The last four years of Undertale: Orange

Hello everyone, 

This is a follow-up to Monday's UTO anniversary post. As promised, I want to talk about the timeline of events starting from the release of the final demo version of Undertale: Orange up to the past couple of weeks. it is true that even when we didn't actively work on UTO in a long time, it was still a regular topic of discussion between us. I have never turned off my gamejolt notifications so everytime someone followed my project, it would remind me that new players are still enjoying this game. Thanks to this project, I have managed to learn skills that are fundamental when it comes to game development, and our team is a lot more capable now than when we started. Before showing you the timeline, I just want to thank everyone for 30 000 downloads and 85 000 views. I still remember how excited we were when just 100 people downloaded our little game. 

• April 27th, 2019 - Undertale: Orange version 0.5 (The Official Full Demo) is released after months of development and public alpha testing. At this point, UTO had been a fully public project for about five months (since New Year's Day 2019) with it being available to a group of select testers since late September of 2018. The team was very happy to be able to reach this milestone. 

• September 2019 - Having worked intensively on UTO over the course of the summer had the game well on track towards a new update. Despite this, there were doubts about just what we wanted to do next with Undertale: Orange. I started development on UTO during the summer of 2017 and we aimed to release the full game by the end of 2019, but it became clear to me, as well as to the team, that we were way over schedule and with this developmental tempo, the game would need at least a couple of more years to be finished. On top of that, we had trouble applying for a second public presentation, because we were deprioritized due to presenting the same game twice in a row. As a relatively new team, the decision was obvious: we elected instead to create a new original game. The working title of this new project became "Stonks". 

• March 2020 - The COVID-19 Pandemic hits Europe. All development on Stonks is effectively frozen. 

• May 2020 - A private Stonks technological demo is released. 

• Fall 2020 - As progress on Stonks crawled along, more and more issues began to form with the project itself. After about 400 days of development, we decide that the scope of the game is simply too complex content-wise and the project gets postponed indefinitely. The final Undertale: Orange devlog post was published around this time. 

• December 2020 - With having invested time and money into a project that would ultimately be scrapped, it was clear that we needed to change the way we approached making games. To fund further development on our own original titles, we switched to a contract-based system. To explain it in simple terms, we would create games tailored to whatever requirements were needed for our customers. 

• April 2021 - Our new strategy was proven to be successful enough to allow us to focus our time on a new original project. Having learned from Stonks, we chose a less content-heavy game, but one that was still engaging and fun to play. This new game would ultimately become "Warpoint" (still not ready for a public release!). A private tech-demo was released to showcase an early prototype of the game. 

• May 2021 - A significant number of our clients were looking for a similar “Undertale-like” experience. Sensing an opportunity to create these types of games faster and with more features, we began work on our in-house middleware engine for GameMaker (once again, still in the works). 

• Summer 2021 – Undertale: Orange breaks 50,000 views on GameJolt, a previously unimaginable milestone for our team sparking even more discussion about UTO’s continued relevance. 

• Fall 2021 – OmniQube goes through a rebranding, intended to show a more professional image in line with our new system. 

• Early 2022 – Undertale: Orange breaks 20,000 downloads. Another milestone smashed. 

• Summer 2022 – Development on Warpoint is at an all-time high. 

• September 2022 – The OmniQube Team goes through its first major international expansion. This was a valuable experience for me personally, as I gained the opportunity to meet and network with new people who are very passionate about game development, much like me. I’ve found a lot of enthusiastic writers and artists that were eager to join in and help with our projects. 

• Early 2023 – A decision was made to come back to GameJolt and restore our love for Undertale: Orange. 

  And so, here we are now.

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The Future of Undertale: Orange: 

Thanks to community feedback, we were able to hone in on several aspects of the game that needed improving or fixing. We were also able to make some newer unreleased areas playable. When it comes to game developers, their first big project is always filled with less than ideal design choices which can lead to unenjoyable experiences for players. Unfortunately, I must say that the current version of UTO didn't deliver the vision that I had imagined when it comes to how this game looks or how it’s played. However, everything has a bright side; it means that there are a lot of original ideas which could have made UTO a better game that could stand out more if we had more experience. 

In the future, we would like to continue this journey with all of you. As developers, we want to deliver on some promises that we just weren't capable enough to deliver in the past.  We simply don't want to abandon this project and leave it in its current state. I hope this article satisfies everyone's need for answers regarding what we've been up to since the launch of Undertale: Orange. Thanks for reading, and keeping our game alive for all this time.