Hey everyone, it's been quite a while since the last devlog, hasn't it? Don't worry, I didn't forget, but I simply didn't have the time because something came up rather spontaneously. I had been intending to actually meet up with Flophawk at some point, but we spontaneously decided to meet up much sooner. So, I spent about 2 weeks over in Canada visiting her and had a lovely time, but obviously that's the kind of time during which you don't really work on games or write devlogs. So we are a few weeks behind schedule, but that doesn't mean we don't have anything to show.

As you just saw in the video, we're adding the Roaring Knight to the game. Over on the Discord server, we've been letting users guess about upcoming forms to the game, with small hints being given out, so one thing I really wanted to do was make an elaborate reveal video with a Tenna fake-out.

They've been really fun to actually use in-game, with their extremely flashy visuals and poses. They aren't done just yet, but they're already great to use. As of right now, our testers haven't had the chance to try them, so I can't comment much yet on whether or not their afterimages are too distracting or performance-intensive when used by too many players, but should that turn out to be the case then we will add an option to disable them.

I've also heard a lot of people asking about Tenna. Technically, a very basic and unfinished Tenna form was programmed into the game for the reveal video, but it's not in a very usable state. However, Tenna will be finished at a later date and become available to all players. For now though, the Roaring Knight will be the final form up until the public BETA release over on Discord. Once that version has released, we will be adding more forms.

That said, there actually was another form we added before the Knight.

That's right, we also added the original starwalker to the game.

And he comes equipped with all sorts of expressions to voice how certain things may be making you feel. The design for how he'd be implemented, along with all the custom sprites and actual implementation were done by Floppo, who has also done other notable work. So why don't we let her talk about that herself?

This forms is pissing me off.

I'm the original

flophawlker.

Starwalker was really fun to make, especially the portraits. Staying on model is really just a suggestion, so I got to draw the dumbest MSPaint faces I could think of for pretty much every single one. Fun fact: all of Starwalker's portraits have at least one error on them! Fun fract!

I also made the portraits for the Knight, which is much less relevant or important or cool. #StarwalkerSweep

Speaking of things that are irrelevant and not as cool as Starwalker, remember those "rest of the Snowdin maps" I mentioned last devlog?

That's right, all of Snowdin is available to run around in, with only a couple features missing (namely Ball and the ice physics). The door to the RUINs is still locked for now however, and the path to Waterfall seems to be blocked by some king of... forcefield...

While Floppo did most of the work on the Snowdin maps, I made some changes and fixes here and there, while also making a few maps myself. For starters, I remade Sans' shop from the Legacy version of the game. While his sprites were already used for a debug shop previously, this is the proper incarnation of his shop for this version of the game.

Just like in Legacy, his dialogue has a lot of variations depending on the form you're currently using. Of course, all of the dialogue has been rewritten to better suit his character and the game's new narrative.

Zacharie also makes his return from Legacy. While he is currently a replacement for Sans while using The Batter or The Judge, he will be moved to a separate area in the future, more on that later.

Zacharie's shop now comes with a unique track, a short cover of one of my favorite tracks from OFF, "Windows Licking". Those of you who are familiar with OFF's original 2008 soundtrack may know what track in particular I'm talking about and I hope you're looking forward to hearing it in-game. Despite the short loop duration of our cover, its a song I could listen to for hours non-stop.

There are, of course, other things I've added or was in charge of. For instance, I set up the doors in the upstairs area of the Snowed Inn to be synchronized between players.

One thing we really want to do, now that we can, is to synchronize a large amount of the world where possible. This will include puzzles and other interactables like glowing mushrooms or the lamp in the children's room in Toriel's home. The current system for this still isn't perfect and a lot of stuff isn't synchronized yet, but we want to make other players feel like they're part of the same world that you're in.

I've also gone ahead and added the Undersnow tunnels.

As a little quality of life feature, holding the run button will cause the camera to speed up, making them even faster and more convenient!

A small change I've made to Grillby's is with how the stools work. Previously, the collision was simply changed in such a way that you could simply walk ontop of the stools. Though, to be honest, this felt very awkward and unpolished.

I chose to reset the collision to how it is in Undertale, but instead allowed you to move directly ontop of top of the stools by interacting with them. While you're still visually just stepping on them and then standing on them, this actually does a lot to make using them feel a lot more polished and natural.

Another small map change is in regards to Subspace, which now features a much more unique border.

We intend on adjusting the tileset in the future to match the sketchy, chalk-like lines on the border, but this is a border I'm incredibly happy with.

However, the main thing I was in charge of in regards to the maps was Papyrus' house. Please, take a look.

That's right! The previously inaccessible kitchen is now accessible and the house is (mostly) as you remember it! Don't worry about the small differences though. While there is no dog shrine implemented yet, we do intend on adding it later on in development. Similarly, we do intend on giving special interactions to the TV and computer in the future.

You might be wondering though, how will other players interact with the layering effect?

Well, here's a side-by-side view. While in the kitchen, upstairs players will appear as heavily transparent, wheras anyone outside the kitchen will see players within the kitchen as being layered behind the upstairs layer. So, basically, it's just about what you would expect and what we decided would make the most sense.

You may have also noticed that just like in Legacy, there are alternate songs that play in place of the regular Sans theme depending on your form. While in Legacy, this was only really something that applied to the Underswap characters (and the fallen human, for some reason), this will now apply to any character considered to be from an AU. Actually, Wario and Waluigi also have an alternate theme, but unfortunately I forgot about that during the recording and remembered about that just now. Despite this, please don't get up your hopes for other AU content.

Another feature from Legacy that I've implemented into the new game and improved from its Legacy counterpart is the Discord Rich Presence support. Discord Rich Presence is a feature that can relay information about the game you're playing to Discord. In MTO Legacy, this feature was not implemented in a way that I was satisfied with.

The icon is very difficult to see proper, the stats aren't necessarily important enough knowledge to relay over Discord and overall it just looked very lacking. So, here's what the new one looks like.

The new one is much better. It displays a clear and concise icon for the game, an icon for your currently active form (the name of which will be displayed when hovered), as well as the exact room you're in (which you will be able to disable in the future). But not only that...

Even costumes get their own unique icons for this feature! This is actually something I'd always wanted to do for the Legacy version of the game, but due to how many skins and costumes were already implemented at the time that I added Discord Rich Presence support to MTO Legacy, it was a very overwhelming task I never ended up going through with.

And, while I was at it, I also went ahead and added support for Discord webhooks; so now when a moderation action is taken in-game, it will be displayed on the Discord.

I've also started working on an early version of UNDERNET. The visuals aren't final, and most of the functionality isn't there yet, but the basic UI is there.

Though you might ask yourself why I would bother with adding UI for a feature that isn't being fully implemented yet. That's because UnderNet also houses a lot of settings for you to mess around with!

Let's go over each for a bit, shall we?

Basic Settings is effectively the same as the settings button on the main menu. It changes the exact same settings, which are saved locally and not to your account.

Edit Vessel / SOUL lets you do what it says on the tin! The visuals are heavily simplified compared to the vessel creator when you first make an account to better fit with the general aesthetic of UnderNet.

The Nametag display setttings are largely the same as you remember them from Legacy; though with the changes and improvements I've already mentioned previously.

This sub-menu lets you display your ping and the player count ontop of the border at all times. I will likely add more things you can display to this in the future, such as maybe a list of online friends or something, but for now these are still nice options to have, even if they're few in numbers.

"Song Settings" allows you to customize which variants of certain tracks you will hear in-game. Most listed tracks allow you to switch back to tracks from older iterations of the game. Snowdin Town additionally comes with a completely alternate track that has never been used before. For songs from OFF, you can choose between the original 2008 soundtrack and their counterparts from the 2025 remake. This menu is effectively an expanded version of that one setting that allowed you to choose between the old and current encounter theme, so you might be confused as to why that track isn't listed here. As of right now, the plan is to repurpose the old encounter theme to be used for the singleplayer portion of the game.

The accuracy features includes a lot of toggles for different things. For most of these you can switch whether or not these aspects should resemble how they functioned in the original UNDERTALE or if they should be fixed. A few of the options also let you change certain behaviors between certain releases/patches of UNDERTALE, such as the shade of Blue Attacks, which was famously changed in the v1.001 patch to be more colorblind-friendly. This way, you can customize exactly how close you want your experience to be to the original game, and which weird oddities you'd rather see fixed. Personally, I do enjoy playing with a lot of things set to fixed mode, but with the Undertale movement for the iconic Frisk dance.

The Pose settings are not yet fully functional, as the pose SFX system is in need of a rewrite first and the pose VFX system hasn't been implemented yet. However, these will let you customize what pose sounds you will hear and what large-scale visual pose effects (such as the Roaring Knight's roar) you will see. You will be able to outright disable these for non-friends or everyone except yourself.

Some misc changes, hm... Did you know, by the way? Due to how Undertale's collision is programmed, there are certain scenarios where walking into a wall will cause Frisk to be layered incorrectly.

This feature is replicated when movement mode is set to Undertale instead of Fixed.

[Comment from Floppo] Did you also know? The foreground trees are actually at different positions when entering the room from the right, since the parallax is tied to player movement instead of the camera. That's awesome, thanks Tony.

Additionally, players will now display a "disconnected" icon when they are disconnecting.

There's a lot of stuff that's been being worked on under the hood that simply doesn't make for something I can really show off; such as how the music system was reworked internally to fix issues with music randomly stopping on lower end devices and various bug fixes. While we've been hard at work and had a lot of support thanks to our Beta testers, there are still some things keeping us from a public Beta release, namely some instability with the netcode and some missing functionality/polish that we'd like to provide players with for a first public Beta release.

That said, as long as I can figure out the netcode problems, there will be a public BETA release on the Discord server before the end of the year and I'm hoping to see some of you there. As a matter of fact, I'm finishing up a new private build for our testers this week.

You might be wondering though what's going on with MYSTERYTALE. Aside from some features during early devlogs that I've mentioned were made with it in mind and the game selection screen, I've been awfully quiet about that project, haven't I? All the devlogs have been mostly about MYSTERYTALE Online specifically.

Being that MTO was the only mode in Legacy versions of the game and has an existing following, along with MTO Legacy being a very unpolished game that has an expiration date on it before its servers go permanently offline, it's only logical that MTO would be our main priority at the moment. The main goal right now is to finish a version of MTO that players can play in place of MTO Legacy, understandably.

Some of you might not even know what the plans for MT even are, so I'll give you a brief explanation. MT will be a singleplayer gamemode following a short, linear narrative in the style of the original UNDERTALE, which serves to contextualize MTO while also making use of some of its mechanics and ideas in a singleplayer story format while also exercising ideas that simply seem fun. In MT, you will play as Frisk through a corrupted version of UNDERTALE that, despite what's normally supposed to happen, continues beyond a Pacifist Ending. Together with Papyrus and Flowey, Frisk will have to set out on a journey to figure out the source of these corruptions and anomalies and put a stop to them. As the game progressively changes more, so does Frisk, until both them and the game itself are turned into something different.

MYSTERYTALE will be a short singleplayer game that'll probably only take around 2~3 hours to complete. Not only will its unique content be featured in MTO, such as forms, costumes and maps based on the characters, events and areas in MT, but there are also plans for interesting cross-interactions between the two games, such as being able to find your MT party at their last save point in MTO or having the fallen human's name in MTO's menus change based on whatever you named them in MT.

While MTO will obviously continue to be the main attraction, I hope you'll all check out MT when it's available. Upon the first proper 1.0 launch of the game, there will only be a very small introductory portion of MT available.

I think what I'm most excited about is the new mascot character we're hoping to introduce soon.

Before we end this devlog, there's one more thing I'd like to show you all. But first, I'd like to discuss the topic of a game's personality. Games can have a certain personality, effectively certain emotions and vibes that the game communicates to its players through various means. The more unique a game's personality is, the more memorable it becomes.

That begs the question though; what is MYSTERYTALE Online's personality like? While I find it a little hard to describe, the game, at least in it's current, unreleased state, has a strangely unique vibe despite how closely it resembles UNDERTALE and DELTARUNE. Despite this, the game's branding has never had too much personality, has it?

For most of its lifespan, the game has had a logo stylized after the original game's logo, with its icon simply being a monster soul, effectively the original game's icon with less personality.

And any branding outside the game itself simply resorted to oversaturated photoshop effects ontop of otherwise bland assets.

What does the monster soul, which is sometimes gray, even symbolize? Frankly, it has no real meaning other than just being there. This is pretty bothersome to say the least, isn't it?

Because of this, we've finally decided to properly rebrand the game and give its logos and banners more personality. Inspired by the new Subspace border, Flophawk was hard at work. There have already been a few hints of it throughout the devlog, such as the icon on the Discord Rich Presence, but I'm happy to finally officially unveil the game's new logos and identity.

That's a lot more personality already, wouldn't you say? I'll be updating the GameJolt page and community shortly to match this new aesthetic.

That's it for now. I'll get back to work and I hope you guys have a nice day!