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TS!UNDERSWAP [Undertale Fangame]

4 days ago

Spring Cleaning - April 2025

Hey, it's been a while!

The last time you heard from us, we released a Dev Update in December 2024 to commemorate the 4th anniversary of Demo v1.0's release. Since then, many of us have been pretty busy with personal responsibilities, and so major development has been much slower -- due to this, we haven't had much reason to post a progress report.

That isn't to say we haven't been making any progress, though! Our primary focus lately has been smaller-scope tasks mostly involving refinements to existing content. This is where today's "Spring Cleaning" devlog comes in -- not a usual progress report, moreso just a showcase of what we've been working on and our design philosophies thereof.

Let's get started!

Brief Catch-Up!

There's a lot that we covered in our December 2024 Dev Update! In regards to our progress updates and content previews, we covered the following:

Further development on certain character backstories, evaluated route plans to keep them within reasonable scope, and proposed rewrites of Ruined Home content for better consistency with current plans.
Some completed battle assets and concept art for Crystal Springs enemies.
As part of a huge collaborative effort, the Boogiemen's re-styled battle sprites are nearing completion and being implemented in-game.
Further work on "Boogie Beatdown" ("Let's Boogie!" v3) and "Kountdown" v3, as well as an almost-finished Crystal Springs track ("Dreamer" by philiplol.)
Implementation of some Crystal Mines puzzles and rooms, slight polish to Starlight Isles content, minor improvements to a few Ruined Home puzzles (including some screenshot examples thereof), and some side work on Spep Mode.
The project was updated to the latest GameMaker version, which required figuring out what needed fixing due to changes between updates.
A few screenshots of the Crystal Mines -- all of which are entirely subject to change, and do not fully represent what the area will look like in the end.

In addition to that, we also included three more sections to commemorate the end of 2024, and the 4th anniversary of Demo v1.0's release -- these consist of:

End of Year Q&A -- a developer Q&A segment we announced via Bluesky, where we selected some fan-asked questions regarding development to answer!
Community Spotlight - Dec 2024 -- a lengthy showcase of TS!UNDERSWAP fanworks!
A Year in Review -- a short retrospective of 2024 in regards to our development.

Spring Cleaning

As mentioned before, we've all been pretty busy with personal responsibilities this year! After the lengthy development and subsequent release (incl. patches) of Demo v2.0: Starlight Isles, we've also dealt with some burnout at times.

We generally have a rule of thumb that whatever content we release with the game is more or less what we aim to stick with for the long run -- mainly to avoid going back and changing too many things, too many times, without needing to. This had been a problem we'd previously dealt with during the earliest stages of the project, where we didn't have a solid enough direction to make the kind of progress we can today.

However, sometimes it can be helpful to go back and touch up existing content -- both since it helps reignite our creative spark when we're burnt out, and also allows us to use what we've learned and how we've developed our style to establish a more consistent experience across the game as a whole.

In the past, this has involved making more minor changes to sprites and writing. After all, we don't want to make too many changes -- especially in regards to assets which others (animations, frames, etc.) are dependent on.

Right now, though, we've decided to get a bit more comprehensive with some of our tweaks -- most of these generally being smaller edits, with the main work coming from the number of changes itself. Here are some examples of what we've been doing:

First, Papyrus! His dialogue portraits and battle sprites were modified to have a more angular head, maintaining consistency with his appearance and stylistic design from Undertale -- while keeping the rounded look for Sans. This is something we've wanted to do for some time, but have been hesitant to do so due to our already-established style for Papyrus. However, with the re-styled sprites we've made for Harry and Larry -- particularly with their theme of "angular Harry, round Larry," it only seemed fitting we retain this characteristic of Papyrus's design to clash against Sans's.

These have since been implemented in-game, with the edits themselves done by DepressoKnows!

Temmie! What started out as an experimental "what-if" redesign for their battle sprite ended up turning into an entire overhaul for the first Temmie's sprites altogether. We've now redone nearly all of their overworld and battle/dialogue portrait sprites -- with the exception of their "transformation" ones, which may or may not gain some added details depending on how much coding work we want to put into it. These edits were made for consistency with the other Temmies' sprites and current art direction for the project, as well as to incorporate more asymmetry and dynamic posing.

These haven't been implemented in-game just yet, since we're waiting to finish all of them before doing so. These sprites have been a collaborative effort between Beethovenus, DepressoKnows, and LuneyToons!

However, something we have implemented in-game is a new sprite/design for the Temmie plush in Asgore's house! We wanted to give this plush its own design that's separate enough from the other Temmies', while maintaining consistency with their overall look.

As we've mentioned before, the new battle sprites for Harry and Larry are almost fully finished! To put this in perspective: we've made 23 dialogue portraits (with 7 new ones), 26 battle heads (with 3 new unused ones), and 56 battle sprites (including new variants depending on the route.) Most of the work is due to how many sprites were reliant on the ones which needed the most changes -- and so when the "base sprites" were redone, we needed to redo or heavily modify all sprites which relied on the look and posing of them. All that's left now are:

Harry's swipe attack (3 sprites)
Harry laughing (2 sprites)
Harry and Larry reacting to hitting each other (1 for Harry, 2 for Larry)
Harry reacting to a shove forward (2 sprites)
Harry and Larry's "fight cloud" animation (unsure right now, we plan to make an entirely new animation for this one instead of making it code-based.)

This has probably been one of the biggest collaborative efforts for a specific task with this project thus far, combining the efforts of Devilredd, LuneyToons (who made Larry's laughing animation above), Chip Potato, DepressoKnows, Beethovenus, SuperKirbylover, and EllisBros to get these done. We're not even finished implementing all of them in-game yet, either!

We previously mentioned how these changes were being targeted for the eventual Demo v3.0 release, given the following:

The amount of changes and fixes to existing content in-game (i.e. positioning, animations) will need testing to make sure there are no bugs created as a result, especially those which may impact other aspects of the game in unexpected ways.
The development branches for v2.0 and v3.0 are separate, as they use different versions of GameMaker, and so the changes would need to be applied across both branches and tested accordingly.

However, because we want to get these into the hands of our players sooner than later -- since Demo v3.0 is nowhere near complete, and will take a good while to get done -- we're hoping to re-target these changes for a Demo v2.0 update, but we cannot promise this nor give an estimation on when this will occur. Thank you again for your patience with this, and we'll make sure to keep you all updated!

New battle buttons! These were made by LuneyToons, with the exception of a brand new button variant made by Chip Potato -- when the player has run out of ITEMs, this will be reflected in-battle with an empty bag icon. Nothing major here, just little added details!

Here's how these icons look in-game! (This screenshot was modified to remove the SOUL, since it covers the selected button's icon. Goodbye, player!)

And finally, we decided to give Muffet a dialogue SFX! This is just another added little detail which wasn't necessarily important -- but since Muffet has a good deal of in-game content featuring her (i.e. battle, shop, hangout), we felt it made sense to add something which set her aside from other characters more. We didn't give her a dialogue portrait since those are mainly reserved for recurring characters, while Muffet is strictly contained to Starlight Isles, and because adding one would likely require fixing the formatting of her overworld dialogue lines.

That was a lot! To finish off this section, here's a few more things we've been working on -- we either don't want to show these off currently, or feel there isn't much point to showcasing them:

Reworks to Bugerpant's overworld sprites for consistency with his look from Deltarune (still in early stages, low priority given how many sprites we'd need to change.)
Reworks to Mad Dummy's battle sprites for consistency with our current art style (still in early stages, higher priority given Dummy-related content in Crystal Springs.)
Reworks to Flowey's facial expressions (incl. number thereof) to better differentiate it from Undertale's Flowey (not implemented in-game yet; condensed many of its facial expressions, need to refine and figure out some other ones.)
Slight polish to the Crossbones "pretend" post-fight scene for better consistency with overall plans and design intentions (implemented in-game.)
Chara now has armor sprites when grabbed by Koffin-K following the Mad House chase (these have not been implemented in-game just yet.)

FAQ | SUPPORT | LOCALIZATION | v2.0 CHANGELOG

Our official translations Spanish (Español), Brazilian Portuguese (Português Brasileiro), and Dutch (Nederlands) are still in-progress, and will ideally be released whenever they're ready. (These are done by hobbyist translators, so please be patient!)

We're still in the process of discussing avenues for which community-created localization patches could be officially added to the game, including a list of guidelines (i.e. submission requirements, quality standards, etc.) It'll take us a bit to iron this out, so please give us time!

With the exciting release of Deltarune Chapters 3 & 4 ~~tomorrow~~ in just a few months, we're hoping that it'll give us the creative energy and inspiration to get back into gear with development on Crystal Springs. Please keep in mind that this project is something we work on purely for fun -- sometimes there either hasn't been enough major progress made, or we'd rather not give too many public details about what we have gotten done, to warrant posting a progress report.

Despite this, we're generally pretty active on Bluesky and Discord -- although because our audience is spread out across multiple platforms, we'll sometimes get people jumping to the conclusion that our project has been cancelled (mainly on GameJolt and YouTube.)

As a reminder: we have no plans to cancel this project, and would tell people if we did. Please don't make assumptions, and let us take our time!

See you next time!

- Beethovenus and Team Switched