Deltarune’s Tenna was first envisioned in 3D almost a decade ago in a delightfully janky prototype

Tenna, the CRT-headed game show host antagonist of Deltarune chapter 3, first showed up in a videogame this year—but Deltarune creator Toby Fox first started working on the character all the way back in 2016. Fox recently said so in a social media post where he quoted himself of nearly a decade ago trying to learn 3D animation.

Fox pointed out that that despite abandoning his own 3D efforts he still has Tenna show up in 3D during Deltarune—he just recruited other developers with in order to make it happen. He credits five other developers with the final product: “Gigi polished the design + drew his turnaround. Clairevoire manually cleaned up his static sprite frames as pixel art (hands, etc.) Everdraed edited the intro. SmallBu helped w/ his final intro poses. And Audrey did all his typography!”

It’s a bit of insight into the process of indie development, where one person with a lot of responsibility may have to decide that the game’s never getting made if they try and do every part on their own. For Fox’s part he decided that the effort of learning and doing all the 3D work for Tenna himself wasn’t going to be worth the development time.

The funniest part, for sure, is that Fox originally wanted Tenna to do MikuMikuDance dances, the kind of viral anime animations and stills made with the free program of the same name. There’s something hysterical about the dances for an Undertale character being made with the weird spinoff program for dancing anime characters made as part of a Japanese corporation’s (successful) project to create a 3D character pop star.

It’s just the kind of weird I expect and delight in from the world adjacent to Undertale and, now, Deltarune.

Which has done very well for itself since earlier this month, when the release of chapters 3 and 4 shot it to the top of the Steam charts. It’s also sitting on a 98% positive review score with over 45,000 reviews at press time.

“Deltarune keeps you on your toes,” wrote Ana Diaz in her feature about how Deltarune defies every rule of RPG logic.

“You never know when a fight might turn into a different game, or a water cooler will become a giant monster of death. Fox has more chapters of Deltarune planned, but the first four are already a phenomenal expression of his signature idiosyncratic style and a must-play for RPG-heads.

You can find Deltarune on Steam for $25.