Deltarune came out! Weirdly, that’s kind of a problem? People who care about the game have this immediate need to stay off social media so as not to be spoiled. There is a rush to for anyone who ever wants to play the game to do so immediately, because if you don’t the Internet will ensure you don’t get a blind experience. You’re forced to binge it or be spoiled.

I was just thinking about chapter 2, and how I would’ve loved to have found the secret twist for myself, even though it was hidden away a little. If the game has indicated there was something to find, people would have found it on their own. Instead, I’m willing to bet the experience for the vast majority of people was finding out online first and then reproducing what they saw for themselves.

Narrative spoilers

But this is not a Deltarune thing. For any narrative media, the experience depends on the work presenting the narrative flow it intends to. This includes reveals, this includes pacing, this includes characterization.

Getting information out of turn spoils the game. It does this so aggressively that breaking narrative flow has become one of the definitions for the word “spoil”, as in “ruin”. I have a much longer piece I want to write some day about information filtering in general, which is maybe the hardest problem ever?

For games like Deltarune, it’s taken for granted that people have at most a week of courtesy before the Internet is flooded with information. And of course there are some people out there who are eager to get that information as soon as possible; it is not universally true that people want to experience narrative as intended.

Except sometimes we care a lot

But is this a little silly? Is narrative purity so reverential that information should not flow through the normal channels by which ideas are pushed to us, like social media?

Here’s what piqued my interest about this today: gaming does have a reverence for not letting experiences be spoiled. It’s just very selective right now. We see this absolute demand that knowledge not be leaked, that games be allowed to communicate information to the player on their own terms. But beyond extremely new releases, we see this almost exclusively with regard to knowledge-based games or metroidbrainias, where knowledge is the gameplay mechanic.

”…okay, fine, you can have one more, but only because of the name”
a Deltarune theory

Answering the questions raised by Ralsei’s prophecy:

• Who is the Angel?
• What is the “Angel’s Heaven”?
• How can it be banished?

Angels and Heavens

First, here’s a list of all the references to “Angels” or “Heaven” in the text of Undertale and Deltarune, which I’ll go through one by one:

• The human in Undertale is called an “angel” for coming down from the human world (this is a red herring) (this could also refer to Asriel but it doesn’t matter)
• The Angel’s Heaven from Ralsei’s prophecy
• The Heaven Spamton is pursuing
• The Angel worshiped by the Hometown church
  • The Angel doll Noelle and Dess made in church youth group

Undertale

First, the “angel” (lowercase) from Undertale, which I’ll ultimately want to write off as a distraction.

In Waterfall, you can ask Gerson about the Delta “with-a-space” Rune, the royal emblem, and he’ll exposit:

As you might know, I have a somewhat complicated relationship with Undertale theories, so for Deltarune I’m kind of forcing myself not to go too red thread board with trying to “solve” things — which sucks, because I really like solving things.

So instead of trying to be right about the big stuff, I thought I’d just talk about some fun crack theories. For fun! For fun, I tell myself.

Susie is immune to player input

There’s a lot in Deltarune Chapter 1 that implies that, unlike undertale, player choice doesn’t matter. The character you make in the first sequence is discarded, There’s even word of god that there’s only one ending to the game.

But, if you look at it, most of that involves Susie. You can’t control Susie at all for the first half of Chapter 1, only eventually getting her explicit buy-in after she decides she wants to be nice to lancer. And, of course, at the beginning of the game, she tells you directly

Your choices matter with everyone else, though. There’s a massive branching tree of options during your battle tutorial with Ralsei, you design a thrash machine that carries over to chapter 2, and you can tell Noelle about Susie eating chalk to get an extra item in Chapter 2, just to name a few examples. Hell, your choices matter with Onionsan and Starwalker.

or, “W.D. Gaster undercuts Undertale’s cohesiveness as a work”

When I wrote The Raphael Parable, I updated it with a little ARG. “The ARG Update”, I called it. There were scattered clues, and a puzzle, and secret notes so the diligent scavenger could piece together what really happened. Except nothing did really happen. There wasn’t a story I wanted to tell, there wasn’t an interesting mystery to solve, there were just clues tied to more clues tied to an arbitrary ending. It was the trappings of mystery without any of the meaning.

Petscop, on the other hand, has a substantial depth to it because it keeps tying itself to reality. The viewer is given a real person recording themselves playing a game. It’s set in our world. The game itself seems to be intricately tied to real-world events; too. Disappearances, the player’s family, even the YouTube account managing the videos. Petscop tells a deep mystery story because the mystery is backed by a story: a death, an abuse, a revenge. There’s meat to the mystery.

Sans (Undertale) is a fun character. He’s spooky. He breaks an unbreakable log, he teleports, he’s figured out something about the timelines. Then there’s a fight with Sans, where he’s very tough and has a gun. Then he needed a backstory for his gun and science, and we got Gaster, who is almost those things. Gaster was a fun idea, though, so he got some extra Easter eggs. We get room_gaster, the gaster followers, Mysteryman, the wrong number song, and the sound test. He’s fun, and mysterious, and ended up carrying most of the mysterious lore bits of Undertale that were never quite explained.

Continuing from Viz Media and the release of Act 1....

November 2017

SBAHJ Kickstarter

Andrew Hussie, in conjunction with comedy writers KC Green and Dril, launched another Kickstarter for a hardcover spin-off of the Homestuck sub-comic Sweet Bro and Hella Jeff.

This campaign was a success (180% funded) and the book was written, printed, and shipped to backers in 2018. Make That Thing is a subsidiary of TopatoCo, a book publisher which previously handled MSPA merchandise.

One interesting note is that Andrew Hussie made a new Kickstarter account for this, possibly in violation of the Kickstarter terms of service, because Hiveswap is in such poor standing that Kickstarter has banned Andrew from starting more Kickstarter projects. If this account were set up just to evade the ban, that would explain it.

Troll Call

A newspost on mspaintadventures.com announces the “Troll Call”:

The real “story” of Hiveswap isn’t found in the universe of the game. Instead, when people talk about Hiveswap, the conversation is dominated by stories about the development and history of the game as a project, which started as a Kickstarter success story but then bounced from scandal to scandal for years. The story of how Andrew Hussie burned through a $2.5 million dollar investment over eight years to produce almost nothing is fascinating, convoluted, and poorly understood especially among newer Homestuck fans.

Right now, this meta-story mostly exists in the form of oral history. This is probably due to the fact that a lot of the key sources have now been deleted, but I think it’s also because it feels premature to write up a “postmortem” on a game’s development before it’s even an eighth of the way finished. Not canceled, just… in limbo. There is also significant pressure on people in the know — even fans who just lived through backing the project — to keep quiet about all this, for reasons I’ll get into.

I’m documenting the story so far so that the Hiveswap Story isn’t lost to time, and so there’s a decent summary of events so far, and maybe even so new Hiveswap fans can catch up. I dug through every page, announcement, interview, blog post, FAQ, and tweet I could find, and the culmination is this the most comprehensive — as far as I can tell — explanation of Hiveswap to date.