LATE JULY 2025 DEVLOG

Game

Versotale [An Undertale & Deltarune Fangame]

7 days ago

LATE JULY 2025 DEVLOG

Hello there!

Since our last devlog, we are now in a post-Deltarune Chapters 3+4 world. And that is VERY surreal to think about, is it not?

THE WORLDBUILDING IMPACT

This did pose an interesting question: I HAVE technically been advertising VT as "An Undertale & Deltarune Fangame." That is to say, while Versotale is an Undertale AU, and thus worldbuilding info from UT is naturally taken into account, it's also been made clear that characters from Deltarune DO exist in the Undertale timeline. While we are not doing anything with dark worlds and such, this has always meant it is also accounted for when deciding the history and characters that would be present in Versotale's world as well.

So! How do the new DR chapters impact Versotale?

...Honestly? Not much. While I was never going to dramatically overhaul VT's worldbuilding to compensate for DR lore, the new information presented surprisingly doesn't ruin any of my plans; if anything, one implied dynamic in particular actually gives more depth to some backstory stuff!

Speaking of building the world, here's a lazy segue into story progress!

STORY PROGRESS

Progress has been pretty great! Though I will admit that I myself have not been doing the best job prioritizing what needs to get done, as you will see in the next section. But, I am ready to announce the planned contents of the next showcase video.

The planned contents of next showcase will be....
The next few rooms after the last devlog! One such feature is showing off a new sequence for:

The new introduction of Herald and Frisk into the story, and MAYBE the new tutorial battle as well!

As usual, I do not have a planned release day for this next showcase, but I would preferably like to get this released before the end of my summer break. Also, I am going to try and do a bit more editing for this one including quick text blurbs documenting what still needs to be worked on, what is done, what is not done, etc. so you all do not need to consult the description to see documented work-in-progress elements.

I do also think that, after this next showcase, we are gonna hunker down and start avoiding showing new cutscenes and the like in future showcases. There WILL still be showcases, but they will be miniature ones. Fun minor non-spoiler stuff. At least, that is the plan. This IS a fangame, after all! We would not wanna give away the whole story, now, would we?

Luckily, some of my poor programming prioritization choices will be really paying off in the future. For example, adding new functions to make coding faster and easier, a vignette object with several different animation options, and as the next section will partly discuss, a whole lotta refactoring.

REFACTORING

WARNING, THIS SECTION IS ULTRA NERDY AND TECHNICAL!!! Feel free to skip it if you do not care so much about programming woes.

It's about as simple as the header says. Some of my oldest code was really starting to show its age, and adding new things to it was starting to become frustrating having to account for so many frivolous variables. So, I began improving the menu navigation in the overworld controls object.

REFACTORING - Overworld Controls

For context, I never implemented the ability to choose which party member to heal or equip items to, which is, uh, kinda crucial. Before, I would have several variables tracking past menus for things like how to display which item category you were in, and the REAL painful part was having a conditional for almost every single time you clicked X to go back in the menu navigation. Unfortunately, this would be a real headache to deal with when adding new sub-menus.

Now, each previous menu is tracked via an array. Which... has made life a thousand times easier. The previous "Clicked X" conditionals where I had to account for almost every menu number the player was on has now been reduced to just a singular "remove last number from the menu nav array, update menu to match the new final number in the array" with very few alternate conditions to worry about. Also, it made it a thousand times easier to track previous visited menus without complicating it with a million variables.

Whether this is the best way to do it or not, I have no idea, I ain't a professional. But it feels easier to use and chopped about 80 lines of code off from the step event alone, which sounds pretty good to me!

REFACTORING - Player Movement

I have also fixed the movement code for Asriel. I can't remember if it's been present in past videos, but there were problems with the player's collision resulting in oddities such as sometimes getting stuck on walls.

I have now made Asriel's movement almost completely in line with Kris's Light World movement in Deltarune. But, for sentimentality's sake, I DID add in a feature sorely missed from Undertale's movement quirks...

REFACTORING - The Dreaded Battle Controls Code...

After the headache that was trying to write the new tutorial battle's code, I came to the very heartbreaking realization that the battle code as it is right now will not be very usable for future script-heavy battles. For example, the way ACTs are interpreted is very rigid and not very fluid. It will probably be necessary to completely remake the battle code at some point... AGAIN. But I'm saving that for a later date as I really really just want to get rough rooms and rough overworld cutscenes implemented first.