“I was so young that it helped me learn to read, and also transformed my brain forever.” Seven years on, his affection would blossom into obsession when he started visiting noted Earthbound fansite. “I played Earthbound when I was four,” he says. Maybe it could be called ‘bullet heaven’ or ‘Bullet Hell Jr’,” he suggests.Įither way, the impact it had upon him at an impressionable age is clear.
“ Undertale was made with the understanding that those types of games are generally too intimidating for most players. The latter was vital: Fox didn’t want Undertale’s combat to be considered ‘bullet hell’, since he’d used fewer and larger projectiles to make it more approachable. Also, bullets offer more variety in movement than simple button presses.” Rather than study any particular games to get an idea of rhythms and patterns, it was an iterative process: he’d adjust his self-created designs until the encounters felt challenging but fair. “I mean, something novel is generally more interesting to people than something they’ve seen before. “I wanted to do something different from what I was already familiar with,” Fox says. Undertale’s combination of turn-based combat and realtime elements had plenty of antecedents, though it has more in common with another genre entirely, with danmaku shooter series Touhou Project an inspiration. Then I decided to make a demo of that game – to see if people liked it, and if it was humanly possible to create.” “So I decided to make a battle system using that text system, which in turn gave me many ideas for a game. “One day, I randomly read about arrays, and realised I could program a text system using them,” he tells us.
In fact, his initial inspiration for this early experiment came while he was casually browsing Wikipedia. The ironic twist is that the first seeds of Undertale were sown from conflict, growing from a battle system Fox had programmed in GameMaker Studio.
For once, you can talk to these creatures. You can befriend, rather than fight, the game’s bosses. Now, that would be interesting.” Indeed, when Fox was looking to raise funds to continue the development of Undertale, the modest description he chose for the Kickstarter page posited it as ‘a traditional roleplaying game where no one has to get hurt.’ In truth, his game was anything but traditional, although he got the second part right. But to play Undertale is to find a game that seems to have spawned from the same line of thinking as that oft-misquoted conclusion: “If only you could talk to these creatures, then perhaps you could try and make friends with them, form alliances. Outwardly, there would seem to be little to connect those two facts. Toby Fox was almost two-and-a-half years old in March 1994, the month Edge’s infamous Doom review was published.
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