INTERVIEW:CHAPTER 2 DEVELOPMENT TEAM

Fred:

Can I say the second thing? Because it was the Nubert room. On the second day of work, I put together the room where you meet Nubert for the first time. I had no context for who he was, but I knew I loved him. I'm so glad that everyone loves Nubert now.

Jean:

The Giga Queen encounter, a true trial by fire.

I spent my first two weeks programming and designing the boss with Toby, playing Super Punch Out, and fighting people on the street for experience.

Taxi:

I joined the core team very early, so I was actually working on developing bullets before Chapter 2's development started proper. A few things I worked on haven't even been shown yet!

Chess:

the first thing i did for DELTARUNE waaas... i think it was the original dark world sprites for kris & susie in chapter 1? gg had already done the character design part, but the only sprites that existed at the time were light world ones. toby wanted me to make some base dark world sprites for temmie to work from.

so i made a couple of dark world susies, and a battle idle & slash concept for dark world kris.

my way overdone slash concept

it's been fun to see so many arbitrary decisions i made in these original sprites carried forth into the rest of the game, as well as fanworks etc. (ie the blue shading on kris's mantle & their pink sword)

Fred:

One of my favorite bits to work on in Chapter 2 was all the vase shenanigans. Vases on wheels, Susie kicking vases, and especially the Vase Race. I think making it to the end of the Vase Race without dropping it is one of the hardest and most satisfying things in the game, and designing and testing the layout of the room to feel juuuust possible was a delightful balancing act of its own.

Jean:

There's so many, but my favorite might be making Spamton Neo get angry if you use a certain cheat.

Taxi:

Spamton's [Press F1 for] HELP. This line of text was already in, but while discussing the battle, Toby remarked that we should probably "make F1 do something." I immediately had the idea of a little Spamton cherub that comes down and heals you, and proposed it to Toby. I got the okay, and then animated, coded, and implemented it all myself. I never expected it to be so popular!

Chess:

the banana. no not the banana

my actual favorite thing... well. i don't think i can say it flat out, but i had a hand in the return of a real original in chapter 2...

Fred:

I got to learn a lot of things about game development, and got a lot of insight from seeing how you work. It helped me become a much better programmer. My least favorite thing was when you decided that all of your quick design notes would be sent in the "jokerman" font, in bright, illegible colors.

((Note: It wasn't all of them. Just some of them. For a while.))

Taxi:

During a group playthrough of Chapter 2, Spamton's shop came up, and I mentioned I hadn't seen it yet. Toby exclaimed "YOU HAVEN'T?!" and put everything on hold to show it to me right away. He was right to do so.

Chess:

when toby needs to explain the plot of a chapter to us. rather than having us each skim a written plot summary, he'd basically act out a live radio drama of the entire chapter himself. he'd read all the dialogue aloud with character voices, play the appropriate music for each scene, the works. i'd even be prompted to make choices where appropriate. truly the optimal way to experience the story of DELTARUNE...

Jean:

Extra shoutout to how fun it was to hear Toby read the chapter with the team and that one time we discussed Toby's graph of what he thought the popularity of each character from Chapter 2 would be over time.

Taxi:

Can I change my answer to Toby reading the chapter?

Jean:

Spamton Neo. I specifically remember trying to balance Spamton Neo's Pipis attack forever. I would send videos to Toby for feedback only to have to tweak it over and over again.

I worked so hard on that attack that I dreamt of Pipis in my sleep…

Fred:

I got really attached to working with Noelle throughout the Cyber City through the many maus trials and tribulations. Some of those maus puzzles were difficult to implement, but they made me all the stronger for having done them.

Taxi:

Gotta say Rouxls. I only did the bullets, but taking lots of different thrash machine parts into account was fun. The little details for getting hit by an all-duck machine's attack were mine, too. Noelle and her monologue are a very close second.

Chess:

queen!!! awesome woman. i got to do a few cutscenes involving her, and i was also in charge of most of the sprites in the giga queen battle. here's a couple mockup gifs i made while working on those!

early mockup with 99999 frames of animation

having fun testing out queen's hand slam frames

giga queen had a pointy nose in toby's concept art, but it ended up getting in the way too much in sprite form. i ultimately only included it in sprites where it looked really cool or funny.

Fred:

My favorite glitch during development was that if you ate moss with susie next to the dumpster, and then talked to the dumpster, you'd get a powerful item you weren't otherwise supposed to be able to get. It took us a surprisingly long time to figure out why. Moss is powerful.

Jean:

My favorite bug: Using Poppup's click ACT causes the enemy to create copies of themselves endlessly until they fake "crash" and get spared. I somehow introduced a bug that actually caused Poppup to endlessly create sprites until the game actually crashed.

Other than that all I'd like to say is that working on this team has been a dream. Everyone is super nice and talented! I can't wait for everyone to see what we have in store next!

Taxi:

This is somewhat common knowledge now, but while we were working on an early verison of Queen's fight around Toby's birthday, I sent him a very peculiar "bug report." We never fixed it.

Chess:

when i designed berdly's dark world form, i conceded that the level of detail might make it annoying for temmie to work from. it was jokingly suggested that he could transform into a More Powerful Form immediately after his reveal, and that this form could be much simpler to animate.

did you know the "sigil" on dark world berdly's chest was supposed to be a pocket? now you do

instead of this, temmie just simplified the design a little & powered through the rest of it. thanks power tem!!!!

i probably don't have to tell you this, but look forward to chapter 3!! it's my favourite one yet!!!