Welcome back to another VERSOTALE devlog! At the time of writing this, DELTARUNE Chapters 3 and 4 are rapidly approaching my location with a vengeance and are ready to subsume all of my free time for the coming week. So, I wanted to crank out this devlog first so I can drink in all of that sweet sweet [DELTARUNE Sauce] without worrying about writing something up in a timely manner for y'all afterwards.

And, while as usual, I don't have anything SUPER substantive to show off for you... what I DO have is some FANTASTIC news!!!

THE LAYOUT

Thanks to help from JJDude, one of our esteemed team members, VERSOTALE now has a solid map plan in place!

What do I mean by that? Well, to be quite transparent, the past method I was using to write VT's scenes and rooms and such when I was working fully alone was inefficient and clunky. Puzzles and scripted moments didn't seem to flow naturally together at all, and this can be reflected even as early on as when VT was just a sprited comic in the olden days of 2017 (Yes, it really has been that long). It really felt like just a string of events rather than a unified narrative.

With an actual slide doc dedicated to making preliminary room drawings and being able to see how many rooms we're working with... it's made everything ten times easier.

For comparison... writing scenes without knowing what rooms they were going in was a herculean task. How are you supposed to write a scene when you don't know where that scene is taking place? Or where it exactly fits in regard to other rooms?

For the first time, I think this AU has finally gotten a sense of cohesion between puzzles, cutscenes, scripted battles, etc. and I can't thank my team enough for this monumental improvement. It took a little over a week to get a preliminary rough room map of the entirety of Haven. This may not excite all of you, but to me, this is the most productive I think I've personally been with this project since last year when I was making the first showcase video. And that's a very good thing. The story and pacing are now in the best place I think they have ever been in all the years this AU has existed.

THE SUPER MINOR OTHER THING

Oh yeah also we now have all major characters in Haven's storyline turned into sprites. Daymations already helped redesign them in drawing form, but now we have fully-realized sprites for them!

...Of course, I can't show you them, aside from Herald since you've already seen him in an earlier devlog. That'd be spoiling the surprise! But I can show you their silhouettes!

(Frisk gets a li'l bit of a silhouette too as their outfit has been altered to fit with their new story role in Haven.)

THE DELTARUNE

Yeah, as the time of writing this, DELTARUNE Chapters 3-4 are officially <VERY CLOSE> days away! Naturally, I, uh, wouldn't expect much VT progress to get done for about a solid week of time

HOWEVER! I do PLAN (Key word being PLAN; we all know how I can be with those) on recording my personal reactions to Chapters 3-4 and maybe uploading those. I've always wanted to branch out into recording videos on games I like, and even said as such that I'd like to do that in past devlogs.

I actually DID record an entire playthrough of Batman Arkham Asylum sometime last year! Buuuuuuut deleted all the footage because I admittedly didn't feel like my commentary was worthwhile enough (And also my voice is not exactly angelic so I was feeling somewhat self-conscious about that)

But I feel like my input on Deltarune Chapters 3-4 will be more than worthwhile because it'll all be fresh and new!

Again, I don't know if I'll do this, but, it's a thing I want to do.

THE CONCLUSION

Thanks for stopping by this devlog. I'm very excited about where we're heading now.

See ya later!