#it's something i'd really like to just capture in a bottle and keep stored somewhere

[heartbeatbookclub]

It's 2 am as I start this, and I feel the need to put pen to paper on this thought, so to speak, because it's something I think about with relative frequency.

This is going to be more of a personal musing on my experience with Doki Doki Literature Club, and why it had such an impact on me when I first played it, as opposed to any more concrete analysis, so I guess you can keep reading if you want to know more about me as a person and my overall personal relationship to it.

Something I think about often in reference to DDLC is its status simultaneously as a satire on visual novels and all of the tropes therein, as well as a love letter to that genre, explicitly. It's very readily apparent if you've played a good few "weeb" visual novels that it very much fits that bill. I think my first experience with it makes it especially funny in that respect.

To give context, I first experienced Doki Doki Literature Club like a month or two after it came out, in a Skype call (shows how old I am) with 2 or 3 of my friends. During this period of my life, me and this small group of friends spent lots and lots of time just hanging out in Skype calls like this, doing whatever we pleased, spending time well into the next morning just enjoying each other's presence and seeing what fun shenanigans we could get into on the internet.

One frequent passtime of ours was playing visual novels. Not just any visual novels, no; we went looking for the most low effort, mediocre, low hanging fruit of visual novels we could download for free. The goal wasn't to enjoy a good story, the goal was to find something amusingly bad, whether in cliched, awkward, lazy writing, or in sheer absurdity. I still do this sometimes, though it's admittedly with a different thought in mind now.

I don't think this perception we had of visual novels, being that they're typically sloppy, cringe-inducing messes is necessarily uncommon even now, but it was especially common back then. It was "weeb shit", simple as, but even deeper than your typical weeb shit. The perception was something like watching High School DxD unironically; it's just weird.

And I don't really think the perception of visual novels being that way is necessarily inaccurate; there is a very low bar to entry to actually creating a visual novel just by the nature of the medium, so really, anyone with enough passion for a project and time on their hands can make one. As a consequence, there are a few egregiously bad visual novels, there are a few really excellent visual novels, but there are a great many just sort of okay, somewhat mediocre visual novels, and lots of visual novels created with not so honorable goals in mind.

And one thing we really enjoyed was just exploring what existed in the depths of unpopular visual novels slipping through the cracks of what people saw. For most of it, we were making fun of it, but there were a lot of points where we found stories which were mediocre, but ended up really enjoying our experience with it. I think an important thing to understand with that lower barrier to entry is that it enables people who really are passionate about telling a story to tell a story that has a lot of heart, and you can see all of that heart as a diamond within the rough of the actual construction. Even in VNs with more polish, typically there are still cracks right around the edges, where you can see just a little bit of the humanity that goes into it. It's sort of magical.

And Doki Doki Literature Club was an odd edge case, which successfully played with all of my perceptions of it. DDLC is probably the only game whose story is reliant on a plot twist where I actually went in completely blind. By all appearances, it was a silly little visual novel made with no sense of irony, and I spent a great deal of time laughing at its contents, completely unaware that they were in on the joke.

And my perception of it being this way I feel like colored a lot of what happened next when I looked into it. I forget exactly when our playthrough ended--we didn't make it to any of the deeper stuff, I watched a Let's Play for that--and I forget how the whole series of events following that went, but somehow or another, I learned of some of the true nature. Namely I saw what happened to Sayori.

It reminded me of Corpse Party, when I actually thought about it.

I'm not going to go deep in depth on all of my thoughts about Corpse Party nor any of its history, but to be frank, Corpse Party reeeally sits in that realm of "mediocre, but lots of heart" to me. I don't really think Corpse Party is very good, particularly elaborating on a lot of the lore, but I really enjoyed it when I first experienced it, and it's still something I occasionally like looking back over. It's deliciously dark, and is extremely effective at creating an oppressive atmosphere out of what's ostensibly a collection of happy warm anime character tropes with little serious personality outside them.

So when I say that Sayori's death reminded me of Corpse Party, I mean that the way it paired playing the happy warm visual novel setting straight with extremely grim subject matter was done well.

Really, there were only a few other examples of this kind of media I could think of that really effectively utilized the exact kind of gut punch that DDLC did. Everything about the way the game framed itself around it, up until the final plot twist, really did feel like they were just elements of a visual novel playing themselves out. Sayo-nara really sets that tone for me--it still gives me chills sometimes when I hear it, because it sounds perfectly like what a "Bad Ending" theme for that kind of ending would likely sound like. It plays itself remarkably well into creating the setting, it really effectively feels like it is a normal visual novel falling apart at the seams.

I think that, more than anything, is why DDLC made such an impact on me when I first experienced it (which is remarkably different than the kind of mark it leaves on me now), it played so effectively with a genre I was so familiar with, and simultaneously played "mediocre visual novel with lots of heart" straight while also completely knocking "deep and terrifying existential horror" out of the park.

It's hard to truly describe, but there's just so much that feels so right about DDLC just being as it is. There's such a unique quality to the way it's written, to the way it's constructed, that goes down to its bones. It feels like that exact brand of junk food media you go to visual novels for. You don't necessarily want to think too deeply about the characters, or the setting of the story, or any of the deeper themes surrounding it; you just want to experience a nice story with some anime girls.

And then it yanks the rug out from under you, and makes you think it's junk food media with a side of deep and disturbing horror.

And then it yanks the second rug out from under that one, making you realize it's something much, much deeper.

I think something else it really appealed to, to me, was just that sense of being on the edge of the world which most indie games of that sort always give me. There are a shitload of examples I could give for this, but this sense I'm describing is the opposite of the sense which games like Undertale give me. Undertale's world feels lived in, it feels like it exists in a much, much wider concept of a great, sprawling world where billions of people live.

DDLC feels like you and the 4 girls in it are the only people in the universe. There are all of these environments you inhabit which ostensibly have other people who pass through them, live in them, there are implications of people, but inside this world, there's only you.

I think it just appeals to my desire to be transported to a complete other world for a little while. A limited space, where only things important to this experience exist, for this pure feeling of emotional catharsis. And that's something a lot of these sorts of simple visual novels appeal to; the goal isn't necessarily to tell some deeper story, it's just to present beats as they happen. DDLC takes that, and plays with it, both in a textual sense, as though these fictional characters exist and are somehow aware they're fictional, and in a meta sense, by directly playing around with your expectations and the way the entire thing is framed.

Or something like that.

Fun fact 1: Doki Doki Literature Club (specifically Sayo-Nara, still one of the few songs I can play entirely by memory) is what got me to start learning piano. I taught myself to play, and started mostly with the DDLC soundtrack (Which is very simple to play by ear, by the way, it's pretty much entirely C major.)

Fun fact 2: What initially inspired this thought was this video, which really reminded me of other visual novels we/I played that would utilize this particular style of music.

[amalgamgooze]

everything.

When I woke up this morning and took a shower, I fished a travel bottle of mouth wash out of the bathroom closet and rinsed my mouth with it. It reminded me of a summer long ago, one with my mouth riddled with braces, picante chicken instant noodles, and the taste of mouthwash.

On a whim, after my shower, I walked through the nearby woods to the Shop 'n' Save to buy a packet of picante chicken instant noodles. Nothing was going to keep me from re-experiencing "Spicy Mouthwash Ramen".

On my way through the woods, I'd walked through one of my favorite places in my hometown--a clearing overgrown with wildflowers, specifically teasels. There's something about their shape that's so alluring and eerie. I'd discovered this clearing back right before the pandemic, back when we were both younger. We've both grown since then. What was once a somewhat-barren woods had grown into a lush wonderland for all the local plants.

In the store, I'd bought several packets of picante chicken instant noodles, alongside a can of miso soup, some cans of SpaghettiOs, and a cup of Campbell's chicken noodle sipping soup--something I hadn't indulged in since the autumn of 2017. I've bought it only for the nostalgia.

I also bought some licorice tea. To me, licorice tea feels like nostalgia. I can't explain it very well. It just does. There's no taste when you first sip it down, but once the tea water's rinsed down your throat, there's a melancholy sweet taste that rises in the back of your throat. I'd highly recommend it if you've never tried it.

Once I'd come back home, I swished some more mouthwash for that authentic "Spicy Mouthwash Ramen" experience, and sipped down the flavorful broth of my cheap noodle soup. (Seriously. I'm probably slowly killing myself with how much of it I eat.) I watched the Vinesauce video where the guy plays RollerCoaster Tycoon--because watching people build stupid mazes, G-force maximizers, and phallic structures is always funny. Also because that video specifically is associated with that very specific memory of "Spicy Mouthwash Ramen" I'd formed years ago.

And the ramen doesn't taste *bad* with the hint of artificially-minty mouthwash lingering in your mouth. It adds to the flavor, somehow. I've spent some time today brainstorming how one could actually prepare that flavor--sans mouthwash.

Then I'd spent some time looking at Google Street View. Not to brag, but I've got over 100,000 views on my Street View 360 photos--specifically one I took in a dying mall back in 2019. I still remember taking that picture--without a dedicated 360 camera, it was tricky using my phone to capture all the angles of the area. It was worth it, though.

I dropped the little yellow lad in front of my own home and scrolled to the oldest photos available. Again, there's something intensely nostalgic about how fuzzy these images are and how cold the tree-covered sky looks within this 360 window into the past.

After that short trip, I'd continued work on my game. After days on end of making little to no progress programming wise, I'm happy to say that we're back in business now!

Today was dedicated to setting up the player's attack structure. How it'll work is that every time the player wants to attack, a new object that's programmed to manage that attack is created, and is put in charge of moving the player around and tracking how much damage the attack should do for pre-defined timing windows.

I'm really proud of the system so far. It's not much, but it's progress. And on a journey of a thousand steps, every step matters. This is probably somewhere around step 53 or something--I'm still just beginning, but this is where I start to pick up steam. The hardest part when making a new game is developing the frameworks for everything. Once you've got systems to easily create new attacks and such, the process shifts from programming-oriented stuff more towards story, graphics, and music-related stuff.

Today I also started playing a game called Balatro. It's a game I've had my eye on for a while, and I finally bought it today. Simply put, it's a poker game where you play hands to build up multipliers to beat levels and get money. It's really complicated--you'd have to watch someone or play it yourself to fully understand it. It's also wicked fun. I'm kind of frustrated with how fun it is. It's too fun watching numbers go up and shit.

Finally, earlier this evening, I'd run out to pick up presents for upcoming celebrations (my brother's birthday and Father's Day). While buying them books from Half Price Books (by the way, shop there! Books are stupid cheap used!), I came across a textbook on Modern Algebra and the mathematics of soccer.

Of course, being the nerd I am, I scooped them up without hesitation.

Looking forward to studying ring theory and that garbage!

...

And now here I am.

Typing out a summary of my day today.

Because it was too hard to pick just one part and focus on it.

I don't know.

I start my internship next week. I'm not exactly looking forward to it, but I suppose it's better than doing nothing all summer.

Other than that, though, I'm looking forwards to the future. Lots of highly anticipated games coming soon, like World of Goo 2 and UFO 50.

My own game is something else I'm excited for.

I will finish something this time.

I can't wait for all of you guys to play it.

...

Anyway, see you all later!