#DDADDS Level 18

[curtisgrahamcracker]

✨My opinion so far/Theory to get to Level 18 on Dream daddy: A Dad Dating Simulator!✨

I’ll put this under read more just to be safe but If you do decide to read up, just know this contains spoilers! 💕

I’m defenetly down to talk about DDADDS with anyone, just not about things I haven’t touched on in the post! I’m still trying to figure everything out on my own ((If you want to talk about Level 18 PLEASE don’t call it something else aside from Level 18 since other names for it are spoilers on their own))))

Alright, so far I think everyone around me is well aware at how much time I’ve spent in the past days playing this game. I really didn’t expect to like it as much as I do! The graphics are really nice, the story is well written and the dad puns made me laugh so much. Of course no games is perfect and DDADDS isn’t an exeption but I don’t have a lot of “complaits” which, in my book, makes for a great game! I think the only thing I’d change is how cartoony the Main Character is drawn creates a disconect from how pretty and soft all the characters look. It’s not a super big deal but it’s still something that I wished was different. 

I love all the dads (with a preference to Craig, Damien and Robert). I think the only dad I’m not super in love with might be Brian just because I consider myself to be Humble and he brags just a little to much for me (he is a great dad non-the-less tho.) As far as my playthrough goes right now,This is my progress Brian Ending achieved: Good ending Went on Dates: 1, 2 and 3 Joseph Ending achieved: Neutral and Good (working to figure out level 18) Went on Dates: 1, 2 and 3 Hugo  Ending achieved:  Good ending Went on Dates: 1, 2 and 3 Mat Ending achieved: Good ending Went on Dates: 1, 2 and 3 Damien Ending achieved: Good ending Went on Dates: 1, 2 and 3 Robert Ending achieved: Bad ending and Good ending (I have no clue if he has a neutral one I didn’t try yet) Went on Dates: 1, 2 and 3 Craig Ending achieved: Neutral ending and Good ending Went on Dates: 1, 2 and 3 About Mary: I know that you can meet with mary at the bar twice. The first time she ask you to bring her home. right there and then you can either choose to bring her home yourself or call a cab. The second time this happen everything is the same except this time she’s mad. she basically go on to insinuate that it isn’t Joseph’s first time cheating on her (which wOW JOSEPH YOU FUCK). To my knowlege there’s no way she leaves the bar not Mad at you. you can try it all she’s always mad when she leaves. So far I know that if you don’t go meet Robert and Mary before the BBQ this won’t happen. (you’ll also more likely get it before your second date with Joseph.) Also You do get to learn about her a little bit more on Damian’s 3rd date which is really nice! I’m also thinking that Damien and Mary are related. They just look very alike? also wouldn’t it be funny that Mary’s last name would be Bloodmarch (maiden name? maybe a wink to Bloody Mary??)

                                     About secrets and Level 18

I “accidentally” died on Joseph’s date trying to get bad/low rankings thinking It might give me the bad ending. Surprisingly enough you can have A’s and bellow and you’re still going to get the neutral ending. I’m aware that you can Die on other dates and I did achieve them (on Craig and Brian’s last dates)

Another thing I’m eager to get to is Level 18. I mildly saw some tiny spoilers going around and I did my own investigating in my steam files. The text is there in the “configuration” file, the pictures are probably in there too which means that technically this is still something that can be played. (Again I didn’t read much in the file I found because I’d rather play it if it’s achievable.) I’m so curious to see how that route goes. I know it’s the bad ending but I feel like It might actually be more interesting.

From what I did saw There needs to be a knife and I know that Robert gives you a knife on your second date. So I’m thinking that If you manage to play your cards right you can probably get mary to steal it from you (unless she alredy has one). Plus I saw a screen cap of Robert that told the main character that he didn’t trust Joseph ((I have 0 clue on how they got there but I’m sure it’s because they were on the right track to level 18!))

This is all specualtion on my part but at this point I think this is requiered to achieve this ending. ((If anyone has the for sure way to achieve it plese DM me))

Again, I’m defenetly down to talk about DDADDS with anyone who wants to ASIDE from it’s anything I haven’t touched on yet! I’m still trying to figure everything out on my own ((IF you REALLY want to talk about Level 18 don’t call it something else, it’s a spoiler in itself so please. refer to it as Level 18)))) Thank you for reading this mess It was fun to writte! Good luck with your own dream dads!! :) <3

[shaefaebae]

So uhhhh has anyone pointed out yet...

Remember how if you ask about Robert’s hand tattoo, he gets cold and stops talking?

This hand tattoo? Sorry if the pic is small

And if you’ve heard of Joseph’s secret cult ending (which isn’t in the game btw), then you’ve probably seen this picture

See that symbol in the back? That red, occult symbol?

What does that look like hm?

Robert was in Joseph’s cult

[kaishiooo]

No longer a thot

[vasyenka]

So I drew a promo for my Robert blog, but I figured to upload it here on my main without all the blog text/rules/about ha ha cult theory is best theory

past art here

[hiddentruths50136820]

Level 18

Okay guys. So, the whole level 18 thing... It's very... creepy. If it was easily accessible, the game would have to have an age restriction. It looks like it may be able to be accessed by having very specific settings in building and naming your character and specific choices in game, but it would take a long time to test that as simple players. I guess it could be considered the "true end" and it may be part of why the game was delayed in release. It looks like it could be the "Escape from Margarita Zone" hidden achievement. Just note that if you go poking around in the game files and accidentally change something in there and save, YOU WILL BREAK YOUR GAME AND HAVE TO RE DOWNLOAD SO PLEASE BE CAREFUL. That is all. Please carry on.

[catboywizard]

When you know it's theoretically impossible to get the cult ending and you didn't even go on a date with Robert first to get the knife but you still freak tf out when you see the cult symbols in Joseph's office

[necromatador]

The more I hear about Robert from DDADDS (accidental untagged shit sucks but hey) the more I'm fairly certain he actually IS Reverence. Like holy shit. Also, if we're going by the proper timeline for DDADDS Rev (had a kid approximately at 25) and Amanda is 18 or just about and going to go into college... that means DDADDS Rev is 43 so he's not /quite/ old man level yet. Getting there though.

[curtisgrahamcracker]

Apparently level 18 is actually non-canon and only left over from a potential Halloween DLC so at the moment you can't achieve it.

Oh darn :( I really wanted to get to it. Maybe I’ll try some stuff still and If I really can’t make that magic happen I’ll just read my file as a “comfort” second price ahaha 

[arimarushunya]

I hate that I do this every time I end up hyperfixated on smth bc cmon who cares but... 

This is mostly just gonna be a summary of the information I’ve gather about a possible secret ending for ddadds. so, uh, major spoilers ahead

I’m gonna preface this with while I believe I know what you’re supposed to do to trigger the secret ending, it’s currently not actually doable and nobody can even get the script to run properly. This whole post is just gonna be a summary of what is and isn’t known about Joseph’s “cult ending”, and then my theories about what happened to it.

So, first thing I should get out the way: the secret ending is not Joseph’s good ending. In the metadata of the game, the secret ending is actually labelled “cultending”. As far as his other two endings, you can attain them from normal gameplay. From what I can tell, the ending where he turns you down to stay with his wife IS his good ending, and his bad ending is where he offers to keep you on the side (the first scenario can be achieved by getting A- and S-ranks on all of his dates, and the latter by failing all of them) Both of these endings can be reached through normal gameplay and aren’t bugged.

So then that leads us to how do we get his third, secret ending? As of writing this post (7/26/17) there isn’t a way to trigger it naturally. The data for the scene (if you want to look yourself it’s under program files in Steam\steamapps\common\Dream Daddy\ddadds_Data\level18) doesn’t actually have any information on how to trigger the scene (although there are some hints I’ll get to in a second). The scene doesn’t actually even have a start point like the rest of the levels, and is missing a lot of code present in the other levels. 

Most of the levels dialogue looks like this:

You can clearly make out who is talking, the line number, the prompts for their relevant sprite actions, and all dialogue is stated twice. The dialogue in the cult end however, looks like this:

no markers, no numbers, and everything is written once. 

Another thing of note I found was this:

A player name: Brent Lilley, who also happens to be a dude who works with gamegrumps. Followed by a user document for what looks to be Jory Griffis’ computer. Jory was the narrative designer for the game. So my best guess would be that the whole of level 18 is an unfinished file Jory was working on, and that Brent was either beta testing it or was just used for a placeholder name. 

However, even though the file seems unfinished, for the most part it doesn’t seem like something that would have been scrapped (from my viewpoint at least). There’s a lot in the rest of the game that leads up and points to this ending as being the final “real” ending. 

First of all pulling data straight from level 18 gives us a few sprites and a background specific to this ending:

there’s more, including sprites for Josephs children and an Amanda demon. Also direct references to the cult are scattered throughout the game, both blatant and subtle. The most obvious being the relevance of the cult’s symbol:

This is the symbol found in the level 18 files for the dungeon (see above). 

This is the symbol on a clock found in Joseph’s home. 

Her it is in Joseph’s office. 

one of the dad customization options lets you choose this shirt, which contains the symbol hidden in the background.

And Robert’s mysterious hand tattoo, which actually might be the most obvious, since the game specifically directs your attention to it.

 Actually, Robert himself is a big tie into the cult ending. If you’ve played his route then you know that he’s been chasing a cryptid know as the “dover ghost”. Dialogue from level 18 actually shows that Joseph himself is the Dover Ghost, and he uses that form to terrorize Robert, possibly because robert knows about the cult and he’s trying to keep him quiet. There’s also lines in the level that show that a good relationship with robert is necessary for the cult end:

The player character is shown to have Robert’s pocketknife in level 18 (and later mary is shown holding it in her character sprite). The pocketknife is something he gives you on his second date (given you didn’t sleep with him the first night). He also shows up at the dock before you meet Joseph for his third date, to warn you that Joseph isn’t what he seems, and that he will stab the player character in the back (ominous). I think it’s safe to assume that dating Robert would be part of the prerequisite for triggering this ending in theory, but I think that that is only half of it. 

The other half of what is needed to trigger it is the “walk mary home” event, which itself has two possible triggers. You can either play through Joseph’s route and you’ll end up triggering the event with an angry Mary, who actually can’t be walked home, or you have to go on a total of 4 dates other than Joseph to trigger the even with a sad Mary, who asks you to walk her home. As of making this post, there’s no way to finish Joseph’s route without triggering the mad mary event, even if you have already triggered the sad mary event. The devs have already admitted this is a bug.

The importance of the event, though, is that Mary needs to be on your side for the events of the cult ending. In the dialogue she is shown helping the player character out in spite of her husband. If she remains mad at you as she is in the mad mary event, she most likely wouldn’t help you. There is speculation that instead of leading to the cult ending, the sad WMH event instead ends with an actual “good” Joseph ending, where he leaves his wife for the player character, but it doesn’t seem very likely, since there’s no data in any of the files to sugest another Joseph ending.

A few people have pointed out that the cult ending might have been scrapped, or a future DLC, but neither have been confirmed by the dev team, and it doesn’t seem likely anyway. I mean if it is cut content why would it still have an achievement? 

If it was cut content wouldn’t the achievement have been cut too? and if you doubt that this achievement is referring to the cult end, Joseph actually alludes to his dungeon as the “ultimate margarita zone” so I’m preeeeetty sure this is for it. Aside from that, ddadds is a pretty textbook dating sim, and most, if not all, dating sims have a dark secret plot (seriously, even dating sim parodies like hatoful)

Given the dev teams virtual radio silence about the cult ending, and it’s apparent importance to the rest of the game, I sincerely believe that it is really the true ending for the game, and that they just... haven’t finished it yet. To me it’s the only thing that would make sense. Like I said, if they scrapped it, there wouldn’t be an achievement, and if there was just a bug keeping it from triggering (walk mary home) then there would be more in the text of the level files. I honest to god think that they had trouble getting the ending done on time, thus the delay in release, and that they took out the trigger so they could keep working on it and still publish the game. 

If I’m right, hopefully that means that they will release a patch for the cult ending soon, but for now, this is all the information available (trust me, I been diggin). anyone have any more information feel free to shoot me a message.

UPDATE 1: as of the most recent update (7/29/17) level 18 now looks like this: 

each line of dialogue is now labelled like the rest of the games files... the walk mary home bug still prevents the event from triggering.

[esther-the-cosmic-princess]

Like honestly?

[esther-the-cosmic-princess]

Sorry I haven't been active but I WANT JOSEPH'S CULT ENDING SO MUCH I'M GOING THROUGH DREAM DADDY EVERY WAY I CAN THINK OF

[esther-the-cosmic-princess]

mellenabravemellenabrave replied to your post It's not accesable via playthrought. It's either cut content or they are planing to release it as DLC

Someone on steam has gotten the “Escape from Margarita Zone” achievement and will not tell anyone how they got it. Our only clues are the Dadbook profile matters and talk to Robert. That’s all we know.