Trivia / Deltarune

General Trivia:

• It turns out that the earliest drafts of Deltarune were either developed alongside, or even predate, Undertale. Once he began talking about it, Toby Fox revealed that he had material for Deltarune dating all the way back to 2012, or back when he was still primarily known for his involvement with Homestuck. This revelation has, of course, sparked even more debate about the relation between the two works, especially since it's now obvious Deltarune and its influence has lurked in the background the entire time.
• The designs for the Card Kingdom denizens in Chapter 1 were taken from a set of playing cards created by artist Kanotynes, also dating back to 2012. According to Toby, these designs were the original inspiration for the game.
• For Chapter 2, guest character designers included NELNAL, who designed the Sweet Cap'n Cakes trio and Tasque Manager, and Samanthuel "splendidland" Gillson (the creator of Megaman Sprite Comic among other projects), who designed Poppup, Ambyu-Lance, The Hacker, and Fommt (the spinning diskette character). Meanwhile, Gigi D.G. (creator of Hiimdaisy and Cucumber Quest, the former of which is referenced in Undertale) provided environmental concept art, including Cyber City and the entrance to Queen's mansion.
• In a hilarious twist of fate, on October 29, 2021, just short of Chapter 1's third anniversary, a Reuters photograph of a Spamton cosplayer at MCM Comic Con 2021 was included in a BBC gallery of "powerful news photographs taken around the world" that week. Not only that, but for the official Twitter posting of this article, the Spamton image was chosen as the Twitter image preview. The replies were exactly as you'd expect.

Trivia Tropes:

• Ascended Fan Nickname: Characters referring to Asriel by the nickname "Azzy" was common in Undertale fanworks. Deltarune uses it as an actual nickname for this version of the character.
• Author's Saving Throw: One of the complaints in Undertale that Toby Fox agreed with was the player character's movement speed was far too slow. This game allows you to either hold down a key/button to run, or choose the option to auto-run. The slow movement speed is even referred to in-game, as, during the beginning portion, Susie repeatedly complains about Kris walking too slowly if you're not using the game's newly-added run button.
• Based on a Dream: In an interview with Switch News after the announcement of the Switch port, Toby explained that the whole idea for Deltarune was based on a literal fever dream he had in 2011, in which he vividly saw the ending to a game that didn't exist and became determined to make it a reality.
• Beam Me Up, Scotty!:
  • Jevil never says, "Chaos, chaos! I can do anything!" He says "Chaos, chaos!" and "I can do anything!" separately, but never as one sentence.
  • While the line "God FUCKING dammit Kris where the FUCK are we" is heavily associated with Susie, she never says it in the game itself (which is devoid of any f-bombs), nor any variation of it. The phrase originated from a meme that took off after Chapter 2's release, which itself was originally the slightly less profane phrase "Goddamn it Kris where the hell are we".
• Blooper: When Chapter 2 was initially released, at the end of the Spamton NEO fight in the Weird Route, Noelle's triple IceShock attack was represented with blue (Kris' color) damage numbers. This was fixed in a later update, which made the numbers yellow instead.
• Colbert Bump: This commercial for Big Shot soda exploded overnight after Chapter 2 was released, no thanks to a specific, popular character seemingly referencing it constantly in his dialogue.
• Creator-Driven Successor: To The Halloween Hack, being another darker take on a prior work starring a shadowy-eyed knight, albeit one of Toby Fox's own this time, and one of its most major themes is forced progression. Fittingly, Deltarune's Chapter 1 demo was released on Halloween.
• Cross-Dressing Voices: In the Summer 2023 newsletter, Toby confirmed he provided the voice of Queen and Tasque Manager, both of whom are women.
• Cut Song:
  • Several songs that aren't present in the main game or the official soundtrack can be found scattered throughout the game's code:
    • A song titled "thrash_rating.ogg" appears in the data for Chapter 1; the filename indicates that it would've corresponded with Susie's assessment of the Thrash Machine after the player finishes building it.
    • "Noelle", an early version of "Girl Next Door".
    • A sped-up version of "Digital Roots" titled "spamton_house.ogg", indicating that it was meant to be played in Spamton's shop before being replaced by "Dialtone".
    • An unfinished version of "Cyber Battle" that has a longer intro.
    • An early, more minimalist version of "Faint Courage" can be found in the itch.io Mac 1.00 version of Chapter 2; the filename for this rendition is "audio_menu.ogg", indicating that it was meant to play on the menu screen for the chapter before being replaced with "Faint Glow".
  • The official soundtrack includes a rejected concept for Berdly's Leitmotif, with blue jays chirping in the background.
  • Toby has mentioned that several pieces of music he wrote for Deltarune got repurposed for use in Undertale. Two specific examples he gives are Papyrus and Toriel's boss themes, "Bonetrousle" and "Heartache"—the former started life as Deltarune's main battle theme, while the latter was originally called "Joker Battle", hinting that it may have been intended for Jevil. The latter is supported by examining Chapter 1's files, where various assets associated with Jevil use the prefix "obj_jokerbattleevent".
• Defictionalization: A real version of both the Golden Berdly Statue and Mona Spamton were created and auctioned off as part of the Spamton Sweepstakes in September 2022. Additionally, some of the prizes for the sweepstakes include the box Noelle wore over her head to avoid being recognized by Queen, Noelle's watch, and a Lancer Cookie replica (3D printed, according to the sweepstakes rules).
• Demand Overload:
  • When Chapter 2 was released, the rush of traffic to itch.io from people looking to download the game was so intense that the entire site was temporarily brought down. That combined with the demand for a Steam release led to the decision to release Chapters 1 & 2 together on both Steam and itch.io once Chapter 2 was released.
  • The official Spamton merchandise sold out within minutes after its release. Toby remarked that Fangamer has to order the merch 7 times more to meet demand.
• Development Gag: One piece of music is named "April 2012". Toby shared an image of his development folder for the game that has files dating that far back, about a year before Undertale even got its demo.
• Development Hell: In a Twitlonger post shortly after the release of Chapter 1, Toby revealed that while he was able to solo develop the original demo of Undertale in a few months, Chapter 1 of Deltarune took several years for various reasons. Because it's unfeasible for him to finish the rest of the game solo again, he assembled a team to assist him but, while he was able to eventually release Chapter 2 and plans to work on and subsequently release Chapters 3-to-5 next, he has no surefire estimate as to when the entire package will be finished due to his lack of directorial experience. By 2023, Toby changed his mind on the release schedule and planned to release Chapters 3 and 4 together with Chapter 5 released separately later, due to the latter still being too far off to keep fans waiting for new content.
• Dummied Out:
  • Ralsei's manual is unused in the game, as it is unreadable in the final game. The change appears to have been made early in development, since much of the information is out of date.
  • The game data contains a file of all choices, sorted by an ID number. Choice number 420 is just "Blaze it." (Blaze/Do Not Blaze). It doesn't do anything and appears to exist solely as a joke.
  • There are numerous unused NPC sprites, including Susie in the Light World with her eyes visible, presumably meant for after returning from the Dark World, though her normal sprites are used instead. Chapter 2, which properly implements these sprites, also contains variants of her battle animations with visible eyes, the majority of which never appear in game.
  • A large number of items are unavailable in-game, and can only be obtained through manipulating the game files. Most have fully fleshed-out descriptions, functional effects, and responses when used on Susie, Ralsei, and Noelle. One unused item carried over from Chapter 1, the Trefoil, even has Noelle respond "Okay! ...? What do you mean, unused!?" when you equip it on her.
  • Jevil has an unused, fully-written recruitment bio for Chapter 2. He likes CHAOS, dislikes BOREDOM, and has 10 attack, 5 defense, and the element CHAOS:CHAOS, with all of his other stats (including his Level) being a row of question marks. His description reads "An agent of CHAOS, he became DEVILSKNIFE to the pocket." Curiously, despite recruitment requiring the player to either spare or pacify enemies, the bio doesn't have a variant for the Jevilstail, Jevil's pacifist reward. As the Devilsknife is only obtained through beating him violently, this would also make Jevil the only character that requires FIGHTing to be recruited.
  • There are graphics for an eighth, ninth, tenth, and zeroth chapter on the chapter select menu, with the former three being tucked offscreen and the latter being hidden in the game's code. Toby Fox hasn't indicated a definite chapter count for the game, so it's unknown if it actually will contain these extra four chapters or if it'll be relegated to the seven hinted at on-screen.
  • Rouxls Kaard appears to have unique, unused Voice Grunting sounds in Chapter 2's files.
  • There are multiple attack patterns that end up unused in the game, including ones for Jevil, Spamton NEO, Queen and others. One of Jevil's unused attack patterns ends up being retooled into one of Berdly's attacks. Also, Queen's exploding head attack was supposed to have a 1/500 chance to spawn a banana that can fully heal you, which isn't seen in the final game, presumably thanks to an unintentional programming oversight.^note The attack used spade bullets as placeholders, and there's a line in the code that tells the game to replace the placeholder bullets (which for some reason includes the banana) with the spinning head bullets.
  • One particular attack pattern for Queen was a birthday prank for Toby Fox by Taxiderby, one of the game's developers. Two search windows pop up, one with the Annoying Dog spinning like a mace on a chain and another with a birthday cake. The game then deliberately crashes with a "BIRTHDAY OVERFLOW" error message.
  • Spamton NEO's turn-wasting attack was originally going to be an Ash Face gag, and the data for it still exists in the game's files; the final version instead has his phone pelt him with a wave of flying heads.
  • If SnowGrave is used on normal enemies, they get dissolved into blood-red mist, unlike the white dust from Undertale and how Berdly is frozen solid by it. As of the Chapter 2 demo, it was possible to see this in-game either by defeating Berdly on the Weird Route with IceShock and then backtracking (before a patch took SnowGrave out of Noelle's skillset should this happen), or by killing the Weird Route exclusive Pipis enemy before they get the chance to self-destruct. Moreover, it turns out this very interesting animation was sitting unused the whole time since the SURVEY_PROGRAM demo.
  • There are unused sprites for Swatch with different emotions, those being sadness, anger, sweating while looking nervous.
• Fandom Nod: In Undertale, Asgore's introduction has his back turned towards the human, stating that he's watering the flowers they're standing on, before shuffling and turning to human. This caused some players to interpret the scene as him urinating, with the flowers' yellow color not helping. In Deltarune, his introduction in his flower shop is similar to the above, except he's more clearly shown holding a watering can. Said sprites are even titled "spr_asgoreu_notpiss" in the game's files.
• Flip-Flop of God:
  • While Toby Fox has stated there would only be one ending to the game, the game's Steam page denotes the statement with a question mark, making it uncertain if this will truly be the case. The alternate Weird Route present in Chapter 2 further muddles things.
  • Combined with Word of Saint Paul; NELNAL initially referred to the Sweet Cap'n Cakes trio as brothers on a social media post, but later took that statement back and said only Toby can make any specific statements about their actual relationship.
• Hey, It's That Sound!:
  • Several sounds from Undertale are reused in this game.
  • The electronic noises heard in the beginning of the song "ANOTHER HIM" is identical to the ambience used in Giygas's fight.
  • Spamton's battle themes, "NOW'S YOUR CHANCE TO BE A" and "BIG SHOT" both use the "WOW!" sample played when starting a new game in EarthBound.
  • The various explosions in the game use the same sound effect in a game platform potentially containing lots of them.
  • Rouxls Kaard's battle theme "It's Pronounced 'Rules'" makes use of the same Synthetic Voice Actor as the shopkeeper from Crypt of the NecroDancer.
• Meme Acknowledgment: The Undertale meme about Sans being an acronym for Steven After Not Surviving was referenced in the Spamton Sweepstakes, where one of the prizes was "Spamton After Not Surviving", a jar of white sand (doubling as a Stealth Pun—Sands, Sans) and a pair of balls representing Spamton's eyes.
• Orphaned Reference:
  • In Chapter 2, Berdly's first boss fight takes place on a roller coaster. If you use the Bump command, the text says "[member] will attempt to bump into Berdly's car!", and they hit this car. This act can never fail or miss, and there are no obstacles, despite the wording of "attempt" making it seem as though it won't always work. The game has unused graphics and code for randomly-spawning obstacles on the track that the characters would ram into instead of Berdly, which aren't in the final version.
  • After defeating Spamton NEO, Susie mentions something about seeing weird "hands" during the fight. An unused attack actually featured hands coming up from the sides of the screen.
• Promoted Fanboy: Taxiderby, an artist and game developer known for creating Undertale Red, one of the very first Undertale fan games, helped develop Chapter 2 of Deltarune.
• Referenced by...:
  • The Pop Team Epic anime's April Fools' Day special includes a brief parody of the K. Round fight, with Popuko filling in for K. Round and Pepadai filling in for Ralsei; Kris and Susie are portrayed by background characters from the manga.
  • A number of Crows Crows Crows tweets advertising The Stanley Parable: Ultra Deluxe nod to both Undertale and Deltarune, including a thread parodying the announcement for Chapter 2.
• Refitted for Sequel:
  • The idea of having a "spell" option was considered for Undertale, but cut, especially once the lore was firmed up concerning the "magical" nature of Monsters vs. the corporeal nature of humans.
  • Two ideas that had to be left on the cutting room floor for Chapter 1 were an actual fight against the Thrash Machine, which had unique attacks based on the parts you built it with, and Rouxls Kaard riding atop K.Round's head during the rematch with it in Card Castle. Aspects of both were combined into Rouxls Kaard's boss fight in Chapter 2, which featured him riding atop a rebuilt Thrash Machine, and using unique attacks based on the parts you built it with if you carried over your save data from Chapter 1.
  • Jevil's unused attack from Chapter 1 that surrounds the battle box and zeroes in on the SOUL^note Shown here under the nickname "Some Rad-Lookin' Spade Attack" ends up being retooled into one of Berdly's attack patterns in chapter 2, re-sprited to fit Berdly's Blow You Away theme.
• Serendipity Writes the Plot: A major theme present throughout Chapter 1 is the player's lack of agency. In the Undertale 6th Anniversary stream, however, Toby talked about how he originally planned to have more choice-driven parts of the chapter, such as an alternate route where Kris could have gone with Susie instead of Ralsei after the K. Round fight depending on how they'd acted up to that point, but he had to cut them either for the sake of the plot or to avoid dragging out development any further. The resulting linearity ended up becoming part of the narrative. Notably Chapter 2, which features a lot more unique content based on the player's choices throughout both chapters including its own alternate route, shifts focus away from this theme.
• Shrug of God: Toby Fox has consistently refused to elaborate on the precise nature of Deltarune's connection to Undertale—whether it's a direct sequel, an elseworld, or what—going only so far as to state that it is not the world of Undertale and playing Deltarune won't affect the story of that game.
  I don't know what you call this kind of game.
  It's just a game you can play after you complete UNDERTALE, if you want to.
• Spoiled by the Merchandise: This is apparently the reason why Toby has specifically requested that Fangamer doesn't make merch of the Lightners.
• Surprise Release: Unlike Undertale, which had a two-year pre-release period marked by a demo and a Kickstarter campaign, Chapter 1 of Deltarune was abruptly released on Halloween 2018 under the guise of a survey program. While the project was obliquely hinted at over the course of several years, Toby Fox never gave any explicit announcements about it during that period, resulting in the release of Chapter 1 catching fans and media off-guard.
• Throw It In!:
  • At some point during Chapter 2's development, Toby asked Temmie to draw a sprite for a toilet, which ended up being too big to use. The oversized toilet ends up in the game anyway, as an Easter Egg blocking the player's path if they backtrack through the City after reaching the Queen's Mansion.
  • The Sweet Cap'n Cakes trio were originally meant to be one singular character as opposed to three. However, when NELNAL provided a design sheet with three potential designs, Toby found himself liking all three designs so much, that he ended up splitting them up into their own individual characters in the form of Sweet, Cap'n, and K_K.
• Trolling Creator: When Toby Fox first revealed the soundtrack for Chapter 2's Cyber City in 2019, he notes that "the City is extremely small." This lead people to believe that the City itself took up only one room. In actuality, the City takes up about half of all the explorable area in Chapter 2's Dark World. He was instead referencing that the entire Dark World itself was contained within the Library's computer room.
• Troubled Production: The development of Chapter 1 gave Toby Fox an unexpected amount of trouble following the relatively straightforward development of Undertale, primarily thanks to the quality-bumped graphics, a much more advanced battle system and overworld, issues with writing and introducing characters in a single chapter, as well as personal issues like burnout and a chronic wrist pain flareup, and Undertale-related responsibilities, resulting in it taking several years to make (in comparison, Undertale's demo was stated to only have taken a few months). It got to the point where Toby decided to forego his original plan of releasing all of the Chapters after 1 at once and instead release Chapter 2 almost three years later, although he does plan to release Chapters 3-to-4 together after working on them, with later chapters coming after that point as well.
• Uncredited Role: Jevil's voice actor and whoever did the vocals in all of Spamton's themes are never specified. Whether Toby or someone else provided these voices is yet to be discovered.
• Urban Legend of Zelda: Undertale is back and Gaster is around. Thought you were going to be free of playground rumors?
  • Upon the release of Chapter 1, there was talk of the game reading your save file from the original to check on whether you had cleared the worst ending and made that one exchange. In truth, Deltarune in general is planned to have only one main ending and disregards whatever you did back in Undertale.
  • With Toby asking people to avoid talking about the game until a day after the release of Chapter 1, some started claiming that there were jumpscares in the game that would trigger upon detection of a recording software à la Doki Doki Literature Club!. There isn't any such detection in the software, nor are there any jump scares; it was done by fans for the sake of trying to prevent people from posting spoilers.
• What Could Have Been:
  • Toby Fox mentioned that Lancer did have a walking animation planned at some point, but was scrapped in favor of the obvious comic relief of Lancer sliding across the floor without moving his legs.
  • In Chapter 2, sprites exist for an unused version of the scene where Susie is injured in a fall in the Trash Zone, in particular showing her visibly bleeding and then blushing after Ralsei heals her. The most obvious reason why these sprites weren't used could easily be that it would confirm what could be a major difference between Undertale and Deltarune monsters too early.^note In Undertale, monsters are made of mostly magic and have very little physical matter, so when they die, they turn into dust; Chapters 1 and 2 meanwhile are more coy about the matter, with the only reference to it being a Hometown resident asking Kris what it's like to be full of blood.
  • An earlier version of the Librarby computer lab map suggests Queen was originally going to be a calculator instead of a laptop.
  • A few scrapped/altered ideas got brought up during the sixth anniversary livestream of Undertale:
    • Toby revealed that in early versions of Deltarune, all the characters in the Light World would have been human, while monsters would have resided in the Dark World. This was changed to its current version, because there were too many reasons why it wouldn't have worked out. Which means for a brief while, we could have had human versions of Undertale characters.
    • In another iteration, the Dark World was meant to have a more vibrant and detailed art style reminiscent of Chrono Trigger or Super Mario RPG, with the Light World being much duller and more simplistic to emphasize an atmosphere of Small Town Boredom. While the Dark World does correspond with a graphical upgrade in the released chapters, the difference isn't quite as extreme as that. At least one remnant of the Chrono Trigger-esque art style exists in the form of a single Susie sprite◊ that Temmie Chang created during development.
    • Toby stated in an on-screen text blurb that he originally envisioned the game featuring a Wild ARMs-style animated intro featuring silhouettes of each chapter boss and an ending shot of the heroes confronting the Knight on a staircase with a white door at the top, set to an arrangement of "Don't Forget".
    • As recounted by the Fangamer associates, Lancer's more childlike elements were originally downplayed quite a bit; Toby ended up ramping them up because said associates kept mistaking him for a very stout, 30-something adult in the vein of a Danny DeVito character instead of the little kid that he actually was.
  • According to a (Japanese-only) interview Toby did with Nintendo Indie World, Sweet, Cap'n, and K_K were originally meant to be a single music-themed character. However, NELNAL sent him three potential designs to choose from, and he ended up loving them all so much he reworked them into a trio.
  • Susie was intended to be a party member since the game's earliest planning stages, but she was originally intended to be much cuter and friendlier, with Toby likening her to Maya Fey from the Ace Attorney series in an interview. Having her start out as a bully who gradually grows into her original characterisaton through Character Development was apparently a late change, judging from a comment Toby made on a piece of concept art that "making her look tough" was a "fairly recent" idea.
  • Rouxls Kaard is one of the few characters to have a portrait in their text boxes, but no Voice Grunting. However, at one point in development, he apparently had some, and it remains Dummied Out in the Chapter 2 update.
  • Originally, the method for cutting Spamton NEO's strings in his fight would involve throwing Kris into the strings, in the same way as how Werewires' cables can be loosened.
  • Chapter 1 was going to have enemies called "Pippins" which were based on dice. They were scrapped because Toby Fox didn't like their attack pattern, but their sprite is still used alongside Rudinns and Hathys to form the mob that overthrows King at the end of the Pacifist route.
  • As revealed in the Undertale 2023 anniversary newsletter, Chapter 3 was originally gonna include a stealth section where the gang would need to sneak around, but it was ultimately cut due to Toby realizing that moving around slowly wasn't fun after developing more sections of the chapter. A sprite animation◊ and accompanying track for this section were included in the newsletter as well.
  • In an interview from the Halloween 2023 newsletter, developer and artist Chess mentioned that she was worried her Dark World design for Berdly would have been too complicated and annoying to work with, and half-jokingly suggested they could have him spend the majority of Chapter 2 in a Super Mode that looked just like his Light World appearance with a SECOND pocket protector, both as a gag and for ease of animation. However, Temmie ended up using a simplified version of Chess's design for his animations that removed the cape and Spikes of Villainy, making this unnecessary.
  • Toby and his team was originally planning to release Chapter 3, 4, and 5 of the game in the first paid update. On October 2023, however, Toby announced that in order to speed up the release schedule, the first paid update would be scaled back to just consist of Chapter 3 and 4. Chapter 5 would be pushed back to a later release.
• Word of God:
  • Before Chapter 1 was released, Toby posted a TwitLonger to talk about his experience developing the game, as well as to answer a couple questions:
    • While he recommended that people should play Undertale first, he confirmed that the game's world and ending will remain untouched by the events of Deltarune. If people in the Undertale world are happy in a player's ending, then they will remain happy.
    • There will be no Multiple Endings. No matter what the player does, the ending will be the same. The release of Chapter 2 and it's secret route has since muddied things on this end, however.
  • Toby stated during the Undertale sixth anniversary livestream that the Card Kingdom's Dark Fountain influenced the King and changed his behavior.
• Write What You Know: According to Toby in the 6th Anniversary livestream of Chapter 1, the scene where Susie bullies Kris before they enter the Dark World was inspired by what a real bully did in Toby's life, who was familiar with his mother.
• Word of Saint Paul: Samanthuel Gillson, who provided the character designs for Poppup, Fommt, Hacker, and Ambyu-Lance, stated that Poppup was not inspired by the memetic "Totally Not a Virus. Trust Me...im a dolphin" icon from the WINDOWS 93 website; rather, the character is designed after dolphins because dolphins are known for being communicative and jumping out of the ocean (and also because they're funny). Additionally, the work that directly inspired Poppup's design is Fin Fin on Teo the Magic Planet.

---