Undertale - Pet dogs and date a skeleton!

I read an undertale fancomic thing which had Chara induce controlled hallucinations of themself in mirrors so Frisk could see them. It was a semi-evil Chara, but it got me thinking...what if that's what the dialogue box is? Chara making an HUD with translations and so on for Frisk to see...and then Mettaton, being a ghost in a robot, can screw with them and blows it up.

Chara is very annoyed because do you realize how annoying that was to make?!

 

also i just realized i forgot to post my ramblings on monster magic and implications thereof that i noticed when plotting the DoWaS/Undertale crossover rewrite

tl;dr: monsters are so sensitive to intent, their idea of a 'fight' doesn't always include violence. also their bullet patterns seem to be for communication not actual fighting, and they always attack the soul and not the body; this means that every monster in the game is fighting with something meant for talking, and even the use of actual weapons doesn't help them much because they're aiming for the part of the human that takes the least damage from pointy objects. you can't bleed out from being stabbed in the soul.

 

Has anyone posted this yet? Its one of my favorite fanworks

 

What if sans is the younger brother but acts older mentally because hes been through so many resets and at least partially remembers them

 

I just watched a clip of someone choosing to tell undyne anime is not real and honestly i feel like i just observed a crime

 

Lookit this neat fan trailer thing :0c

 

An excellent still frame, the most ominous image of Greater Dog I've ever seen

 

:0c :0c :0c

 

hahaha so i just played a sans simulator (in which the player is sans) and if i really was sans, i reckon i'd die as soon as i fell out of the womb (or whatever skelly babies are born from)

 

I have been laughing at this ever since I saw it:



Source

 

it just occurred to me that i have trouble understanding some of the skelebro's canon expressions 'cause of how their faces are different than normal human ones. like, there are some where i am just entirely not sure what they are supposed to be feeling, even in context. like, what do the various shapes sans eyesockets make mean? are sans' smiles all the same smile or a different one each time? what do papyrus' various squints mean?

 

It works so well with them both being secretive in their own ways. Especially for Sans, considering that his smiles barely shift more than a couple of pixels. I get the feeling a lot of the time he's smiling to hide what he's feeling anyway, or he's smiling from gallows humor all the time.

I can't tell you what they Mean For Real, but if you toss me screenshots of times that really confused you, I can give you my take on them!

 

i have trouble with the ones categorized as normal, laugh, mad, evil, dejected and side on this one.

and with the first, second, third, fifth and sixth on this one.

the mad, normal, sad, sly, variety and miscellaneous ones on this one.

many of the faces under face and faces (boss) here

basically, i have trouble mostly with the expressions that look too similar to other expressions.

 

:[ These aren't screenshots, these are sprite sheets! This is a different task than I volunteered to do. Where a screenshot would be an image taken directly from the game, like this:

...These are sprite sheets, compiled courtesy of data mining. I don't have a sheet like this, because I just downloaded the zipfile of all the sprites in the game code from here... so I'm running into confusion about the differences of how this sheet is formatted, and everything.

So here's what I can do:

The names of the images (evil, laugh, etc) are the names that Toby gave them in the Undertale files. With games like Undertale, dating sims and visual novels and so on, they tend to use a small group of expression sprites (maybe a dozen or two for major characters) to broadly approximate a lot of expressions. All of the sprites are used multiple times, they're more like emoji than actual faces.

You said it's the skelebros giving you the most trouble, and I figure it's probably because the bros are in this uncanny valley of human-ish but with the distortions of being skulls instead. One of the big things is that neither of them can close their mouth or completely stop smiling, so instead of comparing to their expression directly to a human expression, we have to compare the expressions to each other.

Look at evil and mad, and look how similar they are. Both Papyrus, both with furrowed eyebrows. But they're a little different, too: with 'mad', his eyes are longer and his mouth is flatter with a weird pixel line beside it, but with 'evil' his eyes are shorter and mouth is more widely smiling. So my takeaway: 'evil' is when Papyrus is grinning and doing his I, THE GREAT PAPYRUS, WILL CAPTURE YOU!! act and hamming it up, while 'mad' is the expression he makes when he's genuinely angry. It matches up to when I remember those sprites being used; he mostly uses 'evil' in the walk through Snowdin Forest, when he's bragging about his greatness or how his traps will totally stop us, while he uses the 'mad' sprite through the game -- especially when talking to Sans.

If you've got screenshots from the game featuring these sprites, that'd be best for me to respond to. If not, then cutting and pasting just the images you're talking about would help.

 

oh sorry! i didn't realize that sprite sheets were different enough from screenshots to matter.

the comparison to emoji is really helpful. i had assumed that they were more like actual faces than they actually are.

and thanks! :D

 

With some things they might not be, but here I got waaaaaaay overwhelemed by the number of images all in one place, with my eyes zipping back and forth between the images and the words all "wait which ones did you mean, was it this one or was it that one, wait it was both of them."

The emoji comparison is an oversimplification, but it's a starting point: no individual expression says volumes on its own. They're all only able to be read in the context of the others, and how they differ. Like, compare these two:

Almost the same face, because it's Sans, but. He glances to the side and the bottom of his eyesockets rise and flatten. It suggests his eyes (eyesockets) crinkling from his smile raising his cheekbones up, like his smiling smiling instead of just the smile that is his face.

Spoiler: genocide

A lot of Sans' expressions only really show up in the genocide fight; some of those show him falling slowly asleep, the one with the pinprick lights shows when we finally hit him, and the bloody ones are all from his dying commentary. They're very similar, but fine differences because the differences between them suggest different things while keeping an overall expression going.

 

thanks!

and yeah, that makes sense. i was getting overwhelmed by them too, but i also was feeling overwhelmed by the idea of looking up the specific screenshots i was confused by (i don't think i even remember which ones, i just know a lot of them confused me.)

the fine differences trip me up a lot. like, when i think about it, my facial expression reading abilities mostly/only apply to big differences on human(oid) faces: frowns, smiles, crying, sweat, laughter, neutral mouths, and whatnot. beyond that, i tend to start having trouble.

 

Ahhhh, yeah, that would make it trickier.
And even with that lovely, neatly organized screenshot compilation, trying to look through in search of use of a given expression is a big task.

Normal: the default Papyrus expression. he's a tall, long-faced skeleton monster with a roughly humanoid skull. his lower jaw moves when he talks, he usually only has eyesockets for eyes, but he somehow has inexplicable eyebrows (sharp ridges of bone? )

Cool: as normal, but with the sunglasses to complete his transformation into CoolSkeleton95

Cry: as normal, except his eyebrows are raised, his eyes are widened enough to have googly-eye eyes, and he's got tears streaming from one eye. probably does not indicate sadness; as far as i can remember, he only uses this when he's being jokingly, dramatically sad, like in the true pacifist ending when he announces he caught tears in his eye.

Side: eyebrows lowered, eyesockets narrowed and looking backwards/away from the person he's talking to, and the line from his mouth that indicates his smile is shorter and lower. he's not smiling here, or it's at most a half-smile grimace. some of the times (but not all of the times) that he uses this:
- when he's complaining about Sans, seemingly looking back into memory
- when he's confused and irritated by the human (when we ask him to explain the color puzzle multiple times)
- when he's being evasive and avoiding eye contact (the call after the Alphys date)

Wacky: nearly the same as cry, except no eyebrows (because their absence emphasizes the wideness of his eyes?) and no tears. I honestly don't remember when the heck he uses this expression, but its similarity to 'cry' is part of why I assume cry is a silly/exaggerated expression.

Laugh: eyebrows furrowed inward like sadness/confusion/pitying smiles, but his smile's full. comes across like "i can't believe you didn't see this coming." he uses it a lot after making bad jokes (like when he counter-puns Sans and gives that really obnoxiously long laugh in his first appearance, his "I THINK YOU'LL FIND THIS... QUITE SHOCKING!" gag in his explanation of the electricity maze, and so on).

Evil: it's basically >:) and >:D, furrowed eyebrows giving that feeling of having fun with mischief, anticipating annoying somebody, hamming it up in his role as the monster who builds obstacles that will surely stymie the human's movement through the underground!!!1. off the top of my head, he uses it multiple times on the walk through snowdin, and in the phone call where he offers to flirt with alphys for undyne.

Sweat: still smiling as with normal, but his eyebrows and eyes are shaped like he's in a bit of pain or fear, and obviously he's sweating. he uses it a lot when he's nervous, afraid (like after we don't kill him in an ex-genocide run), trying to lie (that call after the alphys date again)

Mad: one of the two with the least amount of smile line, with all the >:| of the evil expression. it's our first impression of him, a scowling skeleton who comes over to berate his brother. annoyance, anger, frustration, that whole gamut. compared to somebody with lips, it still looks like he's smiling, but compared to the rest of his expressions, he's definitely not.

Dejected: the least smile, eyes so narrowed with sad eyebrows that it looks like he's looking down in dejection. very :( :( :(. this is the sprite he uses the least; the only times i can think of are ending phonecalls where undyne is dead or depressed (king papyrus, the 'family' ending where she no longer even has hope of getting revenge, and so on).



part of why the sans sprites make no sense is that they're in a scrambled order (i mean, it looks like it's about the order of the sprite names, but they're not grouped by emotion or time of use or anything. so:)



first: default sans. he's another skeleton, albeit a shorter and fatter one: the shape of his head is less like a human skull, with the way his jaw doesn't move. (at least not in any in-game, canonical stuff... it did in the kickstarter for one gag, but not otherwise). he's got much larger eyesockets with pupil/irises of light, which is important because nearly all his expressiveness is in his eyes.

second: glancing to the side with smile-crinkled eyesockets. sometimes used when he's avoiding eyecontact, sometimes used when he's looking back at memories, sometimes used to say something jokey-but-sincere (like mentioning how cool his bro is).

third: wink face, he uses this one a lot when he's punning or saying "i see what you did there buddy."
fun trivia point, as far as i remember this image is used like this in the genocide fight, but in pacifist or neutral games it's mirror reversed. the eye that's open in this version is also the eye that flickers with light in some of his attacks. it's like, if we're the world-destroying level of threat, he doesn't dare take that eye off us.

fourth: closed eyes. he uses this a couple times in the MTT resort date, times when he's taking a metaphorical breath and thinking what to say next, when he's resetting his demeanor. sometimes he goes back to side-smiling, sometimes he goes blank-eyed.

fifth: creepy empty blank eyes, used a lot in conjunction with the non-comic sans font, mostly used for being confrontational, threatening, alarming, or to cover up grief with anger ("You'd be dead where you stand," "then why'd you kill my brother?", "Don't" as his advice for fighting papyrus after killing pap in previous timelines, and so on).

sixth: eyesockets scrunched up, still rounded outward on the bottom so it doesn't look like a smile crinkle, pinching up and in above his nose like he's in pain.
this one and on, i think are all only used during the genocide battle. i know he uses that when he first offers to spare us in that fight, when he's saying stuff like boy we like swinging that thing around, asking if we remember him and all.

seventh: almost the same as the sixth, but his left (our right) eyesocket is slightly more closed, a lopsided falling apart. i think this is the start of his falling asleep animation in his final attack, where he seems to fall asleep from exhaustion.

eighth, ninth, tenth: definitely in the succession of sprites of falling asleep. his smile remains consistent through them all, his eyesockets close. the tenth is similar to the fourth, but notice the way the different shape of his eyes here has that upward/inward pained thing.

eleventh: one of the only two sprites where sans isn't perpetually smiling, where his eyelights have shrunk to pinpricks. might be pain, might be surprise, might be both.

(not in that listing, but here's the only other sprite where his smile falters, and it's also from pain/surprise.)

the remaining sprites are variations on previous ones, during his dying words, with a mysterious red liquid leaking out of his mouth. the last sprite in this bunch, though i don't remember if it's the last used, he's looking down a little more than the others. no other particular differences.



this list took me a little over an hour, i'm not gonna do the rest of all those sprite sheets :P but if, sometime when you're playing or looking at screenshots of the game, you find an expression that seems ill-fitting to the situation, ping me with it for my interpretation

eta
i say, and then skim back up the list. the variety and miscellanious papyrus expressions are various, miscellanious ones. too many to do a proper list. it was okay with sans because he cheats, and his battle sprites are the same heads as his text box expressions. i think he's the only character for whom it's the same? i'd have to go check.

 

Another thing with the Sans expressions-in the one where he's winking, you can see that the closed eye is more closed than his eyes in the 'eyes closed' sprite. Either he's closing it really hard or he doesn't fully close his eyes in the 'eyes closed' sprite, which also implies that he sleeps with his eyes slightly open.

 

Ooooh. That's clever and devious, and it works with how that part of the fight goes. I like that interpretation.