Hi, everyone! With DDLC Plus being unleashed upon the world in just a few short days, we thought it would be a good time to bring up some stuff in regards to how the game is going to work on a technical level, how that differs from the original game, and what it means for certain secrets and spoilers that DDLC has become known for.
I’ll put a spoiler warning here: If you have not fully finished the original game, we’d like to give you the chance to discover it all yourself, or to look up whatever remaining content you haven’t been able to find on your own.
Game Engine
For those unfamiliar, the original DDLC was created using the amazing Ren’Py game engine. Now, as a part of bringing DDLC to consoles, the game has been faithfully and painstakingly recreated in the Unity engine. This allowed us to add some of the new Plus features we showed off in the trailers, as well as provide a consistent experience across all platforms.
Datamining
It’s no secret by now that in the original DDLC game, I hid some Easter eggs within the game files, which added an exciting new layer for fans to explore and speculate about. This worked great on PC platforms, because it was something that anyone could check out for themselves! That’s the nature of PC operating systems; since DDLC was a PC game, I took the opportunity to make use of some features that are only possible on PC by adding those Easter eggs.
Datamining is a different territory. It often requires a technical skillset and specialized tools. Because of that, we’ve chosen to not make datamining a “gameplay” element of DDLC Plus (for both PC and console platforms - every version of the game has the same content). To clarify: In DDLC Plus, all content is discoverable in-game, and none of it requires the use of external tools or software to discover.
Of course, we know that the game is going to get datamined, because that’s just what happens to video games! Discovering the inner workings of a game and preserving information about the game’s development is a passion for many people, myself included (speaking as a developer of game mods).
But we humbly ask you, the dataminers, to allow players to discover all of the in-game content first before sharing your own technical findings. The DDLC community is incredible, and they deserve to experience and share the DDLC Plus content together as they all play for the first time. We would love to give them a fair chance to do that, because any “content” discoverable through datamining is guaranteed to be accessible in-game.
Modding
Last but not least, we wanted to touch on what the change in engine will mean when it comes to creating mods, both for DDLC and DDLC Plus. The original DDLC is quite popular to create mods and fan content for, in part because the Ren’Py game engine makes the process very simple. Meanwhile, we expect that making mods for DDLC Plus will be more difficult; as mentioned above, DDLC Plus runs entirely in Unity, recreated from the ground up.
With that in mind, we encourage modders to continue making mods for the original game, and we have no intentions to ever remove DDLC from either Steam or itch.io. Thanks to the Ren’Py engine, DDLC is excellent and highly accessible for modding, something we hope continues for years to come. For both games, we’d like for mods to remain focused on fan-made story and game content. That being said, we won’t be able to provide as strong community support for DDLC Plus mods, for both technical and legal reasons.
Since DDLC Plus is a commercial game, another layer of complexity is added, because distribution of the new game content is more restricted. We’re updating the IP Guidelines to provide some additional clarity on usage of the DDLC Plus assets for fan content. To help fans who are more comfortable modding the original game feel less restricted with creative storytelling, we will be making a couple of new DDLC Plus graphic assets available for use in DDLC mods and fan work - specifically, two background images of new locations at the school, which appear in the Side Stories.
Thanks for reading! We hope you all have a great first experience with DDLC Plus, and we’ll do everything we can to support the DDLC community becoming stronger than ever.