Hollow Knight has been a big inspiration for the player animations, and also the traveling cutscene! I wanted to add some combat at first, but couldn't due to the time.
In Deltarune there's an insane amount of dialogue; there's like a variation for every NPC for every slight different path you take, and even when you backtrack, NPCs can have different dialogue. Some dialogue is just put there with the thought in mind that maybe 0.1 percent of the playerbase will discover it on their first playthrough, those being the completionists.
I tried to implement such dialogue into my game, not as much as Deltarune though, but still as much as possible :]
As for the main objective in the game, I agree that's it's not really made clear enough. The idea was that you see on TV there's a meteor coming down on your house and your house only. Your plan to stop it (the sketch in the beginning cutscene) is to build a gigantic spring launcher on top of your house to bounce the meteor back into space. Those items you collected were the boards and the spring of the spring launcher :>
In the end though, I unfortunately didn't have any time left to make the final cutscene where you actually build the spring launcher, and where the meteor comes down and gets rebounded. Instead I just put a Thanks for Playing message back there.
Hollow Knight is an amazing game, so I'll take this as a big compliment!
I'm also glad you enjoyed it, and thanks for taking the time to leave a comment :D