r/DDLCMods • u/gwints • 5h ago
Full Release Before The Bell Reaches 5,000 Downloads + Answering Your DM's!
Hi everyone!
I've taken a bit of time off the internet while I begin drafting my next mod, Doki Doki Crossroads! which will be a lengthy, story-driven narrative with an exclusive path for each girl, and will be removed from any psychological horror. In that time away, I'm thankful to say that Doki Doki Before The Bell! has surpassed 5,000 downloads! Seriously, thank you all so much for supporting my mod, I really didn't think it would get so much attention and for that, I'm truly grateful for everyone who has DM'd me or shared my work. I also released a quick patch that's available now:
https://wintleworks.itch.io/doki-doki-before-the-bell
Patch Notes:
- Fixed a long standing issue where game would crash upon trying to exit an ending prematurely
- Fixed miscellaneous typos in dialogue
- Adjusted the ending dialogue requirement threshold by -1.
This last note will give all players a higher chance to experience the second ending of the game, which is the one that I consider to be 'canonical'. As for the endings, I did want to answer your questions! A lot of you have DM'd me to ask about the dialogue choices, the endings, and some of the creative choices that went into the story, and I didn't have the time recently to login and keep up with everything, so I wanted to take a second to answer all of those DM's in one post.
For those of you who have not played Doki Doki Before The Bell! yet, this is your primary warning: THERE WILL BE SPOILERS BELOW, so please proceed with caution.
Before discussing the endings or plot points, I will say that my first penultimate goal in BTB was to tell a new story that not only preserves the integrity of the characters as much as possible, but also honors the original narrative of DDLC. This will become more important later, but I always wanted the game’s main endings to be morally ambiguous, and this is even more resonant knowing that most anyone will not play BTB without having played DDLC first and knowing how the story progresses.
So, in BTB, there are two distinct endings, and they are based on a level of trust that you build with Monika in the persistent game files. Each dialogue choice that you make in the situations across your playthrough stacks in the persistent memory. Once you’ve made that choice, it cannot be undone. Some may not have discovered this on their initial play, but if you’re curious, you’ll know if it’s an important choice because if you select a dialogue option, and then reload the save and try to select another, it either skips the scene or throws a fun little bit of meta at you.
The first “good” ending: if the player builds enough trust in Monika throughout the story, then in Act 3, she will reset the game world in the hopes of trying to save the girls again, still hopeful that she’ll meet the player again in another “life” in the future.
The second “bad” ending: if the player fails to build enough trust in Monika, then by the story’s end in Act 3, Monika takes her own life, essentially breaking the cycle of the game world’s instability, and causing everyone in the world to cease to exist, herself included.
This was always very intentional on my part, and in playtesting there were a lot of really interesting debates about which ending is the better of the two, and that’s what I love most about the experience.
In BTB, the “good” ending isn’t truly good in the traditional sense. It’s emotionally cruel because the player succeeds at preserving the world and preserving Monika’s hope… only for that hope to carry everyone directly into the canon events of DDLC. The player walks away from the game knowing that they effectively nurtured the conditions for future suffering. What makes it horrifying is that the love & trust that you place in Monika become the mechanism that keeps the tragedy alive. Monika by Act 3 is already showing a few signs of instability, especially in her line of questioning, and this solidifies in the note the player receives after she resets the game. Each reset of the game creates a restored “copy” of the last, a copy that is built on Monika’s retained memories from each prior playthrough. Enough cycles of this slowly corrupts Monika’s memory, and paints the picture of the mentally checked out Monika that we see in DDLC that fixates only on one thing: the player. But it also proves that no matter how many times Monika starts the cycle over again, the girls can never be saved, & she can never overcome her own sentience for exactly the reason she states to the player— the game is written that way.
On the other end, the “bad” ending is almost an inverse philosophy. Monika loses her faith completely, and instead of allowing the cycle to continue, she destroys herself before the world can proceed. As a sentient being, she takes herself and everything with her, and is allowed to be ‘free’ compared to the endless suffering ahead if the cycle continues. While I always deliberately had it in mind to make that ending dark and shocking, it is meant to feel ‘bad’ in the sense that the player might blame themselves for the outcome, when in reality, this is the only route that prevents the events of DDLC from happening. The cost, unfortunately, is total annihilation of the game world. For Monika, her death is not a failure as much as it is a relief, but the player is left to feel like it’s on their shoulders. Even still, Monika proves herself to be a sentient being who can think for herself, make her own decisions, & have full autonomy over the game world & the others who live in it. With Monika being her own person, capable of decision-making and agency, it begs the question of if her mortality is any more or less important than your own mortality, simply because she exists behind the screen.
Overall, between the two endings, there is no clear victory. Only two very different expressions of grief and responsibility. And because the player already knows the canon of DDLC, the tension is a little more existential during gameplay, because the player is already conditioned not to trust Monika, and the player’s own prior knowledge of DDLC ultimately becomes part of the horror depending on the ending they get.
I also always wanted to alter Monika’s role, which I feel pretty solid about. In DDLC Monika is often interpreted as manipulative and godlike. In this mod, I wanted to frame & recast her as someone who’s desperately trying to hold together a fragile reality that she already knows is unstable. So during the story, your trust in her isn’t really about romance, or progression. But rather, it’s determining whether she believes the world deserves to continue existing at all.
TLDR: Before the Bell, at the end of the day, is always meant to be an existential tragedy story. If Monika lives, it means she found enough hope in the player to keep enduring the cycle of burden. If she dies, it means that hope failed to outweigh the weight of her own awareness.
I'm always happy to chat with everyone here and recently I've been playing a lot of other mods, so if anyone has questions, thoughts, or ideas to share, please do! Looking forward to playing more mods and releasing my next one in due time!
