan to be updated to better suit the character, Pierre. He's a strange, flamboyant and unnerving guy, so it would be fitting for his theme to reflect that.

So much to look forward to! Even I can't wait!

Story!

Also calling back to the topic of story changes, we've been molding the story for the majority of our time we were in, as we developed many parts of the story, especially in terms of characters. This even comes with some character redesigns, though most of which haven't been truly drawn yet or shown to the public. A lot of characters exist only in our thoughts and on paper, but we probably won't fully flesh them out until it's time to work on them by order of areas. Still excited for the day you all get to see and interact with the 2 main cast characters that are meant to be included with the demo, as we're shooting for 2 areas!

One thing I'd also like to mention is the soon return of our greatest writer, handling every little detail in our script like a champion. He's been having trouble moving to a new place to live lately, but he's almost finished his struggle. I'm talking about LukeWarmGuy, by the way. Just for reference as to how good of a writer he is- he wrote over 30 pages of script in just a few days, not including outlines and more. With him back in action, we'll be storming through scriptwriting like lightning again!

Conclusion.

I'm very glad to be back in action, and I'm so excited to get back to the grind. Something I forgot to mention to you all about the director situation was that I had stepped down as co-director, but eventually, Ethan and I quit playing the "co-director" game a long, long, while ago. You may have been confused because of the original announcement, still seeing me being the most common devlog poster. The reason is that neither Ethan and I are co-directors, but we are both directors of equal power. This has surprisingly gone over better than before, as co-director Ethan was too afraid to take charge sometimes in case I didn't like something he did, and co-director me just naturally continued to act as the main director. This was clearly hindering productivity and making things awkward, and with our power shared equally, there are no worries anymore.

With the fact that I'm no longer swamped with busywork to do, I believe we can get back into a good schedule of posts. I had told someone once before that we would likely be seeing the demo later this year, but I'm willing to bet that because of the graduation project, it will likely see the light of day around 2020. With reboots and hinderances, the game is still alive and healthy, and we still plan on seeing it until the end. Remember the power of patience!

I'd like to take this final part of the conclusion to quickly celebrate Undertale's 4th birthday. It was insane enough being able to call Undertale 3 years old, but 4 is even stranger. I'm so glad Toby brought this little passion project of his into the world, as it has affected so many lives. It's surely not likely for the guy to see this, but that doesn't change how thankful I am for his Undertale. Thank you, Toby Fox- and you too, Temmie!

Thank you all for following the development of UTTO! Did this devlog make up for at least a little of the time spent silent? I hope it did. As always, though, I'll see you all next devlog!