CHAPTER 5 THOUGHTS

Before its release, I described Chapter 5 as a “fun chapter.” Hopefully everyone understands what I meant by that. (Which is that it is fun.) Anyway, there aren’t any more Chapters where we focus on goofy, attention-hungry Darkner characters with the potential to win weird popularity contests. But, thinking about the structure of the story, I think it was the perfect spot to do it one more time.

Even though it’s only been 4 Chapters since Chapter 1, I wanted Chapter 5 to feel like a mix of nostalgic fun mixed with new, unforeseen concepts. Music from Chapter 1 of DELTARUNE. Characters that reference concepts from UNDERTALE… etc.

As for the new elements, this time we added a platforming system where you can jump around, attack, and ACT. Development started in October 2021 with on-and-off programming by Ondydev, creator of games such as Tres-bashers. Eventually, towards the end of Chapter 4, other members of the team were then able to take Ondy’s prototype and develop it further.

Ondy's early platforming example with his own temporary enemies.

As usual, we created tons and tons of prototypes. There were a few design challenges with using the platforming system. I feel quite happy about its implementation in the final game, but here are some things we had to be concerned about…

We prototyped a platforming enemy for each flower color, but not all were used.

• This is an RPG game with a focus on character interaction. If the game turns completely into an action platformer, it carries the risk of making the player feel like “why am I playing a $#&! knockoff of Hollow Knight?” instead of feeling like they are playing DELTARUNE.
• In order to inject some unique character-based elements to the gameplay, the Platforming ACT system was developed in October 2024. A large amount of ACTs were considered for each character, but ultimately we found it most intuitive to just have Hanging with Ralsei and Rude Buster with Susie.
• Another important DELTARUNE-ism was adding lots of stupid optional dialogue for doing different things in the platforming mode, as well as having a couple RPG encounters accessible during that mode. This kept the mood from drifting too far from the main game.
• Another thing we had to keep in mind was that this could be somebody’s first experience playing a platforming game. (A terrifying thought, but technically possible.) Nothing in the game has demanded any platforming skills before this, so we kept the actual jumping challenges rather simple. On the other hand, it was way too fun to make difficult challenges, so we tried to include a couple of those in optional areas. I hope you enjoyed them.

We prototyped various puzzle concepts where you had to swap between both gameplay styles... but most of them ended up a little too clunky and hard to understand.

Besides the platforming, another general challenge was writing a chapter that introduces 8 different characters to the main story without destroying the pacing. However, putting aside how good an idea that is in the first place... I feel like I managed to pull this off fairly well, showing off all of the individual qualities of the different flowers without dragging the story down. Among my friends, everybody had a different favorite flower and every flower was someone’s favorite, so that’s all I can hope for.

10 years ago, everyone was misspelling “Flowey” as “Flowery” and it was driving me crazy. So I thought “wouldn’t it be funny if there was another golden flower character actually named Flowery? Then, everyone can misspell his name as Flowey, too.”

The golden flower, “Gold”, was able to become his own “Mary Sue” character in the form of “Flowery”. He’s trying to be “perfect”... But he doesn’t know anything about what it’s like to really live. His interpretation of “the ideal man” is totally alien and over-the-top. He looks like a generic anime guy and is far taller than a normal human. It’s probable he chose his own theme song and plays it himself somehow… which, by the way, is basically a crappy, misremembered version of only 8 seconds of the Full H**se theme song. And he must think this is awesome.

You can think of the other Flower characters in a similar fashion. Their designs may be strange, but that’s because they had to decide who they wanted to be for themselves. I wonder what inspired each of their “dreams”...? (It’s not really important to be honest, but it’s fun to think about.)

Hopefully none of this comes across as new information. I’m simply pointing out what was in the game.

By the way, here’s some concept art from Touko Yatabe of Studio Khara for the animation! (Her early concept art for the animation determined Flowery's final outfit!)

He has different appearances in different situations. I like when characters have an inconsistent design like this. Especially for a character like him. Maybe the inconsistency is his fault.

Here is some concept art of the other Flowers.

AQUA – I didn’t have any trouble drawing her. She’s obviously inspired by Touhou. By the way, the other day I talked to someone and they didn’t know what Touhou was, so I was like “Bad Apple!?” and they were like “Huh, I thought that was a Hatsune Miku thing…” … that’s not even sung by Hatsune Miku…

SETH – The character Seth is inspired by the character named Seth from Illusion of Gaia. They are both purple and wear glasses. But, they don’t have any other similarities beyond that... Originally Seth’s first concept had white hair and skin that was a bit more lavender in tone, but when I showed it to my friends, they said “uhhh… that’s just… y’know, from Steven Universe…” so I changed it.

GREEN – Green’s appearance is inspired by the art style of my friend splendidland, who designed Hacker, Ambyu-Lance, and a couple other great guys. She didn’t even know about this character until the game came out though.

ORANGE – It was hard to express the joy of her expression in such a small sprite. Look at her. Anyway, it was important have one of the characters be a mouse to make it absurdly obvious how distorted their idea of humanity is.

YELLOW – He had two designs. In the earlier one from October 2016, he was had more of a beard and was a cool collected guy. Then, I redrew him later in January 2020. He takes some inspiration from Woody from Toy Story. He was foreshadowed a bit in Chapter 3 with some bath curtains. I think that’s kind of the full extent of the intentional cowboy foreshadowing I’ve done in my life.

BLUE – In the game, he has a different hairstyle during his face sprite. I thought it would be fun to provide multiple possibilities for what he looks like.

I had two guest artists on this Chapter to design enemies.

NELNAL – Nelnal actually designed four enemies for this chapter. Shinobeetle, Terakota, the pot archer, and the mantis dancer. Ultimately, only two of them were used… in Chapter 5, anyway.

HITOSHI ARIGA – Hitoshi Ariga is a Japanese artist who’s most well-known for drawing the manga Rockman Megamix and designing a number of Pokemon, including the recently beloved Sneasler, Flutter Mane, and Ogerpon. However, did you know that he also drew the character sprites for many classic games, including Illusion of Gaia?!

Anyway, he drew a bit of a fox character, and then I made some modifications to it for the game.

By the way, he and his family are immensely awesome and kind people!!!

Many people helped out with the music this time also.

Garden of Hopes and Dreams – Carlos Eiene – Hard to believe it, this guy was a kid when he made his first UNDERTALE jazz album. I’m super glad to be able to feature him in the game!

Rakuichi Buster – rakuichi – I originally featured his music in an earlier trailer for DELTARUNE... but as long as we were featuring a “fancy” version of Field of Hopes and Dreams, I wanted to make the battle theme “fancy” too.

Cutie Mew Mew Magic – Camellia – For this song, I arranged a demo of the first dozen seconds, and sent that alongside a few minutes of me playing the piano and singing. I also provided a text description of each part. Camellia did all the actual work beyond that. Lol. Anyway the chiptune demo I gave him was originally just the first 6 seconds of this plus the melody but I added some more just now to make it worth listening to thanks.

Flower Man – Camellia – I actually tried to create this song by myself multiple times, and even tried multiple times to collaborate with different musicians to try to do a live version with vocals… But nothing turned out right with the samples I was using, so I ended up begging Camellia to arrange it. Here’s the earliest piano outline.

I Think I’m In Love / DELTARUNE Logo – itoki hana – I made an outline of this song, she arranged it, then I mixed it back together with my own instruments. Also for the logo, it was inspired by the Sailor Moon R eyecatch.

Also, the creator of Fields of Mistria, Claire, drew Pink’s talking sprites and basic overworld sprites for Chapter 5! She is a great friend that encouraged me immensely to complete UNDERTALE so I’m super happy I got to work with her!