Ruining Doki Doki Literature Club by Revealing Every Programming Trick and Secret | Tech Rules

three years since the 22nd of this month it's officially been three years since the release of in my opinion one of the most impressive horror games of all time i'm talking about doki doki literature club and i don't just mean impressive from a sheer terror standpoint although i absolutely agree with that statement but i also think it's wildly impressive from a technical standpoint yes i am praising a visual novel from a technical standpoint you see doki doki literature club was made in rinpai a visual novel engine running off of python it's a very useful tool that lets you put together visual novels simply and easily but you know that's the thing nothing about this game is simple yet all these terrifying effects and tricks happen within the confines of this visual novel engine so to celebrate this game's three year anniversary i'd like to take a look at the code and show you every single scare every small disturbing detail you might have missed and uncover every secret i can find and by secrets i don't mean these things these things have been talked to death i'm good i'd much rather go over the subtle things that you may have missed on your playthrough it also helps that rinpai games are trivially easy to decompile this video is going to be a bit different than my other ones but hopefully it'll still be interesting oh but real quick i want to throw up a bit of a warning here doki doki literature club isn't exactly your average jump scare sort of game it's a psychological horror game it's goal is to cause shock and extreme discomfort through the use of upsetting and disturbing imagery so if you're someone who's easily disturbed by those kind of things you might want to skip the video this time around i mean if you clicked on this video you probably know what this game's about already but i thought i'd make sure regardless for those of you sticking around welcome to tech rules but first allow me to introduce you to our partner for today's video vessi the first 100 waterproof and weatherproof knit sneaker i grew up in an area where two things were almost always certain it was probably gonna rain multiple times that week and you would have to walk through quite a bit of grass on your way to school needless to say wet socks were a common complaint at the lunch tables wow now that i look back on it that's a really boring thing to talk about sorry i'm thinking about what i used to talk about with my friends now and wow we were boring oh god we were really boring sorry epiphany for another time point being if i had vessy's back then that wouldn't have been an issue at all seriously i have rigorously stress tested these things despite the outer layer being a knit fabric these things do not let water through and they can even be thrown in the washing machine they're also 100 vegan and made from a dual climate knit material so hot or cold you'll find that they're comfortable regardless plus they just look really nice i mean look at these things i don't really know what more i have to say anyway when you're ready to keep your feet dry year-round click the link below and use my code tech rules to get 25 off your vessy shoes using the code supports my channel so i would really appreciate it and thanks again to bessie for supporting tech rules on to the video the place will start much like with the game is the build up after all the scares of this game don't happen immediately in fact upon booting up the game for the first time the first thing you see is a disclaimer that you have to acknowledge but otherwise the game itself plays like your stereotypical visual novel this phase of the game is internally referred to as the first run but the widely used term for it is act one act one is the normal visual novel phase of the game so all random scares and other creepy things are completely disabled well with the exception of one scare that one being the early sayori death scare this one can't be activated randomly though it'll only happen through direct tampering of the game's files there are two ways to trigger it you can either trigger it directly by deleting sayori.chr in the characters folder or you could do it by deleting monica.chr before starting a new game doing it that way would cause sayori to suddenly be granted omniscience within the game causing her to break down delete everyone in the characters folder and close the game which inadvertently also triggers the scare anyway when the game is opened without sayori's character file you're faced with a pretty heartbreaking screen an end screen pops up and transitions to sayori hanging on a blank noisy background sticking around for 10 minutes will trigger the final part of this scare a line of text saying now everyone can be happy i guess this can be considered an alternate ending considering the game's now in an inoperable state without further tampering something to note this scare can't pop up if you haven't agreed to the disclaimer yet fulfilling the conditions that trigger it will just cause the game to put the character files back funny that the only scare available in act 1 also happens to be one of the sadder ones like i said act one itself is basically a straightforward visual novel the only thing that's worth talking about is the poem game a custom game where you pick out keywords for your poem in order to impress one of the three romance four romanceable girls in the game for act one though there's not much to say about the game that you can't already notice the route you take is decided based on who got the most points by the end of the poem each word gives one girl three points one girl two points and one girl just one though there are some words that will just give one of them three points and one to the other ones and whenever you select a word the character who received the most points from it does this little celebration animation oh and the one who wins still has to love the poem in order to actually access their route they love a poem when it hits 45 points with them on the other hand they'll also hate your poem if you can't get at least 29 points with them but that only affects dialogue not in-game events in the event of a tie yuri's route is given priority followed by natsuki and then poor little sayori other than the poem game i don't think there's really anything else in act 1 that needs explaining oh no actually there is one thing during the final chapter this file gets added in happy thoughts.pmg mind the x's i guess you can kinda consider it a scare but it's pretty close to the end anyway speaking of which you can probably imagine when this act ends although the actual trigger may be slightly earlier than you think the end of act one finds you in front of sayori's room who isn't responding at which point the main character gently opens the door [Music] [Music] and by the time we get to here we have already passed the point of no return the trigger for act 2 happens immediately after this text box right here closes while you're processing this gruesome scene this is an extremely busy scene with a lot of small parts to it so i don't want to necessarily tackle it all at once however we'll see pretty much all of these effects individually in act 2 so we'll break them down as we see them there however you should note the exception screen in the background this is the exact screen that you would see when rinpei crashes but this one's obviously fake since sayori's body is in front of it and the screen effects are still happening another giveaway is that it's telling you to check the trace back for more details a traceback is essentially a log that's output to help you figure out why the game crashed and if you look in the game directory you'll see that there's no oh this is the first of many creepy things that the game's going to do this is a real traceback file that generates the moment the crash screen appears but as you scroll through it you'll find a message left for monica talking about the error and deciding to just straight up delete sayori from the game as someone with too much experience with these kind of files this was pretty chilling the first time i saw it there's literally no reason a custom message to be in a traceback file there shouldn't even be a traceback file the game didn't crash so how was it done apparently there's just a function in rinpai that simulates an exception on command this part's kind of genius actually the reason you can find monica's message in here is because the message itself is the name of the fake exception even the formatting works for some reason how how did the developer even find this function trust me i checked it's not documented anywhere i guess it doesn't matter anyway with the switch to act 2 a few things change for one sayori's character file is immediately deleted then the game marks that your first playthrough is complete enabling all the random scares and finally the game's anti-cheat kicks in what anti-cheat you might be wondering well the one that stops external save files from working this is supposed to be the point of no return so when the new game begins all your saved files are deleted but some players are smart maybe they frequently back up their saves and decide to use this backup to head back to act 1. that's what this anti-cheat is for using someone else's save file wouldn't work either when act 2 starts the game generates a random six digit number that your save files are associated with trying to load a save file with a different number will result in the anti-cheat triggering and saves transferred to and from act one will always fail because act one saves don't even have an anti-cheat number yet upon attempting to load an invalid save you'll be met with a black screen that says the save file cannot be loaded are you trying to cheat and then monica reminds you how funny you are before restarting the game it's worth noting though that your old act 1 saves aren't deleted immediately once act 2 starts they're deleted when you actually hit new game trying to load it at any point between the start of act 2 and the save wipe however will just show a fake error message about the absence of sayori's character file and force you into a new game at which point the files will be deleted oh but there is one way to get out of act 2. besides finishing it obviously when the game starts it makes a file in the game folder called first run deleting this before rebooting the game will trigger a menu that will allow you to delete your save data and start over and in case you're wondering where the game keeps all this data you know your current playthrough the anti-cheat data all that it's in the persistent data file the persistent file is something rinpei makes in the user's app data directory the same place where you would normally find save files it's designed to store stuff like what routes you've played and what cgs you've unlocked but there's not really a limit to the data you can store in the persistent file so ddlc kind of uses this as the main save file now that the random skiers are enabled let's go over them a couple of them happen on the main menu actually when you boot up the game this first one isn't necessarily a scare in the traditional sense but every time you boot up the game in this act there's a one in four chance the disclaimer that the game isn't for children and those who are easily disturbed will be replaced what replaces it is randomly picked from a list which i'll go over now you are my sunshine my only sunshine i missed you play with me it's just a game mostly this game is not suitable for children or those who are easily disturbed sidiva's deck will fix defcus go on her foe no i have granted kids to hell pm died for this it was only partially your fault this game is not suitable for children or those who are easily dismembered and finally don't forget to back up monica's character file okay a few of these might need explanation pm stands for project m a now defunct mod for super smash bros brawl to fix the issues with the game competitively and make it play more like melee the creator of ddlc dan solvato was one of the devs for this mod so there's that reference i have granted kids to hell as a reference to warrior where touched where speeding up the record for ashley's theme made it sound well oh no not again it's a frequent occurrence i guess sorry i'm going off topic there's also a small chance exactly 1 in 64 to have an end screen pop up the moment you boot up the game and see a ghost version of the main menu and when you try to close the game it zooms in on monica's face before it actually closes because it wasn't unsettling enough i guess and lastly going into the menus while in the game has a 1 in 50 chance to show a picture of monica for a brief second anyway now we can get into the meat of the game which is act 2. and the first thing that we'll go over here is the glitch text you frequently see throughout the game in case you didn't notice this text is generated in real time when you see it so it's different every time basically there's a list of glitch characters the game chooses from and when the glitch text function is called it just changes those characters together randomly for whatever length is specified for example here sayori's name is replaced with a 12 character long glitch text after then a glitched seyori shows up and you see one of the more common methods of glitchiness in this game these are actually just images being used in place of where you would put actual character portraits and a good portion of these scares are just manipulating these portraits in some way if i don't go over a certain scare that's probably why seriously i would say around 75 percent of scares in this game are either a custom portrait a custom portrait that has its position manipulated or a custom portrait with particle effects made from what are essentially jpegs i could point out every time a skier is used this way but that would be a long video and that might be kinda boring i'd rather point out the more interesting effects like this one where the entire screen starts tearing this effect works by screenshoting the game overlaying the image and then distorting it manually this is a simple and effective method of distorting the screen that's also used for other effects such as inverting as these two enter the literature club you get a chance at the first of many random scares of act 2. as you've already seen the game is very fond of randomly showing scares which makes each play through an experience unique i'm actually looking forward to finding out how many of you will be familiar with every single one of these there's quite a few it took me genuinely hours to find all of these anyway this one's basic it's a 1 in 3 chance and if it succeeds this sprite shows when monica first shows up and i don't know wiggles also when you enter the club room and every time from now on there's a 1 in 6 chance that there will be a poster of sayori hanging in the back after this the screen inverts for a sec and when the section ends you get a special poem oh yeah there's 11 of these in the game and you'll only see three of them in a playthrough chosen at random and that brings us to the first poem game of act 2. the new poem game is handled the same way with the obvious exclusion of sayori if you pick a word that sayori would have liked the one who celebrates will instead be whichever girl liked it more and of course with the introduction of poem games in act 2 comes the addition of more random scares firstly whenever you choose a word that yuri likes the most there's a 1 in 101 chance her sprite will change into this atrocity while she's jumping and when the poem game ends there's a 1 in 6 chance for this image to appear on screen and that's the first poem game don't worry it gets worse as we return to the game a final called can you hear me is placed in our folder and we're immediately hit with another unsettling effect that you probably won't even notice right away but the background is turning very very slowly you'll see it later by the way everyone has a glitchy introduction here yuri's is just a portrait animation natsuki's is a still image being manipulated for a second and monica's on the front layer for some reason i'll talk a little more about that later once this scene ends the game splits based on who liked the poem the most we'll start with the natsuki root here we see the first instance of this text format which is used whenever monica is forcing a character to say something the phone itself is verily serif mono just spaced out more with a huge outline on the characters what you might not have noticed is that if you check the history here you can see what the lines were supposed to say this is actually the case for almost every modified dialog box in this scene anyway the big scare for this portion of the route comes from natsuki falling asleep and then suddenly glitching out the base cg is actually just natsuki with her facial features removed and these little blot things are added in real time you'll also hear the music get a lot glitchier which is actually its own track that plays at the exact position the normal song left off pretty much every music distortion or effect uses this method so i won't bother bringing up the future ones and for yuri's route she has a lot of edited text but unlike natsuki's the history doesn't actually show anything different which is interesting perhaps an early indication that this is more than just a direct dialogue box hijack as far as effects early on one of her eyes just kind of leaves her face it's done the way you'd expect the actual portrait is missing the eye and then the fake eye was put exactly where the real one would normally be and then part way through the conversation she glitches into this thing and there's not really much else to say after this the past branch back together and everyone shares their poems i hope your poem got at least 29 points with natsuki because if not there's a one in three chance she'll hate it so much that her eyes same as the thing with yuri's eye the portrait just has black eye sockets and the eyes are overlaid individually so they can pop and after the poems are shown natsuki and yuri get into a we'll say very heated discussion and you're given a choice at the end that behaves very strangely as loud as this scene is it doesn't really use any features of rinpai that you wouldn't expect yeah even the zoom and even the fake dialogue options behind monica here apparently those are also functions rinpai just has oh and monica is in front of everything here simply because she was again placed on the front layer it's literally just a layer rinpai has that's usually reserved for specific things that need to be in the front of everything else like i said nothing out of the ordinary in fact it's even sorta kinda being used for its intended purpose here the poem game is just called at the end of the scene without implementing any transition making it feel extremely abrupt the poem game isn't pre-loaded or anything that's just genuinely how quickly rinpy can switch scenes when you take out the fades speaking of the poem game there's some new scares that can happen here now every word has a 1 in 401 chance of being all glitched if you select this word none of the girls will receive any points for it and the game will suddenly appear very very distorted corrupted i don't know i feel like i'm describing things as glitch too much during this unstable looking mode clicking each word will trigger a 1 in 11 chance of a unique sound effect playing which sounds like this this audio file is appropriately just named ba and its origin is very interesting it's an audio file pretty much taken directly from warioware touched of all things specifically it's from the vocals for ashley's theme that's really interesting because the majority of that song's vocals are actually broken down into syllables so that when the song speeds up the vocals still sound natural it's funny actually back in 2015 someone actually patched all these audio clips together to make a sort of isolated vocals version of the song and that someone was hey would you look at that dan salvato i guess he felt it sounded particularly creepy he was right also i want to point out this is the second time i've talked about warioware touched in this video which is two more times than i was expecting going into day three a new file shows up in the folder called and there's yet another one in three chance that yuri will alright this is getting a little silly now for what it's worth this isn't just an alternate portrait this time it's actually individual portraits being offset manually also later on one in four chance that this atrocity happens natsuki just grows a realistic mouth and starts spouting off a bunch of words it's unsettling when you first see it but a closer look will make it pretty obvious it's just an image of a mouth being squished and stretched as for the routes you're forced on yuri's route for today even if natsuki won the poem game the only difference is some extra dialogue will happen where yuri tells the player not to worry about her intensely so if you've been making an effort to appeal to her the entire playthrough so this route is essentially unavoidable like most of yuri's scenes in act 2 most of the disturbing imagery comes from yuri's actual dialogue so there's not much to be said as far as technical effects go however when you spot yuri in the halls the game rewinds itself back to before the player left the club room this rewind is actually just done by applying the dizzy effect speeding up the text and literally just doing the entire scene in reverse more uncomfortable dialogue later yuri stands up and the notorious eyes scare happens no i don't know i can't call it an eye scare because we've seen like three of those already this scare consists of two parts the first is the base yuri portrait which has the realistic eyes but no pupils then the pupils are overlaid from a separate image and at small intervals the pupils move to a random point around where yuri's eyeballs are it's a very simple effect but the randomness of it combined with how dark it is makes it easily one of the most unsettling things in this game to the point where it might be the most remembered scare from this game after rivals here calms down it's time to share poems again if natsuki has won every poem so far then training poems with her will lead to the also notorious play with me scene so step by step natsuki's facial features are removed and these black blots slowly cover up where they should be alongside a blood trail graphic over her portrait eventually the portrait is changed to one with the smile and then to this the running is of course just manipulation of the portrait with sound effects added and that's really all there is to it yeah i'm aware that this is becoming more of a scarce showcase than an explanation at this point this is sort of the point of the game where scares stop being so subtle and because of that you can just essentially figure out how they work by looking at them we'll have more things to explain as we exit this act promise after poem sharing is done you get another special poem and things get a little weird as we come back there's a couple random scares that can happen one is a one in three chance where the dizzy effect kicks in the screen turns red veins start appearing in the corners and after a few text boxes the screen goes black once you click everything just kinda goes back to normal like nothing ever happened yeah whatever you blacked out who cares at the same time there's another one in three chance that your mouse cursor will change to a glitch sprite of sayori for a few dialog boxes i don't really see anything in the script that stops these effects from happening at the same time so if you decide to replay the game you have that to potentially look forward to i guess at this point the final scare for the day is the symbol back and forth where yuri says a few things then gets uncomfortably close etc etc disgusting eye explosion it's obvious enough but it's worth mentioning that a few text boxes later there's still a little blood dripping from that eye from there the day comes to an end monica fails to say what she had on her mind before the screen fades out and here we are at the final poem game of act 2. like before the scares from the previous game still apply but now there's a couple final effects for one every selected word has a 1 in 11 chance to have monica celebrate from the bottom of the screen you can only see her for a brief moment when she reaches the height of her jump but she's there and finally if you didn't get the sayori scare after this game then there's a 1 in 16 chance you'll see this alternate sayori scare as you load into the final chapter of act 2. either way the final chapter begins natsuki either gets comforted or relentlessly yelled at depending on who you chose to spend time with and oh cool we're forced on the uri route again if you spent your time with yuri on the second day the hall scene from the other day appears again but when the rewind actually happens things change the screen goes black it shows yuri's creepy realistic eyeballs and you're back out in the halls after some dialogue monica spawns on the front layer again albeit very transparent her transparency decreases every few lines of dialogue until she's no longer transparent more glitch effects happen and oh hey i guess we're sharing poems again natsuki tries to sneak a cry for help behind monica's back that doesn't work and yuri gives you this illegible poem which actually does say something just in an illegible font i'll put the poem on the screen if you want to read it but it's just nonsense nothing particularly worth pausing the video for after that we talk about oh my god monica's poem has an interesting quirk that you may have missed while the poem normally shows some glitch sprites when you try to read it playing the game in full screen mode will result in an extra scare at the end where it fakes a blue screen it even hides your mouse and draws the screen from top to bottom like an actual blue screen would it's convincing enough to the point where i'm sure it got some people and after all the poems are out of the way you unlock the final special poem it doesn't say that granted but you'll have to trust me on this one after that yuri says something bad is about to happen and then stabs herself which to her credit is pretty bad but before she does that you're given a choice of who to hang out with your mouse is hijacked for this part to hover over monica but with a little work you can choose someone else just fine and that'll make this happen nothing we haven't already went over though it's just the same programming yuri's pupils had before and the background is just being manipulated behind the static effect anyway that wraps up yuri kicks the other two out monica deletes all the files she's been leaving and leaves a new one called have a nice weekend and the death scene happens this takes advantage of particle effects and the pupil trick we just discussed and this leads us to the finale of act 2. spending the entire weekend with yuri over here feel free to use the skip button here because the game is going to generate a total of 1440 lines of dialogue before this ends each box containing glitch text of a random length between 8 and 80. as the amount of lines increase the time of day will change and yuri's quartz will turn more cold and lifeless accordingly some interesting things about this scene trying to check the history we'll just show you the description for the game with the last sentence repeated although i guess i don't really need to point that out and restarting the game will actually make the text count jump to whatever amount triggers the next time change after enduring that monday rolls around and after a reasonable reaction to finding a dead body monica deletes everyone using this console which is a neat little thing it's just text being generated over an image but it does its job also the commands monica use here are made to resemble actual commands you would use in rinpai that aside everything that isn't monica gets deleted save files and character files included the game it signs itself a new anti-cheat number and act 3 begins act 3 consists entirely of the just monika portion of the game where you spend the rest of your life talking to monica during this act your text speed setting is ignored in favor of going quite literally as slow as possible saving is disabled the main menu button stops working and we reach the final random scare well okay it's not random the scare only triggers when the game detects recording software open on your pc that being said it only actually detects obs and x-split what you might have missed is that if one of these are detected monica also skips over a little trick where she brings up the name of your user account if it's different from the name you're using in the game what's weird about this is this one seems to support more applications it looks for obs xsplit live heme panda tool yy mixer doh utool and huo mao tool what are these programs i have no idea i'm essentially hearing about them just now probably just foreign streaming and recording tools if any of those are detected monica doesn't mention the username it's really strange that the extra ones don't trigger the scare though if someone knows why i'd love for you to leave a comment explaining it i'm genuinely stumped anyway after a very monika poem game the bulk of act 3 begins this act is essentially endless monica will think for a random period of time between 20 to 40 seconds and pick randomly from a list of 57 different topics to discuss yeah going through every single one of these things would take a while well i say 57 but it's actually 54 since the game actually prohibits three of these topics from being selected one of them is topic 26 which doesn't even exist in the game's code actually the second is topic 25 which is monica talking about super smash bros thing is i know for a fact that this topic used to be in the game because i've seen it before it must have been removed in a patch if you ask me why i would guess because monica encourages you to contact dan salvato about it i don't imagine he expected how big the game would get so one flooded inbox later he probably decided to remove it from the game the final one is topic 14 and i know for a fact this was never in the game in fact it was never supposed to be seen in the game at all the reason becomes clear once you read it hey i don't think you should be doing that you know what i'm talking about i really caught you doing something naughty here you're just going through the files and looking for stuff you missed aren't you i mean it's a little bit flattering that you want to hear everything i have to say but it's also really embarrassing you know what if i just opened up your brain and read all the thoughts you have on me come to think of it that would be pretty tempting actually but anyway that's not the point i know i can't stop you or anything just i know you're a sweetheart and you like to consider others feelings right so the most i can do is let you know how i feel about it god i miss you oh no that sounds kind of desperate doesn't it sorry i didn't mean it like that at all just if you're looking through the files like this then maybe you don't hate me as much as i thought am i being too optimistic i think if i asked you to visit once in a while i'd be overstepping my boundaries a little man i'm starting to say some really stupid things i'll go ahead and shut up now yeah sorry that was weird for me too i was gonna have a really talented va do that part but something came up and she didn't really have the chance to do it which is fine she had a good reason but i kinda had to improvise there as for the topics that are in the game you can try to skip them but it doesn't work monica informs you that this part of the game doesn't really work like that and disables it for you now obviously i'm not going to go over all 50-something topics she can talk about but there are a few more interesting things i should mention for one there's a topic for that one poem monica wrote the one that blue screens your pc where she explains what it was supposed to do thing is if you make monica mad by hanging out with yuri too much she won't show the poem to you if that happens then this topic is actually disabled as well something else you may have missed is some unique dialogue whenever you restart the game monica complains about the game being closed being mentally scarring but after doing it enough times she notes she's gotten used to it and stops bringing it up of course to end act 3 you have to go into the characters folder and delete monica's character file how this works from a technical standpoint is that whenever the game is reloaded and also every 5 seconds monica isn't talking the game will check to make sure the file's still there if it's not the ending of act 3 is triggered if that happens monika's name is changed to 12 characters of glitch text her cg is covered by a glitchy looking portrait of her and the really cool effects that ensue are as you might have guessed more of what we've already seen just a bunch of simple effects chained together to make something really really cool as act 3 wraps up monica initially gets mad eventually looks back on what she did restores the club members assigns yet another new anti-cheat number and restarts the game into act 4. there's not much to talk about here considering it's just the epilogue but our final piece submissible content happens right when you select new game if you decided that you regret your actions and tried to restore monica's character file before this final section a pop-up will appear letting you know that she doesn't want to come back and then deletes herself again you already know how the rest of this goes but just for the sake of completion sayori is the club president now everyone got to keep their new character development and it turns out that sayori being the president now means she's attained the same awareness that monica had she tries to act through you again but monica stops her and quite literally deletes the entire game to protect everyone or she doesn't if you went down all the routes in act 1 but that's less climactic credits roll you receive your final poem the game crashes and that's doki doki literature club huh i ended up talking through the entire game didn't i does that mean this also doubles as a let's play seriously though i hope that came across as thorough and not just redundant there wasn't really anything in the game that wasn't publicly known this time around but it still seemed worthwhile to put all that information into one easily digestible source if i missed the mark on that one no big deal but i'm still glad i could talk about this game so close to its anniversary thanks for going through this deconstruction with me and as always i hope you keep an eye out for more tech [Music] rules

Channel: Tech Rules

Views: 1,160,272

Rating: 4.9724455 out of 5

Keywords: DDLC, Horror, Jumpscares, Monika, Sayori, Natsuki, Yuri, Deconstruction, Secrets, Dan Salvato, Ashley's Theme, Mods, ddlc mod, Python, Ren'py, Visual Novel

Id: SV04P6YBuEY

Length: 29min 7sec (1747 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 30 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/Zeph-Shoir]

The creator of this video did the same topic before but with FNAF and it is an interesting video I also recommend.