Howdy, folks!

Today marks the 3rd anniversary of Uppertale, which was the first Undertale fan-game I worked on before creating Don’t Forget. It was a fan-game which took place in a post-pacifist timeline, where monsters lived on the surface together in a small village.

Looking back on it, I don’t believe it was a very good game, but there seems to be a lot of people who liked it for some reason. It’s strange to see how far we’ve come since then, and I’m very thankful for the journey this community has taken me on. To celebrate, let’s look towards the future with some piping-hot DF news!

Story Mode:

Let’s start with how Story Mode has been doing. For the past few weeks I’ve been mainly focusing on finalizing the plotline, and I can now confirm that the game will have a total of three chapters. They will release seperately throughout the course of the year, with each one containing a unique world to explore, with collectables to find, characters to meet, and side-quests to complete. I anticipate each chapter to take around 2 hours to experience, so expect about 6 hours of playtime in total per playthrough.

The process of replacing old assets has also begun, so the game is now looking a bit closer to the final product. The houses in town have been redone, and other sprites have received minor touch-ups as well.

One thing in particular that I’ve been wanting to change for a while is the aesthetics of the battle system. In the Story Mode Demo it looked too plain and almost identical to Undertale, which just seemed kind of lazy, so I’ve decided to finally improve it. Here’s what it looks like now:

The background will now change to reflect the environment the encounter is in, and enemy sprites have been replaced with new ones. The buttons along the bottom have also been changed. Hopefully this makes battles in DF look more unique than they did before.

As for the release date of Chapter 1, I’m not really sure. I addressed the release in a previous devlog, but I’ve been reconsidering some things lately that would push back the release of the game. For example, cutscenes.

At the start of development I intended to have cutscenes in the game, but I ended up scrapping the idea. However, I think cutscenes would actually help a lot with story elements and make certain scenes a bit more dramatic, and so I’d like to add them.

The cutscenes won’t be too complex or anything, probably on the same level as Deltarune’s intro, but the artwork and voice-acting for them would take quite a bit of time to put together regardless. As such, I can’t say a concrete release date for Chapter 1, but at this moment in time I’m aiming for March-April. I hope that suffices.

Multiplayer:

Now, let’s move on to Multiplayer news! I have quite a bit to share about it!

As you may know, I’ve been conducting multiple polls throughout the past few weeks asking for opinions on certain aspects of multiplayer, and thanks to that, it’s been coming along nicely. Thank you to everyone who participated in those!

However, one major feature of the new Multiplayer that I’ve yet to mention, and that I’m very excited to share, is that it has its own unique storyline, seperate from the Story Mode!

In Multiplayer mode, you’ll be able to go on the “Master Quest”, a journey to find the universe’s ultimate power before someone else finds it first. Seek out the 12 grey doors that are scattered throughout the overworld, and unlock them to discover new areas with collectables to find, secrets to discover, and new bosses to fight! Some of the areas are completely new, while others are based on pre-existing locations. For example, this area is based on the Void from the Old Beta:

Each area will also have its own unique enemies to encounter that you won’t find anywhere else!

You’ll be able to start playing the first three areas of the Master Quest when Multiplayer releases alongside Chapter 1. The remaining areas will be added as the other two chapters come out. I hope you look forward to it!

Conclusion:

Well, that about wraps things up! Thank you to everyone who’s been supporting the game lately, especially those of you who’ve been around since Uppertale. It’s great to be on this adventure with you, and I hope you continue to stick around to the very end!

I’ll be hard at work on DF after this, so updates on GameJolt might be a bit scarce until February. If you want to keep up with the game, I post stuff often on the official discord for the game, which you can find an invite for in the description. I’m there pretty much every day so you can find me there if you’d like to chat!

Until then however, thanks for reading, and happy anniversary to Uppertale!