You heard that right! Happy Birthday to Disbelief with Dust!!! One year ago, we finished the first ever (bad) Sans reference sheet and made it public, after working in the shadows for months.

It is crazy how far we've come from back then, especially if you saw the new and improved reference sheet for Sans' design.
We got quite a lot to share, as we have been working consistently for an entire month. Let's begin.

Overworld and The RUINS.

For who doesn't remember, this is supposed to be a full game. Well, we are getting things done for the Overworld. All the sprites in the RUINS are getting remade by one of our newest developers, @Fruits-N-Loops . Here's a sneak peek of his amazing work.

Coding wise, the Overworld works. We only have the engine itself working, it's bare-bones since we haven't implemented all the sprites, however rest assured that it'll be the next thing we work on.

RUINS Encounter - Battle against Sans

As you might expect, the Sans Encounter in the RUINS has gotten most of our attention, as we plan to release a demo of his fight by the end of May.

In terms of sprites, we've been updating them over and over, trying to tackle a consistent style and avoid any sort of wackiness, until I decided to be the one remaking them.

We will be going with Toby Fox-styled sprites, and I even remade the original Gaster Blasters, fixing some inconsistencies and giving them some touches of color.

As you can see, I chose not to over-complicate the eyes of the blasters, as the original ones do not have anything special going on.

In terms of writing, the entire script of the RUINS encounter has been finished and laid out by yours truly. I had a lot of fun working on it, and although it's not a long fight, it actually does well what it's trying to do: teach you how to get through the game. Here's an example of why.

Yep, that's right! You will fight alongside Flowey (The engine is nearly complete)! This introduces a LOT of potential and LOTS of mechanics, especially combo attacks! Since in Undertale we have battles against multiple monsters, we decided to take inspiration on how they work and combine them into this. An opponent can only target one enemy at a time, and you can combine your attacks with Flowey's, dealing more damage. Depending on who combos first, the second will get the kill, and gain EXP accordingly. This is to fix a problem I always had with Genocide: it's boring and linear. You manage to one-shot most enemies, and all it takes is just spamming the FIGHT button. Thanks to this, you'll be forced to get creative and finding strategies to best the monsters that'll dare standing in your way.

That being said, we had a major setback as of recently. @ElMaster59's PC stopped working, and he probably will need a new one- He is the main coder for the RUINS encounter, which means that we lost a bit of progress with the fight, luckily the coded attacks aren't gone, and most stuff has been remade (the background, the blasters and Sans's sprites). Which means that I sadly can't share a video of the fight itself, but if you stay tuned you'll get to see more.

RUINS Miscellaneous

We discussed in the past about the idea of dividing the game in chapters. Well, that's still happening.

The first chapter of the game will be known as DUSTTALE, and it'll be themed exactly how my re-imagination of DUSTTALE will look like (Me and Genarf are planning to do a remake of the og DUSTTALE fangame, canon prequel for DwD).
As this is indeed a full fleshed game, there are enemies you can battle to gain EXP, Starting from the main Ruins cast.

These are some of the sprites I've remade, trying to stay consistent with the original artstyle of the game, while making them more smooth. Speaking of smooth, they're also smoothly animated thanks to @NeonAnimates_'s help.

New art!

Firstly, I'd like to credit @MinusBrush for making the cover art used for the Devlog of today. Due to the recent influx of new artists, such as Fruits, art quality has improved, which prompted me into getting older art pieces to be redone.
Let's start from this: We don't have a banner, we never had really, but it's getting made by @NeonAnimates_ as per usual, here's a little look.

This is how Papyrus will look like towards the end, in the Final Encounter. What, were you expecting him to wear a different armor? Mf this ain't Nick's Dustbelief!!!
Anyways, soon enough you'll also see a new Thumbnail for the fangame, as the one Eggy made us last year has grown to be outdated.
Last but not least, the most important thing that we chose to remake (and that I'll show publicly) is the logo!

This is the third remake, fourth in the family, and hopefully the last. it's still work in progress, so if anyone has suggestions on things we could change and improve, let us know.

Music

Music-wise, we do not have much to show, sadly. The RUINS Encounter is getting done, the other musician is kind of busy at the moment but we do plan to hire a third one.
We plan to first upload all the RUINS-related tracks and then move onto Snowdin's, because we DO have some stuff already done... Won't say much about that though.

Final thoughts

This has been a very productive month, and if my calculations are correct a demo will be playable towards the end of the next month.
For my birthday (May, 10th) I actually plan to do something special, so you might wanna join our Discord server while you still can!

See you all in the next Devlog, I promise I'll try to be consistent with them and make one every month. Cheers!