I know, I know…this is a blog site about fan films, not fan games. But did you even know there is such a thing as a fan game? I didn’t until a few years ago when my now-14-year-old son Jayden got very interested in something called UNDERTALE.
Released originally back in 2015, Undertale was created by an independent game developer named TOBY FOX following a 2013 Kickstarter campaign with a $5K goal. A month later, the crowd-funder finished with ten times that amount! Initially launched for Windows and Max OS, in the ensuing years, Undertale was later released for Playstation, Nintendo Switch, and ultimately xBox. According to this rather extensive Wikipedia article…
The game was acclaimed for its thematic material, intuitive combat system, musical score, originality, story, dialogue, and characters; however, the reaction to its art style was mixed. The game has sold at least five million copies and was nominated for multiple accolades and awards. Several gaming publications and conventions listed Undertale as game of the year, and others have since listed it as one of the greatest video games ever made.
The music for the game (composed by Toby Fox himself) was released on an official soundtrack along with the game and became wildly popular, spawning two official Undertale cover albums—one electronic/metal and the other jazz. Not bad for a guy who had never written a full video game before and crowd-funded its development for a tiny fraction of what the big gaming corporations were spending!
Rather than try to explain the game to you, I’ll just show you this video (surprisingly recent, as the game is still immensely popular) that shows the gameplay…
Hard to believe that such a simple-looking, 2D artwork role-playing game could catch fire like Undertale did, but it seemed to hit some kind of magical sweet-spot for players of all ages…including Jayden when he was only 10 or 11. Within a few months, Jayden was designing his own Undertale “fan games” using a programming engine called Scratch that—surprisingly—was never intended for such advanced gameplay coding. But that didn’t stop my son!
To give you an idea of what Jayden was capable of while still only 12 years old, here’s a video of an Undertale-based fan game he created in 2023. I can’t show the actual game itself, only a video of the full game that he posted to his YouTube channel…
Jayden created all of the graphics and animations himself (the individual visual elements are known as “sprites”) and did all of the coding. The only thing that Jayden wasn’t responsible for was the music, which he downloaded from other Undertale fans who would write royalty-free music for fun. (While Jayden can draw and animate and code—and do really amazing voice-overs—he’s not a musician.)
So how does the original creator, Toby Fox, feel about these fan games?
Undertale fan games began to appear online shortly after the original was released. And these fan games proliferated so quickly that one people reached out directly to Toby in late 2015 to ask him if he had any rules that he wanted fans to follow. Toby’s answer was simply…
In other words, Toby was fine with fans making their own games, art, music, fiction or whatever based on his intellectual property. He just didn’t want any exact copies out there that might interfere with his own sales, and he preferred that fans not sell their own content that was created based on his content—all of which seemed fair, and most fans have respectfully honored that.
In the meantime, the Undertale community continues to thrive. It’s not uncommon to see cosplayers at conventions…
And two of Jayden’s last three Halloween costumes have been the characters of Sans and Papyrus from Undertale…
In order to avoid copying directly from the source material, Undertale fans have taken to creating A.U.s, which stands for Alternate Universes. These fan games start with the same characters but change them in new and unexpected ways. Other fans have applied their creative skills to things like drawing, writing fan fiction, or composing music in the Undertale style. There’s a whole community out there sharing their love for Undertale in the same ways that Trekkies share their love for Star Trek.
And that brings us back to Jayden.
My son has gone from creating his own Undertale fan games all by himself to leading an international game development team! Jayden, along with 14 of his teenaged friends—living as far away as Toronto and New Zealand and all across America—are pooling their talents as writers, artists, musicians, coders, and voice actors to create an Undertale fan game called DUSTSWAP – UNEXPECTED OUTCOME (or DSUO for short). Much of the game storyline has been written, and artwork is now being created…along with some music. Indeed, as a teaser to what will ultimately be a full game, Jayden and four of his team members have just released this sample piece of music, composed by three of his friends, with artwork by a fourth and voice-over by Jayden himself..
Needless to say, I’m a very proud dad, and I wanted to highlight Jayden’s efforts here publicly. What my son is creating with his team is no small task, as their fan game is extremely complex with many moving parts and elements. And Jayden is essentially the “showrunner,” the producer who has not only assembled and grown the team but who manages everyone’s efforts almost daily. I’ve watched as Jayden has done most of the things that a project manager must do to lead and motivate his group, including assigning and monitoring progress, scheduling meetings, smoothing out the occasional flare-up of “drama,” and yes, even on rare occasions having to cut someone loose who wasn’t delivering.
Anyway, I decided to interview Jayden about DSUO for a few reasons. First and most obviously, I’m awed by him and bursting with pride. Second, I thought Jayden’s team would enjoy a little coverage of their efforts beyond the usual posts in Discord and elsewhere on social media. But probably most of all, I wanted to record this little “snapshot of time” as Jayden grows up so very fast! Wasn’t it just yesterday that Jayden was six and appearing for the first time as a guest on a Star Trek podcast???
Well, now Jayden is 14 (almost 15!), and we have such a wonderful relationship as father and son. And honestly, I just wanted to share that with anyone who might be curious about how we interact—and to create this memory for myself to watch when I get old and “teenage Jayden” feels like a lifetime ago. So please join us, as Jonathan and Jayden pave a little portion of a future trip down Memory Lane…