i love cats

1/7

Here are some of the Paint sketches Toby drew to help me with specific Tenna poses! I love seeing his drawings LOL, genuinely really good and evocative 👍

There was a time when I was struggling to capture what he wanted for these specific Tenna poses… Until Toby acted them out himself, and I thought, "Ah, it's like that. I understand." and then I was able to make them just how he pictured them.

When looking through the renders and choosing what to share, I laughed at these two… Remember when Tenna had a gun? Remember when he bent over in a very specific way that might remind you of another, different image? No? Maybe you don't…? Well. Don't worry about it.

These ones are cute… Tenna is pretty cute sometimes! Has anyone ever thought this? Actually, before people knew he was going to be a strange 3D sprite the Whole Time, I was worried people wouldn't like the style and it'd sour people's views on him. I'm glad that didn't happen.

Toby thought it would be funny to have Tenna do some really smooth, mocapped animations sometimes - specifically free to use ones that often pop up in other things. An extra funny part to me is how many frames these take up in the game, and how his tails are stuck to his legs…

Speaking of mocap, Toby wanted Tenna to use custom mocap animations as far back as 2016 - Ten(na) years ago! I got an Xbox Kinect at the time and learnt how to set this up, but then never used it. Here's a look at messing with mocaped stuff again in 2022. So Normal.

Don't bother trying to help him here, he's just being dramatic 🙄

I particularly like these poses - I think I improvised most of these just based off the context they get used in… I always liked posing his tie and coat tails as if they were also parts of his body he could move. Which I guess they are?

After I rendered out the individual poses in high quality, I'd force the color palette to be limited to just a few shades and then I'd shrink the result down to pixel sized sprites. Like these! I'd tidy them up a little, but they'd really get improved on at the pixel scale by Clairvoire.

As well as Tenna's sprites, I also worked on his intro "movie"…! Seeing people be completely overloaded by this on first playthroughs would always make me laugh. In game, there's a ton of extra editing done by Everdraed, but my unedited cut looks like this ⬇️

This was the entire storyboard I had to work from, and I'm realizing now that there's the note "put him in car etc" that I never did and actually don't know what it would mean exactly. Working on this had me listen to the accompanying audio many times, but it's good so it's okay.

Here are a bunch of random clips of the Maya project for Tenna's intro movie. This is how movies get made, I think!! Yeah… Just like this.

Say it with him, folks!!

For the 3D Ralsei clip from the intro, Toby really wanted it to look a certain way, and drew more sketches for guiding me with this part than any other. They genuinely helped.

Remember how Toby's original storyboard has the note "covered in slime and shrinks"? That meant I had to learn how to make 3D slime. You can see my tech advancing here.

I'm really happy with how the final Tenna animation at the end of the intro movie turned out! It wouldn't look as good if it wasn't for some 2D animation to reference from SmallBuStudio, so thank you to them for the help! Tenna is cute… Huh, I already said that…?

(Spoliers and speculation ahead obs)

I don't think that this is being done maliciously, or is purposefully being pushed aside. It is something that is genuinely hard to distinguish, and is something that many seem to find a stumbling block

You can theorise any which way about who is behind the knight, any number of candidates are at this point plausible

But its hard to ignore what we are presented. The knight is decidedly different from others we have encountered. They do not take on the regular form of either a lightner or a real world object, changed by the darkest of darks.

It can change its form at will, moulding itself into any shape it wants to be. It's also strong, even more then the boss enemies we fight at the end of the first 3 dark worlds, requiring a special item for most to beat it. An extension of this is that it seems to drip, frames of it show it seemingly melting

It is genuinely unlike most other beings we see in game. The only ones that come close are the titan and its spawn, but even then the knight seems distinct. For one it creates these beings, seemingly more power then they have, and it also seems more aware. It's able to interact with the world outside of destruction, it has secret aliances with several characters, indicating its ability to handle more complex thought

So, it is like nothing we have seen in Deltarune

But maybe we have seen beings not to dissimilar elsewhere.

Recall its melting, and ability to shapeshift. Think of its black and white overworld colour palette.

These qualities align it with a cast of monsters, unusual in themselves, present in Undertale

The amalgams

Looking at the knights design once more, I think that we can pin down one of the precursor beings.

The antlers are the most obvious, and there are plenty of other connections which align the knight to be one of the Holiday family. Using the logic of the amalgams, and the fact that we never see one reverted back to its original form, the easiest conclusion to make is that the knight is the Holiday we know to be missing, Dess.

I must adress what to some would be a weak point of this theory. The knight and amalgams are different. Amalgams are weak, barely able to express themselves, and animalistic. The knight in comparison is capable of strong attacks, and is much more stable and in control, of itself and its surroundings.

I believe that the difference between them can be explained by the 'glue' that houses them together.

Amalgams are formed by injecting the essence of human determination into a monster. It seems that this determination, without a proper vessel, will cause the melting of the monster's body (recall also Undyne in the genocide route)

I propose that the knight does indeed contain a proper vessel, an actual human soul, sourced from the only human in town, Kris

Kris is seemingly controlled by a soul which is not their own, which they reject and oppose, and yet to which they are beholden. What became of their original soul? Why have they become a vessel for this otherworldly being

This could explain some of the closeness between Kris and the knight. While they do not openly communicate, if they come into close contact with each other they will not fight unless already engaged with one, Kris will make signals at them to end a fight early,

They seem to have an inate connection. I say that they are two halves of the same whole