Is that a cut on your face, or part of your eye?

the gash weaves down as if you cry | UTDR sideblog

[soundtestmenu]

susie was gay as fuck telling kris all that shit in the quiet dark of a place of worship. if you played piano at church every week i'd go in worship of you. watching you put your soul into it like that made me reconsider my entire relationship to music. it stuck in my mind so much that when i pierced the earth and made it bleed the dream that formed awakened an entire separate side of the darkness where music was the world.

[magentasnail]

Roots

[hellspawnmotel]

whatever *tezuka-styles your deltarune cast*

[elflojorandom]

a dog and a friend.

[sillyzlaurr]

Water

[cozylittleartblog]

i miss my WIFE, TOBY !!!!

[crabfungi]

Swooon

[clopiya]

tossing my hat into the ring (inspiration!)

[giucomix]

In Undertale, the difference in physical structure between humans and monsters represents their different... let's say "ontological" status; humans are more physical because they're more real that monsters, right, they're the ones with real agency and moral patienthood; the world is implicitly telling you that monsters don't matter, they aren't moral patients, they are to humans as NPCs are to a player. They aren't real people made of flesh and blood, they're made of magic! That's the joke, I think.

Now Deltarune, with Lightners and Darkners, takes that subtext of ontological superiority and brings it even closer to text; the Darkners are literally not real, Ralsei encourages you to disregard their lives; the Lightners stand above them in the great chain of being, and closer to the Sun.

It would then stand to thematic reason that Monsters, as Lightners in the world of Deltarune, where we already know they don't have Magic, all bleed. This is what I have been staunchly defending for years now. And yet the game has just danced around it the entire time— if it's just a simple fact of the world, why not be straightforward about it? Why treat Susie bleeding four chapters in like a big deal? Why let Darkners so consistently talk about blood?

—Deltarune does not borrow Undertale's symbolism here; blood does not anymore stand for "real", or, rather, if it does, it stands for "real" as in "visceral", as in the opposite of "sanitized".

I don't actually know if Lightners bleed or not, but it doesn't matter, because either way, this fact would not be brought up. This is not a place where things like violence or blood are talked about (just ignore the weird man in the weird costume). This is just a quaint little town! Nothing bad ever happens here. We especially wouldn't talk about it around the kids! We're protecting them from it! Kids shouldn't worry about things like blood or trauma— So even a giant bloodstain on the floor goes unacknowledged.

The Light World doesn't allow talking about anything uncomfortable. Horror movies and rock music that may contain references to scary things are banned! But in the Dark Worlds, where the kids are free from the eyes of the grown ups, and can talk about everything weird and uncomfortable they're going and have gone through, the things they know are there just under the surface but aren't allowed to speak of— they can talk about blood. The Darkness itself manifests gushing from a wound in the Earth!

And Susie— well she talks about blood all of the time. She bluntly acknowledges the truth that "everyone bleeds". And when she rejects the prophecy, when she calls out the lie of the religion which claims to be all about everyone being always nice to one another, she, herself, bleeds.

tl;dr :

[reverssentiment]

And because of that, the kids noticeably and consistently lack the conceptual vocabulary to talk about what's happening in Hometown, and have to use the language they do have to approximate it, badly – first and foremost the language of games; toys; stories.

Noelle can't say "Kris did something," she can only say "it snowed," and "It was snowing so hard, I couldn't see anything." Kris goes to Art Therapy, trying to depict what they saw behind the tree, and draws the trees of Card Kingdom instead – and the Forgotten Man and Mancountry are games, too. The closest we've gotten to the "core" of what Kris is hiding was through MANTLE, game abstraction wrapped in game abstraction wrapped in game abstraction like the shielding of a nuclear waste disposal site, while some shrieking, giggling, unspeakable fear sits at its center and writhes hard enough to tear through that defensive layer and torment Kris in flesh.

They can't say it without a video game to do the talking for them – and that game, derived from Dragon Blazers / Lord of the Hammer / The Prophecy, carries its own conceptual load, doesn't it?

[limbomitosis1]

(gif)

* Lets all smile again

….before the sun goes down completely

[thestrawberryalien]

Color experimenting with these goofy guys bcs I lowkey don’t know how to color!!

Deltarune in five seconds!!,!!!

[ballgame]

UM...

[friskibitz]

JUNE 24

[koeniginderskizzen]

Anyone can become a princess

[pixelatedcrown]

It's been just over a year since Deltarune chapters 3 & 4 released! I did the 3D work, which mostly means Tenna 📺 I figured it's been long enough to share some "behind the scenes" stuff, starting with a look at the Maya file for his static poses...

I'd individually render the poses to get that early 3D shine ✨ Here's some of them at their original resolutions! I would work from text descriptions from Toby, and sometimes there'd be a Paint sketch to help out. Gigi drew the concept that I modeled from and some poses too!

I had a lot of fun pushing myself to match the dynamic poses Toby had in mind for Tenna - making him so crazy and expressive was something I couldn't have done without his prompts. He'd draw the faces on afterward too, which really brought Tenna to life!

(lots more after the Read More cut...!)

Here are some of the Paint sketches Toby drew to help me with specific Tenna poses! I love seeing his drawings LOL, genuinely really good and evocative 👍

There was a time when I was struggling to capture what he wanted for these specific Tenna poses… Until Toby acted them out himself, and I thought, "Ah, it's like that. I understand." and then I was able to make them just how he pictured them.

When looking through the renders and choosing what to share, I laughed at these two… Remember when Tenna had a gun? Remember when he bent over in a very specific way that might remind you of another, different image? No? Maybe you don't…? Well. Don't worry about it.

These ones are cute… Tenna is pretty cute sometimes! Has anyone ever thought this? Actually, before people knew he was going to be a strange 3D sprite the Whole Time, I was worried people wouldn't like the style and it'd sour people's views on him. I'm glad that didn't happen.

Toby thought it would be funny to have Tenna do some really smooth, mocapped animations sometimes - specifically free to use ones that often pop up in other things. An extra funny part to me is how many frames these take up in the game, and how his tails are stuck to his legs…

Speaking of mocap, Toby wanted Tenna to use custom mocap animations as far back as 2016 - Ten(na) years ago! I got an Xbox Kinect at the time and learnt how to set this up, but then never used it. Here's a look at messing with mocaped stuff again in 2022. So Normal.

Don't bother trying to help him here, he's just being dramatic 🙄

I particularly like these poses - I think I improvised most of these just based off the context they get used in… I always liked posing his tie and coat tails as if they were also parts of his body he could move. Which I guess they are?

After I rendered out the individual poses in high quality, I'd force the color palette to be limited to just a few shades and then I'd shrink the result down to pixel sized sprites. Like these! I'd tidy them up a little, but they'd really get improved on at the pixel scale by Clairvoire.

As well as Tenna's sprites, I also worked on his intro "movie"…! Seeing people be completely overloaded by this on first playthroughs would always make me laugh. In game, there's a ton of extra editing done by Everdraed, but my unedited cut looks like this ⬇️

This was the entire storyboard I had to work from, and I'm realizing now that there's the note "put him in car etc" that I never did and actually don't know what it would mean exactly. Working on this had me listen to the accompanying audio many times, but it's good so it's okay.

Here are a bunch of random clips of the Maya project for Tenna's intro movie. This is how movies get made, I think!! Yeah… Just like this.

Say it with him, folks!!

For the 3D Ralsei clip from the intro, Toby really wanted it to look a certain way, and drew more sketches for guiding me with this part than any other. They genuinely helped.

Remember how Toby's original storyboard has the note "covered in slime and shrinks"? That meant I had to learn how to make 3D slime. You can see my tech advancing here.

I'm really happy with how the final Tenna animation at the end of the intro movie turned out! It wouldn't look as good if it wasn't for some 2D animation to reference from SmallBuStudio, so thank you to them for the help! Tenna is cute… Huh, I already said that…?

Phew!! That's a lot of Tenna. I hope it was fun to look through my posts! Oh, one more thing - the Fangamer Mr. Tenna Figurine just straight up uses the 3D model I made, which I think is really funny and cool and nice. Check it out if you want! Thanks for reading!

[paintedhen]

you’re not allowed to tell anyone about this

[field-o-dandelions]

DELTARUNE CHAPTERS 3+4 (2025) | Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening DX (1998)