Hey there!

Last month, we announced on Twitter that we were postponing our progress report--since we were preoccupied with various responsibilities (finishing up classes, jobs, etc.)--in order to have something more substantial to present.

Fortunately, we've been getting some good work done since October! While progress has been slower at times, we've recently gotten more hands on deck with classes ending for the semester--and we're looking forward to discussing it today!

Let's start!

Brief Catch-Up!

In case you missed our October 2021 devlog, here's a quick recap!

We'd been continuing to iron out areas of Stardust Woods that needed attention--especially major sections at the very end--whilst moving forward with work on Koffin Keep.

In terms of that month's general updates:

• Writing -- Progress on writing for late Stardust Woods sequences, and in-game implementation. We'd also further developed our plans for Koffin Keep and Starstruck Village.

• Battles -- Some new sprites were made to indicate when monsters are spareable, and attacks were implemented for the Dogi.

• Environments -- We further developed tiles and environment art for Koffin Keep, and began work for Starstruck Village environment art. Various overworld NPC sprites were made.

• Programming -- Many updates: bug fixes, code refactors, optimizations, technical changes, engine updates, localization-related code reworks, and brand new debug systems added.

• Ruined Home -- New small additions, changed dialogue, and quality of life tweaks.

As for everything else covered:

• The "K" Stands for "Evil" -- An entire section dedicated to discussing updates and showcasing content for both Koffin Keep and Koffin-K! It included:

  • Discussing our plans and scope for Koffin Keep more in-depth, and describing our decisions for reworking our plans from earlier iterations.

  • Describing our overall progress with the area (a solid layout and overall outline, 14 planned rooms with 6 partially implemented)

  • Showcased concept art for the area's visual style, and its progression to experimental tiles and the final product in-game -- this included some screenshots of the area!

  • A short video demonstrating Koffin-K's personality.

Progress Updates

When figuring out the scope for this project and the goals we've wanted to accomplish, we originally hoped to have Starlight Isles done by the end of this year. However, as progress has been slower at times than we would have liked, we need to take more time.

We are happy to report, however, that Starlight Isles is roughly 71% complete! 

While we're in a pretty good spot at the moment, there's still a ways to go -- and even once we meet around 100% content completion for the area, we'll still need to focus on polishing, playtesting, and finalizing everything to our liking.

Regardless, we're confident that we'll have Starlight Isles finished in 2022.

Our main priorities for the end of this year have been to get Stardust Woods mostly finished (missing attacks, misc. writing, and trivial tasks that add up) and Koffin Keep playable from start to finish. It'll probably take us some more time for the first one, though.

In terms of our general progress from last month:

• Writing -- We've further developed some needed dialogue and structure for various scenes, as well as finished all flavor text for the Greater Dog battle.

• Battles -- Every battle for Stardust Woods is now in-game, in varying levels of implementation -- some are mostly finished, whereas others require attacks and per-route variations.

• Environments -- We have created more tiles and environment art needed for Koffin Keep, as well as structures for Starstruck Village.

• Soundtrack Updates -- We currently have 18 tracks completed out of a planned 28!

  • There's also 5 tracks nearing completion, and 5 others ranging from early concepts to not yet started.

  • Music currently has not been as much of a priority as writing, but we are still chipping away at needed themes for Koffin Keep and beyond.

• Programming -- Code progress is almost completely caught up with the assets we have at this point, but some attacks could be started with placeholder assets and general experimentation.

Koffin Keep

We currently have 15 total rooms in-game, in varying states of completion! This includes:

• 8 rooms have the logic they need to be playable.

• About 11 rooms are visually complete.

• We have some character scenes added in-game.

• The entire introduction cutscene to Koffin Keep, and Koffin-K, is complete besides some small polishing tweaks that will come later.

Here's a quick screenshot from Koffin Keep!

The fountain has been updated since, but we've kept the old version to avoid spoilers. The new version is much worse.

Spep Mode

We've made some pretty substantial progress with planning and in-game implementation for Spep Mode, too!

We have a rough outline and scope for everything we wish to accomplish with the mode, which will serve as a self-contained story within Ruined Home with our mascot, Spep, as the playable character.

As we've stated before, it'll feature similar absurdist, surreal horror/humor to the likes of our April Fools 2019 game, Underswaaap.

This is the most we can show you guys of Spep Mode, for now.

Our goal is for players to go in completely blind, and utterly confused as to what's happening. In the spirit of reutilizing scrapped and outdated content -- like we always do -- here's a room we found within one of the 2017-2018 builds of the demo that predates DELTARUNE's tree room.

Crazy, huh?

(Also, that Spep sprite is a placeholder. It'll look better.)

Quick Reading

Following the release of the demo, some have requested a way to access the journal quicker -- we had originally considered a designated keybind during development, though weren't able to due to limitations regarding Android and controller support.

Instead, we've decided to implement two brand new ways to quickly access the journal!

You can open the journal from the STAT menu using C / CTRL (or whatever key is assigned). When the journal has been recently updated, the text will display as yellow.

You can also open the journal by holding C / CTRL whenever you get a journal notification, which will open the journal once the notification finishes.

(It doesn't count if you were holding the key when the notification first starts, so this new feature doesn't mess with speedruns!)

Small Talk

When it comes to game development over a platform like Discord, we heavily rely on text communication with one another -- however, this can result in communication delays, misunderstandings, and more.

Something we've found is that having voice chat sessions really let us quickly bounce ideas off each other, more so than text. We generally end up making a great deal of progress (writing, assets, ideas, etc.) during voice dev sessions -- this includes making really dumb jokes, which sometimes influence our decisions during development and help us come up with brand new ideas.

Believe it or not, we even planned out nearly the entirety of Koffin Keep in one of our voice dev sessions -- just coming up with stupid jokes, which influenced our ideas for the area and its characters.

Because of this, we've considered having more voice dev sessions down the line when possible, in order to make substantial progress with less developed areas. It's a lot of fun, too!

Community Spotlight

It's time for this month's Community Spotlight!

We started these back in June 2021 to highlight community fanworks, and fellow fan-projects.

Since we never did one of these for November, we've accumulated quite a backlog of works we've wanted to share... and so, this section's going to be pretty long!

First up, we're showing off an in-progress unofficial Japanese translation for the demo made by lazyknife! We haven't really showcased any localizations so far, but wanted to take this opportunity due to the amount of effort being put into this one. There's been more progress since the video above, which you can see here!

Next, we have an animated music video of "Knights! Trouble Afoot!" (by colinator27, Ethosein, and TRéZZY) made by It's_Connor, one of our Mac playtesters!

It's got some nicely choreographed visuals alongside the music!

Lilybug-02 drew the major cast of TS!UNDERSWAP!

We really like how they've presented each of the characters and organized them throughout the image--as well as the effects surrounding Chara, the central future of the piece.

mofushiki drew some fanart of Crossbones!

We really liked the pose in this piece, as well as the colors and background shapes.

MITF / M4dumy drew some fanart of Asriel, aka A.S. Dreamer!

We really liked his expression in this piece, and how both friendly and fluffy he looks.

Heartlessmushroom drew some fanart of Chara looking cool with Inverted Fate's Frisk!

We liked the style and poses in this piece! They really are some cool kids.

We have a larger collection of things here from a project called Ts!FridaySwapFunkin' Vs CrossBones, a TS!UNDERSWAP-themed Friday Night Funkin' mod!

Above we've featured a recently-teased video that pits Crossbones against the player -- with an adaptation of our "Skeletal Showdown" song (currently outdated, with a new version to be released).

They've since released a progress report detailing their updates and plans for the project, which we recommend checking out!

Since then, some updated character art of Crossbones, Papyrus, and Koffin-K have been showcased by one of the team's artists, potopollo!

They're also currently looking for some background artists! If you're interested, let them know here!

Finally, we have a collection of videos by Drama Josh, someone whose content we've featured before!

These include a review of the demo, and two different lyrical adaptations of "SOUL Ablaze" (by LucasPucas, Robin Blend, ExtendoFun, and junnboi) -- one for Pacifist / Neutral, and one for Genocide.

We highly recommend checking these out!

That's it for now! Before we go, though...

It's been a year since we finally released the TS!UNDERSWAP Demo.

Since then, we've received (as of writing) 236,244 downloads -- that's approximately 4.19 Greenlands! (We started measuring the amount of downloads in that as a joke.)

We never expected just how positive its reception would be, and we're very thankful for the kind words we've received.

This project has been very important to each of us. We'd started working on it due to our mutual love for UNDERTALE -- its characters, aesthetic, writing, and story -- and with how it's touched our hearts, helped us through struggles in our lives, and allowed us to discover new passions.

We've said many times how much the positive feedback has astonished us -- that we've managed to give people the same feelings playing UNDERTALE for the first time did -- but your critiques have been just as important. We've been able to understand what aspects of the demo were strengths and weaknesses, so we can make improvements further on and refine existing content.

Working on this project, and forging a unique identity of its own, has motivated us to see it through. We love the ways in which we've managed to take existing characters, stories, concepts, and gameplay yet present them in a fresh way -- subverting player expectations, and making people wonder as to what will happen next.

We couldn't have done this without any of you, each other, or Toby Fox & Co.

Even when development is slower and times have been rough, this project has always been a light in our lives that we look forward to seeing through.

Thank you for being a part of this journey with us.

And with that being said... we hope you all have a Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays, and a very Happy New Year!

- Beethovenus and Team Switched

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