Hey, folks!

Today marks the start of a new progress update log we admittedly probably should’ve done since the beginning of development. Our radio silence across our media has led a fair few fans to assume we cancelled the project/died of dysentery/got addicted to Payday 2, which is not the case.

Except maybe that last one. The music in that game’s pretty rad.

So, without further ado, let us begin by explaining the current state of development and where our course is charted for next…

Just where have we been?

I need to be completely up-front and honest about this. It’s going to sound very doom-and-gloom, but don’t worry - this story has a happy ending!

So, by way of introduction; progress has been very slow for a long while now due to an internal issue with one of our team members in combination with other factors. I mean, so slow that it would take centuries to complete the game. No, that’s not an exaggeration. This member, whom shall remain unnamed, didn’t care for the state of the project, but elevated themselves to a position that put them in charge of a great deal of the project’s technical side, proceeding to handle it in a haphazard and uncaring manner so they could use other programmers’ and team applicants’ coding for their own personal projects whilst making themselves seem and sound invaluable to our work so that they would not be removed. There were also many serious behavioural/attitude issues with the member in question that led to some seriously worrying situations - nothing quite as bad as the coding not being done whilst pretending it is, but still concerning enough to have been considered a serious threat to the project. I personally must take a lot of the blame for this for not spotting the problem before it became so damaging.

My personal mental health has not been in the best of states, too. I won’t go into too much detail - no-one’s here to listen to me go on about my personal problems - but to be blunt, I had an awful sleep pattern and was consistently too exhausted to work, often forgoing any communication with my team and leaving them in the dark to the point that hardly anything got done save for some loose, disorganized ideas being written into a doc on our Google Drive. In combination with the behaviour of the aforementioned unnamed team member, an illusion was established to both ourselves and to the fans that programming progress was being made when, in reality, that was hardly the case.

Thankfully, after dropping several other large commitments and focusing more on my health and social life, my physical and psychological states have both greatly improved and I’ve felt far more energetic/motivated to work on managing OvertaleRPG, kickstarting development once more. Furthermore, the programming team has been completely restructured. The entire game’s systems and core framework has been clearly re-documented and is available on-demand to the coding team, which now also has an appointed Lead Coder to organise the framework and direct task progress. Our coders are confident we can now push ahead and finally get some real core gameplay together (what we had before was just about functional, but came across to players as incredibly sloppy and of poor quality. As director, I simply was not happy putting that out in front of fans, not even for a prototype demo).

The results of this shift have been amazing. We managed to accomplish more in three days of hard work than we did in almost an entire year under the aforementioned team member, who had led us to believe that they had everything under control the entire time and that progress couldn’t be pushed any faster.

The long and the short of this is that development has been hampered and strangled by issues within the team for almost a year now, but that’s all thankfully (and at long last!) over. The member responsible for much of the issue has been removed and my personal health has improved to the point where I’m able to efficiently lead the team once more where I was previously unable to. These monthly update logs are a key first step to remedying the lack of communication with you, the fans, as we continue onwards with development. Feel free to ask us any questions down in the comments below and we’ll get right back with answers as soon as we’re free!

For the alpha prototype, or the ‘demo’, we have no ETA right now, but with summer rolling in for many of us, we’ll be able to share more details soon. I personally feel that it could be just under a few months, but I’m not the coders and we all know how previous ETAs on that demo have gone! The assets, save for Lucas and Asriel’s models and animations, are all ready (we’re redoing them as our earlier models were not well-received by fans, increasing the quality and changing up the art style a bit).

We’re also considering making it open to everyone rather than a select pool. It’s not meant to be a demo for the players but rather a bug-squashing playtest for our team, so the more testers to report on bugs, the better, right? It won’t be truly reflective of the full game in some regards - the UI/SFX may change design, some features (like our new PHONE and ‘Enemy Chase’ mechanics) won’t be present and there’ll only be a few battles and NPCs to interact with - but we’re still incredibly confident that you’ll all enjoy finally getting a taste of our work and what can be expected quality-wise from the final release.

Feature Talk

In Feature Talk, we’ll be discussing upcoming features about the game. For future update logs, we’ll be putting out polls on Twitter and our Discord where fans can vote for which feature they’d most like to hear about next - there’s a lot of features we need to keep under wraps so that players experience them ‘blind’ for the first time, but we’ve got a fair few we’d be happy to share details with you about!

For the purposes of this first log, I’d like to announce the PHONE mechanic. Some of you may recognise this feature from Undertale where it was CELL, functioning as a system to text/call characters throughout the Underground and receive updates from them.

In Overtale, we’re fleshing out that feature a little more with additions that both make sense for the near-future, above-ground world and are better-suited to the game’s larger scale and 3D environments. Through his journey, Asriel will be able to use the PHONE to gain input from his friends and associates on various environments and situations. It can be used to gather hints, learn more about the world or just harass poor old Mr. Dreemurr until he cuts Asriel’s pocket money allowance. Additionally, the PHONE can be used contextually depending on Asriel’s current Main Scenario progress to interact with certain objects and/or unlock certain small areas.

Another feature that we’re not quite 100% sure about yet, but are considering, is a camera. This system would allow the player to use the PHONE’s in-built camera to take first-person screenshots of the world around them and save them to their hard drive. It’s possible that some quests or objectives could be based around using this mechanic, á la Ubisoft’s 2003 adventure game Beyond Good and Evil (definitely worth a play if this is the first time you’ve heard of it - it’s a classic and an absolute gem). Again, this may not make it into the game, but we’ll definitely have a play around with the idea and see where that goes!

Team Volunteer Opportunities

Now we’ve got a proper, functioning coding team, things are starting to look very bright indeed for Overtale! However, extra helping hands can make things even better even faster on the project. What we’re most in need of right now are 3D modelling artists and 3D animators. For both of these positions, we ask that you are familiar with Blender and/or Maya - experience working in/with Unity 5 is preferable, but not necessary.

If you’re interested, just fill out our nifty Application Form and we’ll get right back to you if you’re a match for our team!

Wrapping things up…

And that just about brings us to the end of this first monthly update log. Jun will have some more tasty tidbits to share with you in the upcoming Birby Newsletters on our official forums soon, so keep an eye out there for that if you’re hungry for more!

Before we go, I’d also just like to say thank you to everyone for your incredible patience and understanding. I know how frustrating it is having to wait and that many of you are considering this to be some sort of head-canon sequel to Undertale (no pressure on us, then!), so I’m going to be making a full, genuine effort from now on to keep you all as informed as possible. Still no spoilers, mind you!

See you all starside,

• Adameme. <3