It has been almost two years since our last instalment of Deltarune, Toby Fox's follow-up to Undertale and, given the three-year wait between the first two chapters, this isn't all that surprising. However, Fox has recently shared an update on the development of Chapter 3 to keep us all in the loop about what's going on (thanks, Nintendo Everything).
Released as a part of his free newsletter, Fox noted that progress is still being made on Chapter 3, with the team working on the final overworld area for the instalment. After this, it looks like the chapter should be almost ready to go with Fox stating that he will need to give it a thorough once-over — though he hopes that this won't take too long.
The most interesting point that we have taken from this update is the small amount of information given about the instalment itself, with Fox stating that it is going to be "a pretty strange one" which focuses on "unusual gameplay elements" over story. Our small criticisms with the first two chapters until this point have been to do with how safe the game has played things in terms of its relationship to Undertale, so we're hoping that the next section can provide some shock factor.
You can sign up to the mailing list here for future updates, but we have provided the most recent information (via Nintendo Everything) for you to check out below:
As was the case last time, we’re focusing on Chapter 3. However, there are a few people working on pieces of later chapters, such as bullet patterns or puzzles.
As for Chapter 3, we’re finally creating the final overworld area. You could think of it like the “Queen’s Castle” or “Card Castle”, but for this chapter. With this complete, the chapter will finally be playable all the way through…! (Fun Fact: I composed the song for this area in 2016…)
This Chapter is made of many different pieces… so it’s been hard to understand exactly how everything was turning out. Now that things are clearer, I just need to roll over the entire game with a steamroller and crush out all the bumps. There may be things to add, things to fix, or things to remove… but, many pieces have been quite polished already, so it won’t be too bad.
As you can tell, this chapter is shaping up to be a pretty strange one. I mostly focused on unusual gameplay elements, and it’s not too heavy on the story. Since it’s so frivolous, I feel a bit self-conscious about it… but, at least I got to try something different!
Anyway, Chapter 4 will be a much more standard chapter!
It looks like things are ticking along nicely on the next Deltarune chapter, so our fingers are crossed that we will get word of a release date soon.