Hi, everyone! AbsoluteZero here.

Originally I was going to share everything here in a video devlog, but with a lack of frequent visuals and mostly just talking, I figured it wouldn’t be interesting enough. So, here we are! Today, the development team has quite a few BIG changes to share. Without further ado, let’s get started!

REBRANDING

To begin, we’d like to talk about the project’s current name. During its conceptual phase, this project went under the name “AbsoluteZero’s Underswap”. As the AU grew into something more and became a fully fledged fangame, I personally decided that it would be best for our project to stray away from the standard [team name] UNDERSWAP format that had existed on GameJolt and many other platforms, to help our project stand out from the rest. While talking with Spouting, the creator of the AU Sudden Changes about some potential names, I came up with the name “Undertale: Alternate History”. We both agreed that it didn’t roll off the tongue well. So, with my personal love of the Japanese language, I decided to roughly translate that name to Japanese. Thus, the name many of you probably know, Undertale: Daitai Rireki was born. Unfortunately, in recent times, we have found that this name isn’t that fitting for our project. It has also come to my attention multiple times that the name could be mistranslated. I do not speak fluent Japanese, so this is entirely possible (and likely true). In light of all of these things, though, we have now determined the final name for our project. The name of our project is now simply…

This name is simple, memorable, and will suit our game’s aesthetic and story perfectly. This name was suggested by Drop0ff after a short, but rather difficult period of scrambling to find possibilities for a new name. A huge thanks goes to him. Now that the project’s name is finally settled for good, it’s time for the next announcement.

DESIGN

A lot has changed in the past months regarding design. Let’s start off with characters. In the past, we’ve shown off designs for a lot of the original Undertale cast. Two characters, Asgore and Alphys specifically, took hefty inspiration in their designs from media outside of Undertale. In recent times, we’ve found that these designs created an inconsistency in the line of concepts, and were uninteresting, unoriginal and distracting to some. So, our Head of Art and Design, Divide, reworked the designs while keeping the original inspirations in mind. Please take a look at our changes to Asgore!

We’ve decided that this design is far more fitting and interesting than the blatantly inspired design we had before. Apologies to those who may have preferred the blatant references, but this is for the better of the project. Alphys has also undergone a redesign, but…

Maybe we’ll save her for later… ;P

Moving on from character designs, we’ve also changed up the Ruins a bit. We’re shifting away from the previous blue color we had, and using a more red-ish/burgundy instead.

(Not everything shown here is necessarily final.)

We find this color to be fitting for Asgore and the floral atmosphere we’ll be giving the Ruins, and it also separates us from other AUs and projects that use the color blue for the Ruins.

Finally, on the topic of design: we’re going in a new direction with our talk sprites. Instead of the standard black and white sprites, we’re going with full visual novel-styled portraits!

The portraits will be drawn by our one-off comic artist, Vinpie. We believe that these will allow for a lot more expression in the long run, and create an interesting aesthetic that has only been expanded upon by a small handful of AU creators thus far.

And now, ladies and gentlemen! Our second to last announcement of today! This one is very important, as we brought in a very special guest. Please give a warm welcome to the one and only…Papyrus.

https://instaud.io/private/acec651091d4844989a54a10bda1a6cccfc04e92
(Please listen before reading further!)

Yep, you heard him correctly!

VOICE ACTING

We’re aiming to include full voice acting in the final version of the game. There will be an option when booting up the game to enable or disable voice acting. We know it’s not everyone’s cup of tea, so we’re not going to force it on everybody. When the casting call for voices begins, it will be posted on each of our social accounts (except YouTube). Keep an eye out!

WHAT DOES “DELTARUNE” MEAN FOR THE FUTURE OF INTEGRITY?

To end it off, a little talk about Deltarune. This is one I should have covered a couple of months ago, but I got sidetracked by demo production and real life business. While the release of Deltarune made a huge impact on the Undertale community and our team, this is still an Undertale fangame no matter what. Deltarune did give us some ideas and inspiration for going about certain mechanics and menu designs, but the game will remain the same at its core. Also, to reiterate from the edit on our April Fools post, we will not be working on any “Deltaswap” or AU spinoff of Deltarune. The game hasn’t even been fully released yet, so we find it a bit ridiculous to even attempt it. By the time Deltarune fully releases, we’ll all likely have moved on by then, too, so don’t expect it now or ever.

CONCLUSION

This was most definitely our largest devlog yet, as we’ve had these changes ready to share for quite some time. I wanted to wait until the time was right, and that time was now. Thank you for your overwhelming support for this project as time has passed. We plan to share more with you as the demo and game progress. Until then, have a wonderful day!