Undertale AU: Versotale

WHAT I'VE BEEN UP TO

Of course, I haven't been spending my ENTIRE time on homework, projects, and such. But I've learned from experience that it takes me a couple days to a week just to get back into the flow of things, and I can assure you that it would not have played out well.

So, in the stints where I wasn't working on academics, one of my friends introduced me to this little unknown indie game you probably haven't heard of called Hollow Knight.

I may have developed a minor addiction to that game now.

This was surprising to me, as I have never played a metroidvania-style game before. Yet, in one fell swoop, I think it has become my favorite genre. What I also wasn't expecting was to find inspiration from elements of that game's storyline. Of course, I'm not going to tell y'all what those elements were. Point is, inspiration is high.

PLANS

The primary goal as of right now is to finish getting the battle recode into a presentable state. I have to admit that there's been a LOT of different ideas tossing around in this noggin of mine as to what the enemies for the battle should be. Should it be a non-canon goofy battle, with enemies you would NEVER encounter in the game? Should it have new/updated enemies in early unpolished states that are likely to be encountered in the game? It's a conundrum that I still don't think I have the actual answer to. So that's step one. Step two is actually the aforementioned task of making the battle presentable while still acknowledging that it is a work in progress.

Of course, then the next goal in mind is to get rough draft implementations for each planned room for the entirety of the Haven map. At the very least, the most important rooms that need to be visited in order to complete the area. After that, in no particular order, script implementation, puzzle implementation, random encounter implementation, scripted boss implementation, etc. etc.

So, still lots to do!

HOW AM I FEELING?

I'm not going to lie to you guys. There's part of me that's nervous about coming back after this long unintentional hiatus and basically having nothing from the interim to show off.

While I don't follow many other projects, I've seen some of my favorites absolutely killing it with high-quality and frequent progress! So, while I'm not asking for pity or anything, I feel it's pertinent to let you all know where my headspace is at while we dust off the cobwebs. That there IS a tad bit of pressure to measure up to the other big hitters out there. It's silly, honestly, as keeping up with the output quantity of other fan projects has NEVER been a concern of mine. But I'm certainly feeling a bit of a need to push on and get some stuff done. All that to say that I hope you bear with me as we start getting this show back on the road, alright?

All that being said... it's back to finishing up the recoded battle demo. Let's really see how intuitive I made this code for my future self to come back to and understand, eh? I guess we'll find out depending on how long the video takes!

In one of the earlier iterations of the story, Asriel was a teenager who could not age due to his parents being killed in the Underground. To give him motivation to escape the Underground, I created Hercine, another boss monster whom he was in love with. I expanded the concept of boss monster aging in the form of Boss Monster Marriage: It tied the spouses' souls together and allowed them to contribute to each other's aging.

So essentially, rather than utilizing anything actually established about Asriel in canon, I had tethered Asriel's central motivation to a character who never existed beforehand, with lore that had never existed beforehand.

It. Was. Weird. It also came pre-packaged with certain unfortunate implications if you think hard enough about it, which I regretfully did not realize until I had already canned this version of the plot... the pitfalls of being a novice writer.

When I completely rebooted the project with this current iteration of the story, I aged Asriel up to a young adult so he could be the king of monsterkind, but kept his inability to physically age. Hercine was aged up as well, was made queen, and even had a complete personality revamp.

But... there was no real point to her anymore. Hercine was now just a vestigial element from a bygone version of the storyline who no longer served any narrative purpose. She was just... a new character, who would appear once, and possibly never again. And, call it a premonition, but I also had this gut feeling that Deltarune was going to establish something about Asriel that could be riveting to bring into Versotale's lore that Hercine's existence would dilute or even just flat-out contradict.

So, realizing Hercine had no reason to exist, I removed her from the project entirely. It IS a little bit sad since I actually was quite proud of her new personality, but ultimately, the many negatives of keeping her outweighed the few positives