Download GameMaker over at gamemaker.io/en or else

if i remember correctly Toby actually got the genocide game delete to work. but he removed it since windows detected it as a virus 💀

the WRITING is genius the code on the other hand is held together by sticks, duct tape and a prayer.

Toby Fox made his game in a cave WITH A BOX OF SCRAPS

"Undertale is poorly programmed" Canonically it was made by a dog barking into a text to speech converter, so that checks out

Honestly, the fact that Undertale is a poorly coded game makes Undertale even more of an inspiration. If even a rookie developer can make such a fantastic game, then you can too!

this is just how people code. if its not held together with spaghetti and tape, are you really even a developer?

The "Fun Value" thing should be in more games. It adds variety to different playthroughs with minimal effort from the developer

5:00 For your knowledge: Computers are really fast at everything. Going through thousands of statements does not require a lot of computing power, however if that is done every frame (which it isn't here) it could take away crucial computing power from other tasks. So, Toby's approach is dubious, but ultimately fine.

"If you like quirky characters and inconsistent pixel lengths, Undertale is for you." - Toby Fox, 2015

_Reads title._ _Gets pitchfork._ _Watches video._ _Lowers pitchfork._ "Good point."

Two very important things: - Undertale is graphically good. The vast majority of visual assets seen in the game were cleaned up considerably by Temmie, produced from scratch by her, or done by another artist Toby hired. The entirety of Home, Snowdin, and many other areas were not only drawn and sprited entirely by Temmie, but even conceived in concept art by her first via fairly vague instructions from Toby. It is not an exaggeration to say Temmie is more important to Undertale's identity at many points in the game than Toby is. There was a strong effort to keep the look simple and reminiscent enough of what Toby himself would doodle, but most of the final product is by no means not a professional quality finish, nor something he could produce anything that feels remotely similar to. This confuses a lot of aspiring gamedevs into thinking they can still achieve what Undertale did with lower standards/ability. They cannot. -Toby's lack of ability to code his way out of a "Hello world" assignment is one of the many factors delaying Deltarune to year infinity. It is very much an issue and, much like the point above, should not be something that encourages aspiring game devs to skip over learning their fundies. Toby has been notably trying to use Temmie less on Deltarune also, and development and the product itself is suffering for that as well.

This video is kinda neat, though the statements made about the switch statement being "slow" or "unoptimized" are incorrect. It's still wrong to do dialogue this way because it makes the code difficult to read and add onto, but it doesn't make it "slow". A switch statement has a constant speed no matter how many cases are in the statement, this is why it's preferred to use a switch statement over a long string of elseif statements. In fact, depending on how the code is written, it would likely be *faster* than accessing a JSON file. (Since in order to access a JSON file you need to make a read request to the storage device as opposed to ram, though you could just store the JSON file in an array, but even then, that's unlikely to be faster than a switch statement.) Again, it's still wrong to do that massive switch statement, but it certainly isn't wrong because it's slow.

Yeahhhhh Undertale is held together by a bunch of sticks and glue 😅it's honestly kind of miraculous that it not only works, but also that most playthroughs really don't see many glaring bugs at all

There are two routes of spaghetti: Toby Fox YandereDev Nuff said

a switch statement isn't inefficient memory-wise, it may be even faster than a file you read whenever you need data.

Undertale is a roomba with a razor taped to it. Good enough.

3:01 fun fact: I saw on a yt video about unused undertale content that this flowey sprite was gonna be used if you manage to oneshot Asgore by hacking the game

One of my favorite things about Undertale is how, with Toby's limited skills and technical crap, it's still one of the best games I've ever played

4:00 to be fair, Toby used to be an Earthbound rom hacker, and Earthbound is pretty much infamous for how overtly complicated it's text system was

I want to point out a few things: 1. Game optimization does matter. However, it's importance depends on what kind of a game you are making. 2. Switch statement are not inefficient. Inefficient is what's called an if ladder, because it will check conditions one by one. Switch statement are designed to determine what code should be executed in almost constant time. That's why it only accepts constant values as cases. So it's not that bad.

THE UNDERTALE DIALOGUE "IF" STATEMENT

oh hey, i'm in this!! thanks for the shoutout

4:47 Minor correction: Unlike a list of if statements, where you run the dialogue ID through X amount of statements one after the other. Switch statements, on the other hand, use a hashlist that tells the game what part of the program to jump to in order to execute the right code. Like it's a messy blob function that could be written in a more coherent way, but coming from a background of backend development, I've sort of just accepted that there are some situations where you will just have blobby code, and game design is one of those cases. So it's less "slow", and more "a visual affront to god"

IT'S A SWITCH CASE!? THAT'S HOW THE DIALOGUE WORKS!? WHAT THE FUCK!?

You should change the "Written" in the title to "Programmed", "Coded", "Developed" or "Designed", it'd still be plenty eyecatching for the youtube algorithm and wouldn't send people to just dislike and then click off which would tank the video and stop KZfaq from recommending it. But yeah I agree it's interesting how a game as great as undertale looks like it was just programmed on a napkin by a drunkard with a crayon behind the scenes.

Games nowadays don't have enough dogs you can pet.

This very much reminds me of Thee Sims 2. It’s in my (and many other people’s) opinion the best Sims game to date, yet the code is so awful, that you have to jump through hoops _not_ to completely break the game beyond repair. Like, certain buttons in the game that you’re supposed to use will just break. Say you try to export a lot that Sims have lived in, the whole game has a chance of breaking because now there’s missing data and it’s just a beautiful mess of a game.

extraordinarily rare oneshot mention in a random video the 2016 remake of oneshot doesn't do anything as extreme as deleting the entire game though, but it does do something similar by restricting your access to the rest of the game until your delete your save file or solving the puzzle related to it though OneShot becomes literal in the 2014 version as mentioned. however, there are versions where you get more than one attempt at the game

So THAT’S why Deltarune Ch.3 is taking so long

read the title. grabbed my pitchfork. then watched for a few seconds and realized: "yeah the code is just papyrus' spaghetti" and then put my pitchfork away

Wow your channel is awesome! How did youtube not recommend this to me earlier? Keep it up!

My experience messing around Undertale's code is when me and another guy working on technical stuff for an Undertale localization project, the other dude noticed me about a problem that when a player walk through Alphys's lab, they sometime got lag and even game crash. The reason for that is because of the screen displayer (that display Frisk's face) works by deleting and generating a sprite from the main surface (that draw everything inside the room) every single step, using function sprite_create_from_screen_x, which is sprite_create_from_surface but with application_surface. We have to modified the code to use surface_copy_part and the result is like day and night. There are more funny stuff we found inside the code but this one is the one I remembered the most.

Yeah, I remember the heartbound dev saying that you "don't need to be a good game dev to make a great game" in a shorts and using Undertale as example, so I actually didn't get clickbaited (Also, there is a code behind sans so...)

"Undertale is a horribly coded game" could have gotten the point across better, but what do I know? I still clicked on the video 💀

Robtop is hiding under his desk begging not to be found after this video came out...

7:38 deltarune chapter 1: 😰

the thing holding it all together is some tape and DETERMINATION

-It works? -yes... -so?

1:17 Thankfully this only happens in an old version, the steam version just has niko confused when you relog into the game

Remember kids, you dont have to be good, just good enough

I know you are going for a rage bait title but I strongly recommend you to change it. You don't want to meet a certain side of the fandom

More accurate, and less clickbaity to say "Undertale is a horribly coded game" because everyone either knows that's true or would be interested to learn more about. (As a modder, it _is_ questionably programmed... Well, at least I was able to make plenty of progress on my Bug Fables mod of Undertale!)

Real. You ain't gotta code good to make a 10/10 all-timer. Make games!

4:30 Excuse me, but isn't switch statement very efficient so it will jump into a certain place in a constant time no matter how many cases there are? From what I have seen in this video, I guess dialogs in the game work in a way that when an event that causes a dialog happens, the event asks a global switch statement to handle a number the event was given in advance. For example, the player hits an object, so the object requests the global switch statement to handle the object's pre-made number. In such a way the dialog shouldn't be inefficient, am I wrong?

Yeah, Undertale is a cheap game. But it’s not cheap in its heart, literally. So much will and emotion is put into every corner of it. Honestly, it being so simple in its controls helps it’s worth blossom MORE, because the game is about subversive storytelling. It’s saying that beauty can be found in anything, and in anyone. And it’s up to you to give it that chance, and you do that so many times in the game that it eventually feels instinctual to the player. It gives someone good values without them even knowing it.

I disagree about the illusion of choice. When done correctly, it's a very useful tool that gives the player some sense of agency without spiraling off exponentially with every decision made. Plus having multiple paths to the same outcome is just realistic. Plus all you need to do is throw in some real choices, and then now the player doesn't know if the choice will matter or not. You do want a common experience between players. Not exactly the same experience, but they need to feel like they're playing the same game. And, for completionists, it needs to achievable to see all the content.

4:51 As far as I know, using switch is faster than using if, yes, the code reads worse, but internally the compiler makes optimizations that make it much faster, using a CSV you first have to read the file and I suppose you will load it in a map, which I think is a little slower than a defined switch, although they are small things that practically do not affect the performance of the game.

Loved this video essay, if you make more of these trust that I'll be watching the whole way through. Super comfy watch, intriguing and informative. Earned a sub, guud shit.

I saw "Dev" in your name and immediately knew it was going to be about the code lol

"Undertale is a horribly coded game" wouldn't hit as hard as written

Super well-made! This video got me to subscribe. Looking for more of your content!

this is the same guy who wrote and sang a song about a 13 year old boy giving birth to his best friend. and it's an amazing song.

I feel the need to clarify that larger switch statements do NOT impact performance. No matter how large the switch statement is, it will always take the same amount of time for the game to figure out which set of instructions need to be referred to -- effectively, they are the O(1) alternative to having a bunch of separate if statements. I will agree, Toby's method of handling dialogue events may seem kind of odd, but ultimately it looks more like a preferential thing to me. It seems like he was more fond of keeping everything in one place so that he could refer to different in-game events easier, instead of having to look in multiple different places around the game. That's just what I personally believe, though.

If you think Undertale's dialogue being one giant switch statement is bad, look at VVVVVV. %90 of THE GAME (yes, the ENTIRE game) is one giant switch case statement

4:45 - I'm going to have to disagree with you here. Huge switch statements are bad because they are hard to maintain and work with. They are not bad for performance, at least in any halfway decent language. A competently-designed compiler will transform a large switch statement (or lengthy else-if chain) into a lookup table, because that's much more efficient and has the same overall effect. It does probably make performance a little worse, because it increases the size of the binary and might cause paging or cache misses, but that is way cheaper than manually iterating through every case as you suggest it's doing. Also, fetching dialogue from JSON or CSV files will hit the disk, which is quite slow compared to a computed indirect jump.

6:56 omori does that wich is why I wondered why I saw Mari once and not again in a different play through

Was he trying to delete the game from the game's own code or something? That's not a great way to do it. Spawn and use a separate process. Write an EXE to temp that kills the game and then deletes it. Or, if you want no traces of the game left, launch the game uninstaller in silent mode, and close out the game before it starts. Sure, you can possibly figure out a way to delete the actual files out from under you, if you know how to keep the game in memory while the files are removed. (Or if you're using Linux, which automatically handle this). But it's so easy for things to go wrong. Far better to separate things out. Of course, maybe the tool he used can't spawn new processes?

I remember that instead of figuring out any type of real pathing system or fixing several boundary issues, there's several Out of Bounds areas in Undertale that have "magic glass" (his words) that appears when you or Undyne walk on it. It's like instead of being able to get rid of a bug, he put a clown nose on it instead and said, "See, now it's a funny joke and not irritating at all!" and went to do something else. I sometimes wonder how the game would look if he knew beforehand just how popular Undertale would become.

Oh thank god I saw the title and I was getting worried I would have to summon Franklin again

10:22 - Toby Fox’s 2 favorite words… *P E T D O G S*

While I agree with the overall message of this video, it contains A LOT of misinformation. Here are some critiques: 1:00 This code technically works, but it's blocked due to limitations with Game Maker and Windows. While a work-around could be done, it's not really a "coding" issue as much as a computer security one. 4:56 This would not slow anything down. In fact, it's the opposite: this is the most performant method possible way you could add dialogue to your game. Parsing an external .csv file or other data structure would take waaaay longer. Having the text embedded directly in the code allows for instant access. It also wouldn't take more memory. I'm guessing you said this under the assumption the hard-coded strings are loaded at runtime, but compiled code stores hardcoded strings directly on the .exe file and only loads them when they are used. In addition, we actually don't know how Toby created the switch statement. As far as we know, Toby used a tool like Excel to write all the dialogue, then used a script to convert the data into a GML switch statement. This would actually be the best system by far in terms of writing the dialogue and loading it in game. Which is why I hate how this potentially genius system is treated as some "Toby bad coder" evidence. 5:10 Not much to say here other than this tweet seems to imply "if statements" are inherently evil... but they serve a specific function and are required to do most things. A lot of the "if statements" run at the start of the level's creation to set things up, which would not impact the game's performance at all. Once again, this is actually the fastest and most logical way to handle things, not bad at all? 5:30 This is a somewhat deceptive critique of Undertale. While technically correct, this could be optimized a tiny bit by moving the Game Maker object instead of recreating it, internally this would make no difference for the renderer. All the font glyphs are preloaded, and the data is re-sent to the GPU even if it's the same Game Maker object. You need to rebuild the text to animate it in other ways due to Game Maker limitations, so this choice probably made the most sense for working with the existing system Toby already had.

She actually has a point, PUT DOWN THE PITCHFORKS

Is this what all this "Hopes And Dreams" is all about?

I’m glad my ‘Had us in the first half’ sense have been honed enough to see the twist in topic coming

When I read the title, I knew exactly what you were talking about Toby even added a reference to this in Deltarune with the Spaghetti Code item

this is honestly extremely encouraging. i want to get into game design but have found it challenging to approach and this video honestly made it seem better. just jump into it, doesnt matter if youre perfect. an unprofessional random guy did it pretty inefficiently and now its one of the most beloved games ever

This is the equivalent to some stickman carrying a Statue of Liberty.

This honestly makes me wanna go back and learn more about the backstory to Earthbound and see if there were any similarities in that process as well

I was honestly hoping this was actually about the story because I wanted to see what unique standpoints would be given for a criticism of the game.

Bait used to be believable

1:01 Regarding that, maybe he should use a list of file names and a loop that goes through all of these file names to shorten the code.

This video is awesome at explaining it, ive heard thor talk about this in particular during a stream and you just summed it up keep making these videos!

The title almost gave me an heart attack lol

I agree with Mr. Fox on the last bit. Hades is only good because you can pet Cerberus.

So clickbait-y title aside, this video really isn't great because I think you can totally improve and do better. The whole topic of "toby fox = bad programmer" is very disingenuous when you're supposed to be talking about the source code and why its bad / how to do better yet you've only brought up one proper example about its dialogue system. Everything else is just cut content, secrets and features that did not make it in (and some random talk about its art for a minute? why is this relevant?) You've only covered one valid example that goes on for 2 minutes in a 10 minute video, is that not a problem? 5:45 as far as I know, Toby isn't responsible for most of the website's content as in he most likely never had a hand in its development and couldn't have added that comment there. The website is all done by Fangamer who are also in on Toby's den of secrets, so its a little something they added themselves

using a switch statement is literally faster than using a csv. the switch statement is going to be compiled to a vector table and instantly branch to the desired code. A csv has to be loaded and parsed, then do the lookup. Its cleaner, but it is not more efficient.

Making a metroidvania right now and writing all of my dialogue in a single array because I'm too lazy to set up a json. So I can sympathize with Toby Fox.

5:30 Ah, the classic "I could program this object to be able to move with another object and spend hours debugging that, or I can fake the same thing through weaponized code jank because this is literally the only time I need it to move like this".

Understanding how really, really big games has a lot of kludge and are made in a not-so-professsional way encourages me to keep programming

I realized this when I started developing in Game Maker and noticed Undertale had a walking glitch that took me like thirty seconds to fix.

Undertale has spaghetti code... boom. the title doesn't trigger my fight or flight response

i feel liek a better title would be "undertale is a horrible coded game" before people start jumping you??

The title scared me for a second but great video!

I'm so glad they changed that for the oneshot for steam so people could actually see the story they don't give any information that closing the game kills the kid

All these commentators are like "thank god you didn't talk shit about the dialogue or characters!" and here I am disappointed that this video is only about code.

2:13 This Steam Thread was surprisingly tame. Why use this as an example of them being horrible? Lord knows you have PLENTY of choices in that regard.

Correction: Only all of the text from the first area, the ACT menu options, and the dialogue that has "choices" in it is in the file you're referring to. It's also a switch statement which would probably be a-okay in terms of performance to have all the dialogue in if it were any other programming language, but switch statements in Gamemaker are roughly equivilant to "if else" statements or even worse sometimes. I know this because I have tested the performance of switches vs if else statements in Gamemaker, seen the bytecode switches compile to, and have also seen this dialogue file.

This is honestly inspiring, even though I don't have plans to seriously dev and release any games I've done stuff for fun and I always feel anxious about how bad my code must be because I really only know the basics and know nothing about optimization. Really inspiring knowing that one of the most beloved games is awfully coded.

Everything from its programming to the music to the dialogue was unorthodox, that’s what makes undertale so great. Toby went and did everything you aren’t supposed to do with a game, especially something like RPGs and made it into a game and IT WORKED.

"Not yet ferb!"

Ngl this video was awesome to watch, and I learned some new stuff about Undertale that I never knew before so thank you for making this video it was really good!!!

Ive been wanting to see a video on this since I saw PirateSoftware making a short on all the text being in a single switch statement

I've heard that Toby was inspired by the Shin Megami Tensei series, it's where he got the idea for the talking to enemies especially, and that series is also has a good amount of code fuckery like accidentally making a boss a debug enemy with only 2 attacks, having a stat that does almost nothing, having magic damage thst decreases as you level, forgetting to compress layouts and having an underflow glitch where you can't increase your agility past like 27

I ascended reality when I went from programming everything as an if statement to programming everything as script_execute(asset_get_index("ScriptName"))

i gasped at the dialogue being one if statement, oh my god

I've been planning to make a specific game for half of my life, and gamemaker was really the only option i saw for me, it looks really convinient

Why on earth do people think switch for dialogue is slow? It's literally supposed to be faster than loading text from a disk and using a hashmap for dispatch.

Came here to see this vid get clowned on. Stayed when it was actually ballin.

8:18 Calling game maker free nowadays is like calling mushrooms a fruit. You can make web based games but that's it. They removed free Windows game development. That's paywall content unless you have the old version unlocked and installed before the switch.