The original design of the blaster was made by Genarf, and we jokingly called it "Albert" saying that it had "the typical face of a clueless Albert", and it became an inside joke in the dev server ever since.

I decided to later on remake the sprites to make them fit the size of Sans' blaster and give it a more Toby style. Although the mouth was based on a blaster I had seen on Gamejolt, later on confirmed to be from Ari, the design was kept consistent with Genarf's original idea.

Now, all this was happening behind the scenes BEFORE Frank was announced/confirmed in Papyrus' BELIEF, so I don't know why people have started to call our blaster a "Frank rip-off". Keep in mind that just because our blaster has a name, it doesn't mean that it's trying to copy another game that is doing something similar, especially since naming an alive-looking attack is just.. a Papyrus thing to do. In fact, I decided for him to name every blaster, with each name ending with "-ert" (for example, Albert, Robert etc.), as I thought it not only fits Papyrus' personality well, but would also be quite humorous.

Contrary to Papyrus' BELIEF, Papyrus uses multiple blasters, mostly four, and he is able to somehow distinguish them from each other and remembers all their names.

Tl;Dr - just because an idea in a fangame is similar to an idea from another, it doesn't mean that it's copied: ultimately, we are making fangames out of a game's limited source of information, things are bond to be similar between other fangames.