NPC dialogue is almost entirely wrapped up! (Think of the ones you see when you run around Hometown at the end of each chapter.) 

We ended up dividing the work of writing NPC dialogue among our three writers by having each of them take on one of Hometown's main streets; and cover all of the dialogue in it. As things are now, there's only a handful of NPCs left to cover and revise before we're finished with them all! Woohoo!

..

..This is where you’d press [Z]..

As for any larger & more important scenes in the game.. We're still in the process of creating acceptable drafts for them, not only because that between three writers there's a lot to carefully consider when staying true to these beloved characters, but also because we also need to account for multiple versions of the same cutscenes, which, yes, they actually do change depending on key factors in your playthrough! (Though, we can't say too much about that just yet...)

We’re really looking forward to showing all of you some of the art in the game. We have some really nice things planned for the visual presentation of this fangame, and it’s all going super well! We have so many talented artists on the team for FATE, and they’re doing their absolute best to make this game as beautiful as it can be, and trust us, it is VERY beautiful.

Now then, it wouldn’t be an ‘Art & Visuals’ update without showing you, well… some Art & Visuals™ !!, so..! Here's something we’ve been working on!

One of our main pixel artists (Trueface), has been working hard on updating some of the stands and games you’ll be able to find around Hometown during the festival. The new and improved stand we’re showing you here carries more depth, more distinct colors, and more defined shading and texturing compared to a version from earlier in development. And this is only just one example of how each stand you might've seen in Mike’s original teaser (start at 4:32) could change and develop throughout.. “develop”ment..!

Currently however, on top of sprites and what you’d normally expect from a fangame, our artists are also working on visuals for an assortment of additional, fun content that you’ll be able to experience during the game. Keep an eye out for that in the future! (Wink!)

In regard to the programming side of things, we’ve had quite the wild ride to put it mildly. While there are a lot of minute details and changes that we could share about the process, for now, we’ll stick to addressing the most significant milestone in development: We’ve switched game engines, from Godot to Kristal! (Kristal is an engine tailored for DELTARUNE fan games.) We believe this shift in the codebase will allow us to implement and refine the various systems in place at a more efficient pace than what we were able to achieve in the past! Systems re-implemented include Hometown itself as well as many NPCs, which means we will sooner be able to focus on larger goals that, thanks to Kristal, don't involve remaking DELTARUNE's core features from the ground up again.

So far, our lovely musicians have worked hard this past year creating the majority of the music we’ll be using for the game’s soundtrack! For many of these songs, all that’s needed now is to properly implement them in their associated sections. 

Also, if you haven’t noticed yet… We encourage you to check out the songs we’ve just posted on the main GameJolt page! There are currently eight songs we’ve made public, with more to come down the line! Take a good listen to them all, and you might be able to guess where they’ll appear in-game!.. In-fact, why not make a comment, and let us know what you think? We’d love to read your predictions! (Of course, the songs we DO have listed on our page are subject to change at any point, so, they may not be final… It depends!!)

One last note: for the time being, this is the only place we’ll be hosting our music, so until that changes, we please ask fans to not reupload them on any other platforms. Thank you.

This concludes the first of many devlogs to come for this project! In the coming months, we hope to showcase more and more as we make even larger strides in development. Be sure to follow the game to see when more updates come out!

..What?! It’s not over?!?

Yes, before we fully sign off, we’d like to introduce one last special section!

At the end of each devlog, we reserve a portion for ‘Featured Team Member(s)’ who’ll share their own account of how progress has been, what they’ve worked on, or even what significant developments have occurred in their life concurrent to the project! We hope you will take the time to read about each team member we feature in these updates. It’s their hard work and passion that make any of this possible! For our first installment, we actually have TWO members sharing the spotlight, both of whom are programmers:

BrutalSword & FBIDonut!

BrutalSword

Heya! I'm among the newer people on this project, having joined earlier this year. I've been a fan of the FATE animations for a while so I jumped at the chance to help out.

Most of my work so far has consisted of setting up new rooms from scratch and minor NPCs while we were still using the Godot engine, but from the tasks I had outside of that I particularly had a lot of fun building the Thundersnail minigame on the old engine! Switching to Kristal took a bit of time to readjust, but it has been much, much easier to work with for us. There's actually a bunch of stuff I'm really looking forward to that I either will be contributing to or already have helped with, but I'll be keeping a lid on that for now!

FBIDonut

Hi! I've never really written something like this before, and I don't really have much to reference, so hopefully this doesn't suck.

In case you don't know, I'm Donut! I've been working on this since 2022! Crazy, huh? There's been a lot of changes over the years, obviously. I was the one who pushed for the recent change from Godot to Kristal that was mentioned above, actually! It’s been a learning experience for all of us, but I’ve already coded a couple rooms, npcs, and I ported over Thundersnail from the original project! Things are coming along much more smoothly with the recent change. It’s been so fun getting to work on this and I’m excited for everyone to see what we’ve got in the works!