Hello fellow underground dwellers!

It’s been a good 5 months since my last announcement for UTC, and almost a year since I have produced any new major content for this fangame. I’ve been asked by quite a bit of people on whether I’m going to be continuing UTC or not, and since it’s approaching the 1 year anniversary of UTC, that’s what I want to talk about. It may be a long read, but if you’re interested in the status of UTC, scroll to the bottom paragraph to skip all the reminiscing jazz.

In March of last year, I started work on my closed source engine, called the UTC engine, which was designed to help in assisting in the creation of Undertale fangames, as there were a lot of people within the Undertale fandom who wanted to construct major Undertale fangame projects, but didn’t have the programming capabilities to really pull off such a daunting task. So I began work in coding an engine that would be as faithful to the original Undertale as possible, and by May, I released the very first showcase of my engine. It didn’t pick up much attention at first, but got the attention of a game news site, AlphaBetaGamer, that called it “one of the best Undertale fangames”. I felt accomplished and proud, to say the least.

I continued to build on the foundation of my engine, with more features as time went on, and was graced with the opportunity to join Undertale Yellow as a backup programmer. I helped with progress on the demo so it could get released faster, constructing the code for the introduction, various overworld elements, an AI walk engine script, and a prototype to my animation engine that was used for some of the enemy animations. As January hit, the lead programmer for UTY resigned from his position, and I naturally took the helm of being the lead programmer for UTY. This means that my engine would be the home to Undertale Yellow, but my engine needed a lot of work to prepare for such a huge task.

So my engine, the UTC engine, has now become UTC 2.0, with much more features than UTC 1.0. UTC 1.0 could not do nearly as much, but UTC 2.0 can now handle a lot more, and is truly ready for the task of housing such an ambitious project, Undertale Yellow

So for the status of UTC:

Because of the major engine changes that I’ve made, if I were to continue UTC after UTY finishes, I would have to reprogram the first two battles to work under the new engine. What I’m saying is that if UTC continues, the first two battles will be revised with all the new stuff I’ve learned, and become even better than before. There would also be a story to tie everything together, and the engine would feel more smooth as a whole. On the other hand, I’m getting to a point in my programming capabilities where I am getting interested in going into making my own commercial work after UTY finishes, and building my very own original JRPG. My JRPG would have some of the key elements from UT, such as different ways to resolve battles and different routes, but would have an original battle system and mechanics, so my game wouldn’t be living in the shadow of another game.

Either way, whatever I choose, you will see more original work from me after UTY.

Anyway, thanks for reading this devlog, and as always, stay safe in the underground!

mysteryracer