It's been a long, long time.

Hello, everyone. If anyone is unfamiliar with me in the two years I've been absent, I am poody_blue, the first of two founders of this project and the individual who passed the torch down to cubicSimulation.

Undertale: The Otherground has been a lot of different things throughout its lifetime. Once, it was a story about Undertale if Frisk didn't exist and Renee, the protagonist at the time, fell in their place years later in search of false rumors to aid her terminally ill twin. Then, it told the story of a human Louis sailing the sea to find his father- only to meet a similar fate by being dragged to a mysterious sunken island. In its final incarnation, it told the currently unrevealed story of Louis as one of many synthetic humanoids bio-engineered to fuel the queen's malice against humanity and her maddened desire to resurrect her human sister- only for her creation to be used against her as along the way he learns what it means to be alive and most of all, human. In the end, however, it truly only amounts to ideas and content scattered left and right in an unorganized chaos that cannot be put together.

In the end, development just wasn't working out, and after so much time I couldn't let it keep going without it continuing to haunt me no matter how far I distanced myself from it.

What was wrong with development?

For the most part, I blame myself. Sure, it was hard to get people moving when development was active, but it didn't help that half the time people weren't sure what the big picture they were working on pieces for was going to be because of primarily my critical failure to organize to a basic degree, something that I am embarrassed about. Ethan and I would brainstorm all the time and so would some of the team, and we would have a lot of fun and come up with so many cool thoughts and ideas! Then, for some ridiculous reason, none of us would document our concepts in a cohesive manner that can be accessed easily later except only on a few occasions.

Because of that, it was hard for people to feel the drive to work when there was no tangible sense of direction. For UnderEvent 2021, I sincerely spent about a month straight making sure I didn't get distracted by anything and grinded out assets for Otherground's appearance in UnderEvent. I couldn't get anyone else to move with me, and it felt frustrating, especially when we were a week away and only then did anyone start doing anything. With that said, though, I didn't consider how lost everyone must have felt if they weren't engaged in the conversations we were having in Discord about what needed to be done, and there wasn't that much of a cohesive list of things they could be doing other than checklists on Trello which not a lot of them used for reasons I don't know. I also for some reason never got into Github until much later, despite programmers using it frequently. Any changes to graphics I stupidly didn't understand I could just upload to the project myself through Git, which got tiring for sure.

There's so much more I can't express in words, other than that unfortunately and unbeknownst to me or anyone else working on this project, Otherground was doomed to fail from the beginning due to our naivety and inexperience.

Why did we cancel now and not sooner?

Honestly, I'm unsure. I had spoken about cancelation before, but the team was too attached to the project to let it go, so I gave it multiple chances and even gave it to new leadership. Unfortunately, while Cubic (the individual I gave UTTO to) is a great leader, they simply had too much of their own life going on as well as a project of their own to work on, meanwhile Otherground continued to be the burden it was with no active leadership and being too messy for anyone to do anything with.

For me, the final straw that broke the camel's back was Blaize.Mayes. Bits n' Pieces was born one day because I decided to draw Frisk in the Otherground human style, and Blaize liked it a lot. They then started BnP as an "Undertale with Otherground GFX"-type project before it evolved into what it was a few weeks ago. I had immense fondness for BnP for having surpassed its parent project with flying colors and I felt I was very friendly with Blaize (granted not to a personal level). Then, the shock came when I heard they were arrested for possession of illegal content containing children, and even saw their mug shots. BnP quickly died for perfectly valid reasons (and I feel genuinely terrible for the people involved), and with BnP being modeled off of a style adapted from my own for UTTO, I couldn't look at this project without feeling uncomfortable. It had been rotting for the two whole years I stepped away, anyway, and I felt it needed to be put to rest once and for all as soon as possible.

What about UTTO's content? Will we reveal it all?

Not all of it, as some ideas some of us still want to see live on. Discussion in the Discord server will be far more free, though, and we may drop pieces of unreleased content here and there but don't expect a treasure chest of assets to open. I understand that in this page's Q&A I mentioned revealing what we had, and that can happen, but that will only go as far as chatting about it on the Othertales Discord server and posting content in a more casual manner.

What good came of UTTO after all this time? If BnP was spawned from it and also died, what's left?

During Otherground's height in popularity, projects similar to it existed that I felt could benefit from a strong community to help them build teams and community hype for these lesser-known projects. This is when I started "Othertales", which was a platform designed to host UTTO as well as any project that also attempted to take place within Undertale and later Deltarune's canon worlds as opposed to AU's, to create an expanded universe. Pre-existing projects like Forest Story (Later becoming Binds of Fate) and SAVE OUR SOULS were able to find a home there, projects I had initially thought and given to new devs like DEFECTIVE and Tomb of Sands were given life, and best of all brand new stories the community themselves thought of when inspired by Othertales were born.

Othertales has grown up to be something genuinely tremendous and I couldn't be more proud of the community still going strong and being there for one another as new Othertales are born and existing ones flourish.

With that said, please do not try to recreate the project or restart it with a new team, Undertale: The Otherground needs to finally rest.

The characters and concepts we loved about the game aren't being abandoned, as Ethan and I are putting together concepts on how we can use the places, characters, and themes from this game that we love but reborn in a world free of the Undertale IP. The project's working title is Fringe, and it will be quietly worked on behind closed doors, as I want to truly do things right this time. I want to document every detail of its development, I want to dial the excess ambition down to something doable by amateurs, and I will not publicly reveal anything significant or build a community until there is at least a tangible proof of concept. At the very least, here's a look at graphics for Louis & Co. as a sample of the artstyle I'm shooting for.

As spoken about earlier, there is still an entire library of fangames that the Othertales platform has helped foster that you can check out, and please do! The devs behind those games are very passionate and could use all the support they can get, and last I checked, the community is very friendly. You can check them out on the Discord server here, which acts as a central hub for all projects, which includes their Gamejolt links if they have any:
https://discord.gg/qTfFpQX

And if you're itching for something to play right now (or in this case, very soon), did you know that Undertale Yellow, a big inspiration for this project, is coming out in just 9 days? Yes, it will be launching on December 9th, and I'm so happy for their success! Here's a link to their Gamejolt page:
https://gamejolt.com/games/UndertaleYellow/136925

Thank you very much for following the rocky development of Undertale: The Otherground. I sincerely do apologize, but despite its failure in the end, I'm hoping one day the result of this project can truly become something the players can love as much as Ethan and I love it. Regardless, the memories made, friends met, and skills acquired during my time on Otherground were worthwhile experiences I will cherish as I move forward. Hopefully, I will see you again sometime.

Goodnight, Undertale: The Otherground.