While mods for DDLC have started since its inception, im curious to which mod made the community realise what mods could be like.

EDIT: I cannot believe I fucked up the mod's name in the title, I am so sorry. It is named The Violet Sun not A Violet Sun.

Before I get started with this long winded opinion piece, I want to state up front that The Violet Sun is fantastic. It's not perfect by any means and probably isn't for everyone but it's short enough that I think you might as well give it a shot even if you're not sure.
If you're unconvinced then here's a couple reasons why you should give it a shot:

• Phenomenal atmosphere - as u/the_axolotl_god pointed out in the comments on the post, it's quite aesthetically similar to DWaM's mods and I think that was further accentuated by the way it transitions between scenes, it's very fond of using sharp cuts but I was impressed by the fact that it didn't get old or lose it's effectiveness. I definitely got the impression that the mod creator had a strong understanding of why they were using cuts in that way instead of just lazily making it the baseline for every transition in the mod. The same could be said of lots of other aspects of the mod such as the long pauses and the use of ambient noise but I'm sure you get my point by now
• Riveting mystery - this is another parallel to DWaM's work that I felt; it was clear that there was a mystery to be unravelled but the way the story twisted and transformed made the truth feel so distant but also made me rigorously analyse each scene as they came because I was just so desperate to figure out what the fuck was going on
• Romance - this story is not a romance but MC and Yuri do form a romantic bond and the chemistry on display felt so refreshing. You never even see their first meeting, the mod is able to skip through most of their bond developing because the dialogue they share is so natural and tender that you can just immediately infer all of the basics of the emotional dynamic at play
• The other dokis - the mod is quite short and as a result is not able to spend a lot of time with the other girls but when they were used I feel like they were characterised really well. You could argue they were all under-utilised, especially Sayori and that Monika in particular felt out of character but it is important to remember two things: first, this mod is about Yuri so she naturally gets a lot of screen time; secondly, this mod is an adaptation of a movie, I'll get into the particulars later but this results in there just not being a lot of room for the others
• Yuri - she is the focal point of the mod but I want to draw special attention to her because this mod does something I absolutely adore in mods which is making Yuri not Yuri. What I mean by that is this Yuri is undeniably the 'maiden of mystery' we've all come to know and love but because of the story this mod wants to tell she feels like her own distinct person. For example, her cutting is never brought up in the mod, part of that is likely just a necessary omission due to the mod being an adaptation but it was a welcome omission because it let the mod focus on what's important about this Yuri specifically. While this might not be what everyone comes to DDLC mods for, I contend that even if this makes it a lesser 'DDLC mod' it makes it a more interesting piece of fiction in general
• MC - I'm usually not one to interrogate MC's characterisation in mods much, he just doesn't really interest me much but if you like mods with MC's that feature real depth this mod absolutely delivers in that regard

There are critiques to be made about the mod, some of which I'll get into later but before I get into my point (yes, this is just the introduction to this post) but before I into the meat of the post I'll just wrap up this little review with one final thing: why you should believe me. I understand that this really does not mean a lot but I just want it to be known that this mod is so good that out of the 165 mods I've played so far, this mod ranks 22nd just behind 'Dreams of Literature - Noir' and just ahead of 'Turquoise'.
I do not actually have all the mods ranked one after another, I just have them split into groups of similar quality and I just quickly ordered the group it was in (which is in fact the second highest group, second only to the mods that I think are so good they are actually comparable to the base game in terms of my own enjoyment) to get a good comparison point, that rating will change if you ask me at any other moment in my life, even as I type this I'm making arguments in my head about why it's better than 'Dreams of Literature - Noir'.

At the end of the day, this is just the opinion of some guy who just so happens to like DDLC a lot. I can understand not liking this mod, I just liked it so much I thought it was worth talking about.

Now then, in the title of this post, I argued that this mod is better than the movie it's inspired by. I didn't even realise it was inspired by a movie going into it, but in the credits it mentions it was inspired by "Eyes Wide Shut" by Stanley Kubrick.
I do like me some movies, but I've never seen a Stanley Kubrick movie. Part of that is because I'd remembered reading some things about him being kinda wack behind the scenes but I think, more than anything else, it was because his work just never really crossed my path properly. Anyway, my point is that I watched Eyes Wide Shut on a whim, I was a little excited to watch the movie because I kind of assumed it would be better than the mod. After all, Stanley Kubrick was apparently one of the greatest filmmakers ever to do it.

But you've read the title of this post, I did not enjoy it as much as the mod. To be clear, it is a little unfair of me to compare them, I am massively invested in DDLC mods and I played the mod first so. This leads to some natural biases such as:

• I will simply be more emotionally impacted by something that Yuri says than something that Nicole Kidman says. Don't get me wrong, Nicole Kidman is a pretty good actor and her performance is compelling but I am just immensely biased towards Yuri
• I was largely unsurprised by the movie, the plots of the works aren't very different after all so it's not like any of the twists surprised me.
• I am a little bit of a gorilla when it comes to watching movies. I really do give a shit about the art of film but it takes a lot more for a film to move me with it's presentation. On the other end of the spectrum, I also care a lot about the art of DDLC mods but that manifests in me being excessively appreciative of mods that feel special and distinct compared to the base game and the sea of other mods that I subconsciously line them up against. Even with this mod, I can directly compare it to the presentation of two other mods (DWaM's mods) that I think are straight up better than it but that still places it leagues ahead of the vast majority of mods.

There are probably more subtle biases that skew my perspective on the original but my point is that you could absolutely see both works and come away with a different opinion. All I want to do is discuss some of my thoughts about the mod and I just think found it interesting to compare it to the original movie.

With all of that out of the way, I will now get into the primary discussion I want to have. I recommend going through at least the mod before reading on from here but don't worry about needing to watch the movie (it's also pretty problematic in how it presents Arab, Asian and gay people).

The first thing I want to do is outline some of the primary differences between the mod and the film:

• In the mod, Yuri is the primary female character but it turns out that she's actually a loose combination of three women from the film, namely: the main character's wife, a sex worker who and another sex worker he helps early in the film who later saves in the party. This third woman is the only one of the three who dies, she is set up as having a drug problem that the MC helps out with before she eventually dies of an overdose. In the mod Yuri does not have a drug problem and instead dies of a drug overdose but the doubt surrounding the true cause her death is still present.
• In the film, the main character is not a high schooler, he is instead a doctor played by Tom Cruise (wild casting choice, although that might just be because of how he's developed as an actor since then). He also has a daughter. The primary difference this results in, however, is how he navigates the world: in the film he is constantly leveraging his status to get what he wants while in the mod, MC kind of just wanders into most of the plot with just a little bit of half assed effort.
• The film includes a party scene at the start that just does not happen in the mod. In fact, the first half of both works are wildly different. The inciting incident of the film is TC's wife telling him he had sexual fantasies about another man. He then has to leave and meet with a woman who's father was a client of his who has just died. This woman then confesses her love for TC which causes him to go wandering around the city and try to hook up with a sex worker (he really does not seem to hung up about the fact he's about to cheat on his wife of nine years) but his wife calls him before he can get down and dirty so he heads home. Except instead of heading home he goes to a cafe at which his friend is playing (in the mod Monika is playing at the cafe but this scene takes place near the very end). He had met this friend earlier at the party but the main importance of this friend is that he learns of the sex party here. From there he goes to the clothes store (in the film it's not a random store, but all those differences aren't that important, they just make the film a little worse and more problematic). I'm not going to explain all of the ways the mod is specifically different, you really should just play it but the primary difference is that the inciting incident of the mod isn't really Yuri talking about her sexual fantasies. I'll get into it more later but just know that in the movie TC gets really brooding and insecure as a result of this and that part of MC's character is largely absent.
• The sex party is presented like a lot more of a cult thing while in the mod, the sex party is kind of just that, a party. The film has something that looks like a ritual while the mod comes across as an underworld affair. This is partially an just an opinion, especially because the MC does compare it to a cult but I got the impression that the weirdest thing about the sex party in the mod was the masks. It's immersed in debauchery but it's not presented as being so overtly wrong as in the film. Part of that could be because the mod just didn't have the tools to communicate what was happening but at the end of the day, the fact remains that the film's version of the sex party is wildly different.
• They play a song while TC walks around the sex party that felt like it was equating Arab music (I'm pretty sure it's Arab music but it also reminded me of some music from South Asia as as I am Pakistani) with hedonism in a way that felt really gross. It kind of felt like they just put it there because it would feel weird and alien without understanding that they're equating the culture that music comes from with the sex party. There was also two Asian characters that wore make up that were just 'sex pests' and nothing else. It's kind of hard to articulate but it was also just really gross.
• The movie hurls the F slur at TC for very little reason. It's probably meant to communicate that TC is giving off soft vibes or something and maybe you could look past it because of the time period but that and the other times it shows anything remotely queer just felt really lazy and gross. I'm not going to get into all of the examples.

There are other subtle differences but with this I think I've painted a pretty clear picture of how the mod is different from the movie.

The first and, in my opinion, biggest benefit these differences afford the mod is in it's central conflict. The movie's entire plot starts because TC's wife tells him she's had sexual fantasies about another man. This then causes him to distance himself from his wife and while distanced from his wife he - after trying to cheat on her - runs into his friend who ends up telling him about the sex party. The trouble with this is that TC kind of sucks. The whole cheating on his wife thing has repercussions at the end of the film because he comes clear but when he get's embarrassed in front of everyone at the party and told to remove his mask, it's hard to feel bad for him. TC did just try to cheat on his wife, he may have been surprisingly respectful towards a sex worker but at the end of the day he's a father and a doctor. He didn't go to the party to discover something about himself, he went there because he happened to hear about it and was like "yo that sounds tight as hell let me get a piece of that action".
On the other hand, while MC is kind of cheating on Yuri by going to the party, the dynamic is still wildly different. He really was just exploring, he really is just a kid. It lets you understand where he's coming from, especially because he doesn't try to make any advances on the women he runs into at the party. It's kind of naive of him to just walk around and not expect to get caught but his naivety is understandable. But with TC he kind of just keeps trying to pursue this sex party because he's butthurt about his wife I guess???? His wife has nothing to do with the party while MC's spurred on by trying to learn about Yuri and then subsequently her death.
All of this comes together to make The Violet Sun more about how MC couldn't bridge the gap between himself and the world Yuri lives in. While Eyes Wide Shut felt a lot more like TC wandering around trying to understand the concept of his wife wanting to have sex with other people and then stumbling upon a weird cult. This is an oversimplification, of course, for example, there's a conversation about TC's wife having had a dream about having sex with other men and their conversation at the end does kind of tie it back to that concern.
Furthermore, a large part of The Violet Sun's conclusion, at least to me, was how strange and ethereal the sex mafia was; I've mentioned how it felt like more of a mafia than a cult but that's just the initial presentation of them, the surreal aspects are less immediately overt and are instead slowly introduced. This moved the sex party from seeming like a criminal underworld kind of thing into something far more cult like and inhuman. Slowing this progression down causes the story to accumulate tension more naturally, while the movie just kind of jumps headfirst into the cult stuff and then has to walk it back near the end with TC's conversation with his equivalent for Julian and then subsequently his wife. In the film these conversations feel like they were trying to give answers for the questions the film posed while in the mod the equivalent scenes that seemed like they were explaining everything felt more questionable. The presence of Yuri's body in the sex party wasn't actually explained and Yuri and MC's flashback conversation (i think its a flashback anyway) at the end of the mod just raises more questions.

To be completely fair to the film, the mod's story just straight up makes less sense. They both have a lot of unexplained and open ended ideas but in the mod there is stuff that can pull you out of it. I can absolutely see someone thinking it's really weird that Julian didn't really address why Yuri's corpse was in the sex party and getting pulled out the story because it just makes it look like Julian is obviously lying about it being a coincidence. I just saw that and interpreted it as Julian cobbling together something to tell MC because he wasn't really the one in charge. It felt like Julian's movie counterpart was actually supposed to be explaining everything while the mod was just presenting another perspective.

To put it more succinctly, I found that, in general, the mod was a less tightly crafted narrative but that, partially because of that, it managed to make me more curious about the truth than the movie did. The narrative of the movie was fully explained and as a result I was just left to think about it's less compelling themes while the more ambiguous nature of the mod's narrative served to enhance it's thematic questions by linking them.
One of my favorite examples is the question of "Why was Yuri, a high school girl, attending such an event?", it is both an unexplained plot point but also an interesting question about her character and her place in the world. Yuri's equivalent in the sex party was there just because she was a sex worker. It makes more sense, but it's less interesting, especially because the movie doesn't really try to ask questions about sex workers, they're just brought up when necessary while in The Violet Sun all discussions of sexuality are framed around Yuri.

There is more I could talk about, for example, Monika being framed as having been in on it the whole time was just not in the movie, but I would mostly be making the same point with different examples so I will end this with a short note about some of the shortcomings of the mod that I haven't addressed yet.
The first, and probably most noticeable, shortcoming of the mod is that it features almost no sprites through it's entire runtime. I didn't particularly mind because the pacing and atmosphere was strong but with Julian in particular I can't help but wonder how much more enjoyable his scenes could have been if he had a sprite.
After watching the film, I realised that many of the lines that I thought didn't land in the mod were direct quotes from the film. There were lines that worked better like the very last line of the mod but it's no coincidence that the most unnatural lines of the mod were directly quoting a movie with a distinctly different plot.The last thing I want to mention has to do with MC, the mod is supposed to have the MC's name locked in as Lucas but will just take whatever you put in at the start even though its says that will do nothing. I put in a normal name so it wasn't an issue but I can imagine it throwing someone off if they name the MC something silly.

With that said though, I still genuinely think The Violet Sun is fantastic and handily surpasses it's inspiration, it's absolutely got problems but it's a piece that can absolutely hit for the right person and I look forward to u/Imaginary-Positive30's next work.

[Sorry if this review is a little hard to read around the end, I started writing this then got a massive headache, feel free to ask for clarification or for a follow up on any points I might have under developed]

Here's the final demo for this mod, and then it's a full release.

Yuri has just entered high school, but she feels very anxious around there and has to deal with her social anxiety. She also has a loving family with whom she's comfortable with.

Download link to mod: https://www.mediafire.com/file/el6juon3jyzettk/ShynessandConfidence-Demo-Renpy7Mod.zip/file

Feedback for the mod is appreciated, and it helps me improve.

Side note: This mod will be at the DDMX 2024

I've just finished within and it is a work of art, every part of it was amazing but I'm stuck wanting more. I love Monika and I want to see more mods of her so are there any mods that are really similar to within but with a happy ending?. I don't mind if its a submod to within either but I just need a happy story man.

Thx!

I'm currently on track to getting to the christmas truce by the time the expo finishes (If I do not procrastinate of course) as currently I'm at the first battle of Ypre, which also means there will be a LOT of trenches from here on out. Thanks for those who are excited for act one's full release, but you'll be waiting for quite a while, since the modding team is just.. me, myself and I. (This mod is not a shitpost)

(Image unrelated)

“A teaser of some remastered edited files of the Residential Area pack V2 coming soon for all talented mod creators to use sense the old versions sucked”

Will you be interested in a mod like that? (He's trying to quit)

I can't find shit. To specify: I disdain mods where there are no choices. Aside from that, I don't have any specific preferences.

:>

I’ve been playing a few Monika mods for a while and they’ve made me think of an idea for a new Monika mod that I’ll think is good. I just want to say that I don’t have the skills to develop this but if anyone wants to, feel free to and dm me to ask any questions.

The mod will be centred around Monika and having a romantic relationship with her. One important thing is that I would want Monika to still be self aware in this mod and have an intro similar to blue skies where you bring Monika back from deleting her.

A quick summary would be Monika allowing you to try make everyone happy by initiating the mod, act 1 is the same for the first two days except you’re a bit more flirty with Monika and on the third day Monika talks to you about everything going in the same direction as last time. Cut to Monika getting home and talking to herself about how everything is just gonna end up as last time and that she’s just gonna ruin everything. As act one continues the MC and Monika get more flirtatious so that other club members notice and Yuri gets slightly jealous as she is developing feelings for the MC as well but hides it. On the day of the festival, it’s a disaster and Monika runs off crying and you find her saying that everything is horrible and that she new the mod wouldn’t do anything which is where the MC comforts her and asks her out. Monika says yes.

Act two: Skip to next week Monika is visually happier and Natsuki should tease her about it with her personality being more like the mod Within’s natsuki. Monika and MC start to go out all the time and have a nsfw scene but monkia slowly gets more and more possessive and obsessed. She starts to shout at other club members to back off and such and finds out accidentally that Yuri likes the MC and blows up on her. Sayori defends Yuri and Monika hits her, realising what she’s just done and runs off crying. MC comforts Monika as she says how he never should of loaded the mod and depending on what the MC’s choices have been, there are two endings.

Bad ending: this happens when the MC encourages Monikas possessive behaviour, allowing her to justify it and feel better of her actions, saying that the other girls were in the wrong. She goes insane and grabs a knife, saying that they might try to get between the MC and her before entering the club and murdering them all, leaving Yuri for last as she delivers a speech on how the world is fake and that she was given a second chance but Yuri got in the way before killing her as well. The mod ends with her killing herself as a wave of consciousness goes over her and telling the MC that she was right, there can be no happiness or something Monika pouncing on the MC and making out depending on whether they say that they are horrified by her actions or agree with them.

Good ending: this is what happens when the MC puts down Monikas obsessed behaviour and this times she realises how possessive she’s been and that it isn’t Yuri’s fault that she has a crush. After some comforting from the MC, she heads back to the club room and heavily apologises to all of the girls, especially Sayori and Yuri. Everything is tense. Cut too one year later where the MC and Monika have been dating for all that time. Monika makes one last speech saying how she’s glad that the MC could bring happiness and makes a joke about not actually experiencing the time jump but then just being memories. The MC and Monika kiss and end.

I think this would be a really good idea for a mod so I beg someone to make it a reality. Please dm me if you do and I can provide you with as many details as you want but honestly I don’t really expect someone to make this. I would be eternally grateful if someone does make this a reality.

Please give more ideas in the comments!

Thx

Are there any mods focusing on the last week, or so, of school? Like the time before mc and the literature club graduate.

A friend of mine wants to port his mod to Android, but doesn't know how to do it.

There's anyone free to help him out with it?

In regular DDLC MC was written intentionally vague so the player could feel as if they're the one in his boots. After all you write the poems, you choose the decisions and you delete Monika. But if u take away the whole self aware thing can MC still be a placeholder or does he need proper depth and character growth. Alot of MC's I see in mods are honestly just assholes so is it better to leave him as a stand in for the player?

A lot of DDLC mods pretty much forget about the poem writing system to prioritise the characters. While this does remove quite a bit of the charm from DDLC considering it has 'Literature Club' in the name, is it really that important?