Toby Fox has been hard at work on the Undertale sequel, but we’ve had quite the wait for Deltarune Chapter 2. Now, the game’s developer has just posted an update to fill us in on his progress: it’s only “about 50% done” after nearly two years of work.
If you’re unfamiliar with Undertale, it’s an RPG that was first released a few years ago. While it looks somewhat similar to many classic role-playing games from the 8-bit and 16-bit era, it does an excellent job of defying conventions and surprising players with innovative design. For example, the game keeps track of whether or not you’ve saved your game data and it’s somewhat difficult to attempt to tamper with that save data.
Undertale proved surprisingly popular for the day, so much so that its sole developer Toby Fox set out to make a sequel. The first chapter of Deltarune launched in late 2018 and it’s pretty great, but we’ve had an unexpectedly long wait for the next part of the story. What happened?
As Toby Fox explains, the Deltarune Chapter 2 delay has a lot to do with the game’s design process. A project of this type would normally have a whole team of people working on it, but he’s largely been working on the sequel as a solo project. (In the interim, he has since worked to hire more people to help and is looking to fill several job roles.) Aside from taking on multiple job roles, Fox also explored using a different engine entirely. Unfortunately, things didn’t work out quite as he had hoped.
“In summary, I largely spent the past two years writing, composing, designing, and drawing,” Fox said. “However, that’s not the whole story.”
“We had actually attempted to develop the game since the time too,” he continued. “Development started around March 2019 and a 99% work was spent on investigating engines alternate to GameMaker, which I used for Chapter 1.”
“Without getting into the details, I decided a few months ago to go back to GameMaker after all. It still felt like the best fit for the project. So using Chapter 1 as a base, we’ve started creating Chapter 2 since May 2020.”
Although he’s been working on the game for some time, there’s only been five months of development on the actual software. Designing the next chapter and investigating other engines took roughly 18 months before production could properly begin.
It’s not all bad news, though! While we’ve had quite a wait, Toby Fox says that there’s a good chance that the Deltarune Chapter 2 release date will still be sometime before the end of 2020. Beyond that, we can likely expect to see more chapters arrives in the future. Perhaps they’ll help us better understand how Deltarune ties into the world of Undertale. For now, you can get Deltarune Chapter 1 for free on the game’s official website.
