Howdy!

While summer has already begun for most of our team members, we've all been a bit preoccupied with miscellaneous responsibilities--rest assured, we're still making sure to get work done on Starlight Isles, even though at times it's been a little slower.

For that reason, this devlog is going to be a shorter one. However, it'll give some insight into what we've been working on, and the decisions we make during development!

Brief Catch-Up!

As a quick recap: back in March, our project was one of many featured in UnderEvent, a fan-created presentation of Undertale fangames. Our own presentation featured a teaser segment of the next major area, Starlight Isles, and announced Demo Version 2.0.

Our subsequent devlog (go and check it out!) touched upon some important announcements regarding development of the demo, and some updates and content previews. This includes:

• Future releases format -- upon the completion of two additional major areas each, we'll be releasing major updates to the demo. It'll look something like this:

  • Demo v1.0 - Ruined Home

  • Demo v2.0 - Starlight Isles and Crystal Springs added

  • Demo v3.0 - Boreal Bluffs and The NEXUS added

  • Full Game(?) - Everything else (The City of New, Endgame, final polish, etc.)

  • (We've mentioned this before, but SAVE files will be compatible with future demo versions. However, they will not be backwards compatible, for obvious reasons.)

• Starlight Isles updates -- we talked about everything that was shown off in the video teaser for Starlight Isles, including entirely new game mechanics, dynamic battle UI colors, brand new enemies, and more!

• Post-demo character design reveals -- we finally revealed the designs for several major characters! The current iterations of sprites for Alphys, Asriel, Undyne, and Sir Scratchalot (Napstablook) were shown off, along with concept art for Toriel's design.

While we hadn't put out a devlog last month, we posted some small project updates and content to our Twitter page!

• April 25th: we posted some out of context, jokey screenshots of Starlight Isles.

• May 6th: we posted an entire thread of Ruined Home concept art, including some previous iterations of the sewer and The City of Old.

On May 14th, several of our developers appeared on The Determined Podcast to answer questions about TS!UNDERSWAP and UNDERTALE! While we didn't show off anything new, we did briefly allude to some things that'll happen in future demo updates. Go and check that out!

Progress Updates

While development has been a little slower lately, we've still been working hard on the project. Our main areas of focus with Starlight Isles have been:

• Writing out the script for Starlight Isles--focusing primarily on Stardust Woods (the first sub-location) before we proceed to fleshing out Koffin Keep and Starstruck Village.

• Working on dialogue, flavor text, and ACT/SPARE methods for Stardust Woods' random encounter enemies (mostly finished) and minibosses.

• Implementing functioning puzzles and rooms in-game, up until the final miniboss of Stardust Woods.

• Creating assets for monster attacks, based on concepts and ideas, to be implemented in-game.

Writing Process

When it comes to writing for the project, there's many factors we need to consider.

Firstly, we make sure to construct a rough outline of an entire area. This starts out by creating a simple list of rooms and sequences, in order to figure out the pacing and progression for the area. After that, we'll start getting more specific, and elaborating more on each room/sequence with some dialogue, general structure, descriptions of events/cutscenes, how miniboss encounters start and end, and more.

(The writing system in the above screenshot is subject to change.)

However, in addition to that, we also have to make sure we plan out the entire area for multiple routes. As shown in the above image, we need to have at least 3 different variations for every major scene. This includes variants for:

• Neutral and Pacifist routes (largely the same, albeit certain major scenes that differ much more)

• Genocide route

• Aborted Genocide / "Evacuation Neutral" route

The reason why Neutral and "Evacuation Neutral" are different internally is due to how TS!UNDERSWAP handles the Genocide route. If you took your time killing everyone in Ruined Home, Asgore ends up warning the monsters outside about your presence--even if you spared him, aborting the route, the whole Underground would still be put on alert about a murderous human. This is in contrast to how in Undertale, aborting the Genocide route would simply put you back on a Neutral route.

Here, your actions have far-reaching consequences, with the Genocide route effectively serving as this game's "hard mode."

Once we start getting into actually writing the script out, there's even more stuff we have to take into consideration. Using the rough outline as a guide, we start getting even more specific--fleshing out dialogue and flavor text word-for-word, planning out sequences (visuals, sound effects, music, character placements, camera views, etc.).

For battles, we put together two tables:

• Enemies' stats, ACTs, and SPARE conditions

• Enemies' flavor text and dialogue

For these, we need to take into account many different actions--ACTs, the order of which certain ACTs are done in, multiple enemies interacting with one another, how enemies react to aggression + certain routes, etc.

Right now, we've actually been working on getting Lesser Dog's battle for Pacifist and Neutral all figured out! While it's been going slowly, we've been having a lot of fun with it.

Screenshots

Of course, we're sure a lot of people here are looking for in-game screenshots. First, we have the newly-implemented Starlight Isles menu theme for the main menu! Upon saving in this area, the scrolling parallax background will change to reflect the area, along with the optional aesthetic border (if set to dynamic.)

With the introduction of even more characters in Starlight Isles, we wanted to make sure navigating the journal didn't become a hassle. For this reason, we've separated monster profiles in the JOURNAL by location--when you encounter a monster, they'll appear in the JOURNAL under the area they were encountered in.

Like these two goofy skeletons, whose journal doodles--along with those for other characters in the area, have been added in-game!

We may end up creating a section for certain characters which appear across multiple locations, though that hasn't been implemented just yet.

As we mentioned before, we've also been working on getting monster attacks planned out, assets made for, and implemented in-game. Here's a little screenshot of one of them, where you'll evade a swarm of bee-shaped bullets!

We've been having a lot of fun working on Starlight Isles! We're really hoping you guys will end up liking everything we've been putting together, once it's eventually done.

Trash, Trash, and More Trash

While the main focus of Demo v2.0 will be the addition of both Starlight Isles and Crystal Springs, we also plan on doing some minor touch-ups to Ruined Home--nothing major, just some quality of life additions and little secrets as we see fit.

However, we don't want to spend too much time adding things to Ruined Home when we don't need to, especially when we'd like to focus on getting future areas completed.

Due to this, we'll need to make sure we don't get overly ambitious with our ideas, and cut things that aren't feasible nor realistic. For anyone who was disappointed that checking every single trash can in The City of Old did absolutely nothing, just know that we had you in mind here! Unfortunately, this wasn't able to make the final cut, since it would have been pretty difficult internally to easily implement. At least you have the satisfaction of being a certified garbage-dweller!

Obligatory Shout-Out Section

Recently, a friend of some of our team members reached 1,000 subscribers on YouTube! Rapwned is a streamer and content creator, and has a highlight video of his TS!UNDERSWAP Demo stream up on his channel! Go and check him out if you're looking for a good laugh.

That's everything for this progress report! Now that summer has begun, we're hoping to finally hold a developer commentary stream at some point in the near future--no dates just yet, since we've all still been pretty busy. We'll make sure to let you know if, or when, we've decided on any. Until next time!

- Beethovenus and Team Switched