Alright, before starting this, I want y’all to read the ENTIRE devlog. All of it. Not quitting after reading a bit of it, I want you guys to read all of it. Aight? Good. Except maybe the next bit. You know, those fancy lines seperate each part of the devlog and you can skip the next one. It’s not important, just a bit of a summary of this game’s history.

Let’s start this off with how Mysterytale came to be.

So, over a year ago, I started messing with someone else’s old and clunky Undertale-Fangame engine just for the heck of it, but was disappointed as to how limited it was and how little it actually came close to the original Undertale-Game. I decided to make my own full Undertale-Fangame Engine.

After finishing the engine, I figured that too much work had gone into it to just give it into the hands of some kids who wouldn’t know how to make a proper game if they had a manual. Besides, I didn’t want to risk not being credited at all, since that is what I saw happen with RickyG’s engine. Now, with Ricky’s old engine, you could tell it was his engine very easily. But when an engine is fairly close to Undertale’s, like mine was, and people don’t credit the creator of the engine and pretend it was their own work, it isn’t necessarily easy to tell if they actually used an engine or made their own. Yes, when it’s a poorly-made game with lots of grammar mistakes and bad sprite-edits, then it obviously used somebody else’s engine. But my concerns were still there… Besides, I kind of have a phobia of giving anything that is mine to anyone else.

So, seeing as how I had to shift plans for the engine, but had no actual Undertale-Fangame ever planned, I decided to just mess around with GameMaker Server and just have some fun. It was never supposed to be anything big, which is why I just showed a few screenshots on Don’t Forget’s Discord. Looking back, I should’ve probably not done that.. I think? I didn’t really see it as advertising, as I just wanted to be like “hey, guys, i did something cool, be proud of me, please.” Some people got interested in the project. It had no set future or anything. It was just me messing about. Eventually, I added a textbox-based chat-system, the guys who were interested created a small little dm-group for discussion of it and eventually, the Mysterytale Discord Server was created.

A GameJolt page was created a few months after some testing was done, and eventually, the first public build was ever uploaded. Mairusu was invited by one of our admins to come over and try it out and he did. However, that version was very short, so he didn’t record it, but said he’d come back another time to check out how the game has evolved until then.

The game was being worked on and being worked on. It had evolved into my first major project. The community was small, but nice, until one day, Mairusu returned to play the game again, and even recorded it. And so, the Mysterytale Community as we know it was born. The game finally got some attention. People were storming in to play around with all the crazy skins and the such. At this point, I was already feeling a bit of creative fatigue, but I kept going.

But the creative fatigue kept growing and growing. My interest in working on the game sunk and sunk. The game became more planning for cool things than actually wanting to do something. Alas, I lost all my interest in working on it.

tl;dr: the game is on hiatus. not cancelled. but i will not be working on it for who-knows-how-long. no updates for a while. there will probably be updates, and that’s why i recommend you to keep following the game for when it’s time, but for now, no updates.

I have noticed that I have grown less and less proud of the game with every single day. Regretting more and more of my decisions. Yes, that is a part of becoming more and more mature, but I just don’t like the game as much as I used to anymore.

Don’t get me wrong, I still love the game for what it means to me. I have met so many amazing people thanks to this game. Carey, Rasp, Perp, Serns, Frisk-O and more, which I can’t mention because otherwise that would take up 99% of this DevLog. But most importantly, if it wasn’t for this game, I would have never met the holy angel that is my girlfriend. And I could not be more thankful for that.

I really wanna thank everyone who helped this game grow, everyone who played a role in this rollercoaster of events which lead up to this point. I wanna thank the people who recorded this game, like Mairusu, Luigikid, SkyChrew, DaveAce, Core, jayonicblaze and everyone else. I wanna thank the entire MTO-Team (which we will now have to rename for reasons I will mention later in this devlog), all the admins, artists and composers. Even people who I had arguments with, like DiA, BMon, Gamaxp, etc. Everyone who was banned, everyone who was there. (& Flop) I wanna thank all of you. I really can’t express it enough. You all have made my life go from boring-everyday-sitting-on-my-butt-and-wishing-any-of-my-friends-remembered-me to happy-everyday-people-care-about-me-now.

But most importantly, I wanna thank my amazing, perfect and talented smol guardian angel for making me smile every single day of my life and making the Snow halate for me. Without her, I dunno, I would’ve probably gone from ironically-edgy to unironically-edgy.

So in the words of a certain, copyrighted plumber:
“Thank you so much for-a-playing my game!”
..and thanks for having stuck around. Hope y’all gonna stick around some more.

So, the game is not gonna recieve any updates for god-knows-how-long. But what next?

Well, “creative fatigue” only really describes my feelings towards Mysterytale, but not game development as a whole.

So instead of focusing all my energy on one goddamn project for all my life, I’m just gonna work on things I wanna work on.

One of which is gonna be an all-original platforming-RPG featuring cats. Doesn’t that sound exciting? Think Super Paper Mario with Thousand-Year Door’s Battle-System and with cats and plenty of wacky stuff and art styles.

And as for fan-games, no, I’m not quitting those either. I’ve been working on something which I might create a GameJolt page for soon enough.. Maybe even right after finishing up the devlog.

So, yeah, expect more stuff from me, expect Mysterytale to not be dead, so yeah.

On a side-note, the Mysterytale Discord is now the afanguy Discord. No, I don’t praise myself, I just think it’s easier to bring all my projects to the same server. It would also be easier to manage for all the admins. It might be more channels, but less servers in your list.

Anyhow, I’m probably gonna tweet this to some of the YouTubers mentioned, just so they know about this game’s situation. And I’m probably gonna make another DevLog for when I released the first public build of another game.. since I need to self-plug and all.

Okay, this got unexpectedly long… Uh.. Stay grand and eat your vegetables. Don’t overdose on memes and stay in school… or at work.. or whatever.

See y’all on the other side