Happy Halloween, everyone!

While we've been busy with our lives, development for Starlight Isles is still going pretty well.

For this month's progress report, we'll be taking a look at things we've been working on--including a showcase of new content from Koffin Keep, an entirely original sub-area of Starlight Isles.

Let's start!

L: ... Or will we?

H: Hee hee hee...

H: This party ain't started just yet, see.

L: We haven't even set the mood just yet!

H: So why don't we go and move things around, see?

Brief Catch-Up!

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

In terms of that month's general updates:

• Script Writing -- Worked on ironing out specific plans and visuals for certain cutscenes in order to move forwards with writing.

• Battle Writing -- Worked on figuring out progression for certain battles before writing.

• Enemies & Monster Attacks -- Added attacks for random encounter monsters, including Woodwork and Mordax.

• Soundtrack Updates -- 17/27 planned tracks complete, ~4 nearing completion, and 6 others ranging from early concepts to not yet started.

• Koffin Keep -- Worked on developing basic plans and progression, specific layout and gameplay, and the area's visual identity. Added 3 rooms in-game with placeholder assets.

• Spep Mode -- Basic progress made including visual effects, early cutscene changes, modified game mechanics, and ideas for story writing.

L: Boy, they’ve been busy...

H: Busy wastin’ their time! What even IS a “spep”?!

Progress Updates

Since last month's progress report, we've been continuing to iron out areas of Stardust Woods that need attention--especially the major sections at the very end--whilst moving forward with working on Koffin Keep.

We'll talk more in-depth about Koffin Keep after this section!

For now, though, here's some of our developments from last month:

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

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

• Environments -- Further developed tiles and environment art for Koffin Keep, and some beginning work for Starstruck Village environment art. Various overworld NPC sprites have been made, too!

• Soundtrack Updates -- Music hasn't been a huge priority right now, so there isn't much to report besides some basic work on certain tracks.

• Programming -- There's a LOT of updates in this regard.

  • Bug fixes, code refactors, optimizations, and many technical changes.

  • New Diannex commands for scenes.

  • Updates across new versions of GameMaker Studio 2.

  • Work on redoing localization-related code to make everything as external as possible--includes custom sprites, and fonts/offsets/custom character widths will be more flexible in JSON files.

  • Brand new debug systems that make testing certain things easier on us (battle, room, and item selectors)

• Ruined Home -- Some tiny additions including interactable stuff, new/changed dialogue, and quality of life tweaks. You'll want to revisit the area in the next demo! (Though, we didn't want to change or add too much. Just little things here and there.)

H: I think the good stuff is coming up next, see!

L: You mean the bad stuff?

H: (Good, bad, what’s it matter?! Zip it up, big man!!)

The "K" Stands For "Evil"

Koffin Keep is an entirely original sub-location of Starlight Isles, which exists between Stardust Woods and Starstruck Village.

It serves as the base of operations for the dastardly Koffin-K--the arch nemesis of Crossbones--and his various paid henchmen of varying competence.

In our August 2021 devlog, we mentioned our plans for Koffin Keep to be a smaller, self-contained, nonlinear area where the player can complete tasks at their own pace.

Originally, we had much different plans for Koffin Keep! Formerly "Koffin-K Island," it was going to be a much larger area you'd visit after the Crossbones fight, as part of fulfilling the requirements for the True Pacifist route. You and Crossbones would have teamed up to defeat Koffin-K, with him being a brief party member that did nothing useful whatsoever.

As we moved forward with development for Starlight Isles, though, we realized these plans were WAY too ambitious for the scope of our project--and needed scaling back.

We ended up deciding on a smaller, nonlinear approach for the following reasons:

• Most areas in UNDERTALE were largely linear, with the exception of exploration side rooms. Since Ruined Home and Stardust Woods have also been mostly linear, we wanted to try something different to shake things up.

• Stardust Woods is a pretty big area on its own, and we want Starlight Isles to be paced properly. This meant scaling back the original size plans for Koffin-K Island, and reinventing it as Koffin Keep--a smaller area that takes full advantage of its rooms, ensuring there's enough content and gameplay!

• Having Koffin Keep at the end of Starlight Isles made the area's progression too similar to Snowdin from UNDERTALE. We decided to naturally integrate it between the woods and village portions, so it wouldn't feel unnecessarily tacked-on for the sake of having something new. This included making sure it tied in with the overall story to avoid "filler" content.

In terms of our progress with the area:

• We now have a solid layout and overall outline for the entire area with goals, obstacles, and character interactions. We still need to write out the exact dialogue, though!

• There's 14 rooms planned for Koffin Keep, with 6 partially implemented in-game!

• We've figured out the visual style for Koffin Keep, and have an incomplete (yet mostly polished) tileset!

When it came to figuring out the visual style for Koffin Keep, we wanted it to reflect an "evil supervillain's spooky manor" feeling. This started out with some concept art by SuperKirbylover, based on the overworld sprite for Koffin Keep.

After that, we worked on translating these concepts to in-game tiles by experimenting with different looks, and figuring out the in-game color palette. The ones above were done by Beethovenus--we later decided on the top left's looks, and developed them further.

Rather than showing off the current iteration of the tileset, which is still subject to change...

... Instead, we'll show off how Koffin Keep currently looks in-game!

While everything is subject to change (and there's some stuff we've changed to avoid spoilers), we're very happy with how this area has been coming together--and we're excited to show more in the future!

Now, there's one more thing before we finish off this section!

We've mentioned Count Koffin-K a lot in the past, but haven't taken the time to give people a clear view of his personality. Since we've fleshed him out more as a character since then...

(Koffin-K designed by Treppy, and named by Grassinio)

It made sense to actually demonstrate his personality!

Since making videos takes time and we didn't want to distract from development, we made something short and sweet to give people a general idea of what Koffin-K will be like.

While it's very brief, we hope this has helped a bit!

And now, on to some new music!

Community Spotlight

Can't forget about this month's Community Spotlight!

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

A month ago, there was an update to UNOTALE by RynoGG!

This update included some new character skins, such as Crossbones! We also gave our permission to use two of our game's tracks:

• "Knights! Trouble Afoot!" (by colinator27, Ethosein, and TRéZZY)

• "SOUL Ablaze" (by LucasPucas, Robin Blend, ExtendoFun, and junnboi).

Go and check it out! It's a really neat UNDERTALE-styled adaptation of the card game "UNO," which can be played with a maximum of 8 people!

The day after our September progress report went out, Drama Josh uploaded a lyrical adaptation of "Stage Fright" by LucasPucas, Mettacrit's battle theme--complete with both in-game and drawn visuals!

We already planned on including it in this month's Community Spotlight... and then he ended up making two more!

• Rise, Child (original song by Robin Blend.)

• Dummy Chase! (original song by The Musical Ghost, Ethosein, and TRéZZY.)

Go and check them all out!

Yoki-doki drew some fanart of Chara battling The Ruined Knights!

We absolutely loved the monochromatic scheme used in this piece, and the adaptation of the Knights' maze attack.

gottagospeed drew some fanart of Mettacrit!

We really liked the pose, and overall presentation of this piece! It definitely feels accurate to the character.

That's it for now!

Last month, we had posted our devlog in celebration of UNDERTALE's 6th Anniversary. We hadn't expected DELTARUNE Chapter 2 to release on the same day, and were completely blown away by everything we played.

We mentioned on Twitter how Chapter 2 really inspired us to get a bit more creative with certain things, and helped us with some ideas for roadblocks we were having. This was especially true for Koffin Keep, where you'll see some DELTARUNE-inspired bits here and there.

Funnily enough, though, there were various things throughout Chapter 2 that were similar to things we had already done for Ruined Home, were working on for Starlight Isles, or planned to do in the future--we've now been inspired to take some of those ideas further, expanding upon our previous ideas with brand new stuff.

We hope everything we have in store for you guys won't disappoint!

- Beethovenus and Team Switched

L: Heh heh heh… Happy Hallow’s Weens!

H: You’d better watch out for us, see… (Halloween!!! HALLOWEEN, YOU IDIOT!!!)

(Art by SuperKirbylover)