Hello! This is the first devlog for UNDERTALE ROGUE. I wanted to say thank you to everyone who's played it so far and I hope you've enjoyed it!

In this devlog, I'd like to talk about the game in general, where it is, and where it's going.

What is UNDERTALE ROGUE?

For anyone reading this who hasn't played yet, I'll give a brief introduction to the game. UNDERTALE ROGUE is a game in the Roguelike genre that's set in the world of Undertale. It's inspired by games such as Vampire Survivors, Peglin, SNKRX, and of course Undertale itself. In the game, you venture across a map where you find chests of items, shops, and of course battles. The battle system consists of a familiar bullet board and waves of monsters descending from the top half of the screen. You have three weapon slots with different effects, strengths, and weaknesses that trigger automatically. Each time you level up, you're given the choice of one of three skills to upgrade, and after each battle, you're given the choice of one of three weapons. If you already have that weapon, it's given an upgrade.

The demo versions (currently 0.1.3 at the time of writing) have really captured the essence of what I want this game to be and I'm extremely happy with the current state of it. Of course, this is nowhere near the final game, but before I talk about what's to come, I want to talk about what's in the game right now and how it got to that point.

UNDERTALE ROGUE development

In the demo, only the first area is available. This is mainly because of the circumstances of the initial release of the demo prototype. The original release of this demo was as secret content given as a reward for beating my Undertale April Fools Day mod, Troll Mod 4 (which you can still download and play yourself at https://www.oceanbagel.net/projects/troll-mods/). I like to use the troll mod series as an excuse to show off interesting and unconventional modding technology, which in this case focused on the storage and retrieval of entire arbitrary files within the game's code, due to the restriction of the mod being distributed as a single patch. This was used for two things: there was a gag at some point where the game was replaced with a vanilla copy, and there was some secret content where a .zip file containing the UNDERTALE ROGUE demo prototype was added to your game folder upon completion of the mod. The execution of this wasn't particularly difficult to accomplish, but it meant that UNDERTALE ROGUE's first demo prototype had a hard deadline of April 1st. The original plan was to release Troll Mod 4 on April 1st, 2023, but the proper mod itself wasn't ready to go yet. Although I started working on UNDERTALE ROGUE in late 2022, I only worked on it sporadically. By the time March 2024 rolled around, I had the basic game structure ready but not much more. My focus was mainly spent on Troll Mod 4 itself, and by the time it was finished, I only had three days left to build UNDERTALE ROGUE up into a functional game. Because I knew that I needed to spend most of my focus on Troll Mod 4, which needed to be fully ready by April 1st, I decided to limit UNDERTALE ROGUE to only the initial Ruins area so I could focus on getting what I had ready instead of making the other areas.

Of course, under these time constraints, I couldn't really add many details beyond what's necessary for the game. So I made a list of everything I wanted to add and sorted it by priority. I made the essentials first and worked my way through until I didn't have any time left to work on it. Most of what I wanted to add made it in, including the leveling system, the shops, the initial weapon select, and the main menu (which I'm especially proud of for how minimalist it is). Other things didn't make it in, including additional monsters, minibosses, and random events (the ? icons on the map currently select another event at random, but they'll be their own thing eventually). Because of the limited nature of the prototype, I had to adjust gameplay a bit from what it will be during normal gameplay.

The current state of the game

Currently, UNDERTALE ROGUE has a leveling curve that's exponential. When you choose an upgrade, the game multiplies the current stat by a multiplier. Then when you upgrade again, the game multiplies by the same multiplier again. This means that higher-level stats benefit from upgrades more than lower-level stats. If you've seen or experienced some wacky overpowered weapon attacks by the Toriel battle, this is most likely the reason. The reason I chose to do this is because the final game's level curve will end up being much shallower to leave room for upgrades in the other areas, because it wouldn't make sense to be overpowered coming out of the first of five areas. But because the demo is only Ruins, I want people to be able to experience that sort of scaling now rather than have to wait for the full game. You may also notice that the exponential level curve also applies to enemies. I'll talk more about the future of this mechanic in the next section.

As for the weapons, I've implemented five of the weapons so far. I plan to release the last two starting weapons soon, which will be the Burnt Pan and the Empty Gun. One thing I wanted to mention regarding weapons is that I'm trying to theme the weapons around the corresponding stat, and I'm trying to theme the stat around the corresponding trait from Undertale. Here's the list I have:

Red soul

Trait: Balance (unofficial), Upgrade: None currently, Weapon: Stick (all-around weapon benefiting from any traits)

Cyan soul

Trait: Patience, Upgrade: Crit rate (not much to do with the trait for this one), Weapon: Toy Knife (highest base crit rate)

Orange soul

Trait: Bravery, Upgrade: Power (which matches the corresponding trait), Weapon: Tough Glove (a rapid multi-attack covering a large area that can massively benefit from power)

Blue soul

Trait: Integrity, Upgrade: Movement speed (which matches the "hopping and twirling" description of this trait), Weapon: Ballet Shoes (their launch speed is relative to your current speed, so more speed means you can launch them faster)

Purple soul

Trait: Perseverance, Upgrade: Attack size, Weapon: Torn Notebook (the attack size upgrade has the effect of making the notebook attacks last for longer, or persevere)

Green soul

Trait: Kindness, Upgrade: Defense (matches the "concern and care" description of this trait), Weapon: Burnt Pan (not yet implemented)

Yellow soul

Trait: Justice, Upgrade: Firing rate (most relevant to projectile-based attacks like the Empty Gun will have), Weapon: Empty Gun (not yet implemented)

The future state of the game

There are of course many things I have planned that I could talk about here. But I want to start with the big picture plan for the game.

UNDERTALE ROGUE isn't just a roguelike, it's a roguelike based on Undertale. Part of that includes the choice between killing and sparing. I don't currently have plans for a sparing mechanic, but I do want to integrate this core concept into the game. In order to accomplish this, I have a rather specific plan for the monsters' level curve. Right now, the monsters outscale you in the game. If you were to keep fighting monsters over and over, they will eventually overwhelm you no matter which upgrades you take. Because of this, this forces you to try to avoid battles and especially avoid the elite battles which give more EXP.

However, that's not the full story. In the full game, I plan to implement a mechanic where the monsters' scaling only applies within that one area. So if you're a high level at the end of Ruins, the final boss may be especially difficult. But once you get past Ruins and enter Snowdin, the monsters will be back to their base levels as if you were LV1. However, you still keep all your upgrades that you got from Ruins. What this does is it adds a dimension of risk vs. reward throughout the entire run. If you want to have an advantage in Snowdin, you might pick up a few extra battles in Ruins. But if you pick up too many extra battles, you might get outscaled before you leave the Ruins. This would of course be difficult to balance, but I think it adds a level of complexity to the decision-making beyond whether you have enough HP for the fight in front of you. I don't think I've seen this sort of concept before, and it has the added bonus of fitting in well with the themes of Undertale.

As for other future additions, I plan to add a timer to battles that causes the battle to end when the time expires. This would give stall tactics a purpose and make faster weapons more advantageous. I also want to have a bonus for finishing a round quickly, but I'm not sure how I want to do that yet.

There will also be more monsters to fight, even in Ruins. I want to give each monster a unique movement pattern just like I did with the three current monsters (the third being Toriel's fireballs). The monsters you get in each battle would be random. Also, I want to do something more unique with the elite battles. They're currently just stronger versions of the regular battles, but I want to make special miniboss battles. Speaking of which, there will also be a set of more valuable weapons you can only obtain through elite battles. This may even be something unique to that area, so that the Ruins rare weapons are different from the Snowdin rare weapons. Once you obtain these weapons, you can get upgrades for it in any other weapons area, but the initial weapon would be unique to these elite battles (perhaps even guaranteed).

As for some of the smaller things I want to add, I'll be looking at adding backgrounds for the map and the battles, and a proper HP and EXP bar in the battles as well. I'm also considering various other QOL features, such as being able to cancel discarding a weapon and adding some sort of pause menu and an options screen for toggling various things related to sound or visuals.

I'm certainly open to feedback, so if there's something you want to see, feel free to let me know by leaving a comment! If there's enough interest in the game, I may also consider opening up a dedicated Discord server. If that's something you want to see, please let me know as well.

Conclusions

One final thing I wanted to mention in closing is that this project is mainly just a hobby for me right now. Progress on the game would depend on my schedule and whether I want to continue working on it. Although I really want to make this game into something special, I can't guarantee any particular timeline. I want this game to be great, and if I don't have the motivation to do great work on it then I don't want to push myself and deliver something less than great. That's just the reality of a hobby project like this, and I hope you understand if it stalls out at some point down the line. This is my first real standalone game, after all, and although I want to be optimistic about it, there's still a lot I don't know.

But in the meantime, thank you for joining me for this exciting new project, and thanks again to everyone who's played this game! I hope you enjoy it now and I hope that it gets even better in the future!