I released Doki Doki Mod Manager v1.0.0 to the general public all the way back in June. Now it’s time to take a look at what’s happened so far.

Origins

I first played DDLC in May, and immediately fell in love with the characters and their stories. As there were already so many mods out there, with no real way to install them easily, a little program to make installing them easier would be nice to have. So I threw together a rough version of what would become Doki Doki Mod Manager — and it worked!

Doki Doki Mod Manager — version 1.0.0

Unbeknownst to me at the time, it had its fair share of flaws. There was no sort of crash reporting feature, so dozens of users suffered in silence as I had no way of finding out if they had any issues. I didn’t bother to add much error checking, as I naively thought that nothing could go wrong.

I was very much mistaken — more on that later.

DDMMv1 used a custom format for mods: the mod needed to be a zip file that had an mod.json file in the root directory. This was a mistake, as very few mod developers would go out of their way to support a project so early in its life. (The ones who did included the developers of the extremely popular Monika After Story)

I also included my own version of a “mod store” where you could upload your mods and distribute them to users of DDMM. This worked surprisingly well — people could upload mods, the server would verify them and make them available to download.

Except my code was terrible, and some mods were marked as valid when they weren’t, and I had to manually unpublish a couple of mods that flat out wouldn’t work. Then I ran out of DigitalOcean credit. Then people complained that they couldn’t add certain mods. Then I realised my code was a complete monstrosity (two GIGANTIC JavaScript files, mixing UI and backend code — any other Electron developer would want to hit me. This is why v1 was never open sourced, but feel free to have a look anyway)

Version 2 was born, out of necessity.

Version 2: The Functional One

I started writing DDMMv2 to address these issues, and more. I wanted to make an application that did a task discreetly without getting in your way or causing unnecessary nuisances, and not something that you’d spend more time in than necessary.

Installing a mod was simplified, as was creating them. I did away with the mod.json nonsense and replaced it with an algorithm that automatically determined what goes where. And it worked! I also re-released it on Reddit, which was met with much more interest than v1 ever got.

Doki Doki Mod Manager —version 2.0.0

One of the most important features I added was crash reports. If something went horribly wrong, DDMM would post a rudimentary crash report as a GitHub gist (privately under my account).

There were quite a lot of crash reports. So many, in fact, that I had to write a script to delete them from my GitHub account.

The UI got a redesign (and a dark theme!), an SDK added support for achievements, and it could download DDLC by itself. And I eventually ironed out some of the most common issues.

Version 2.0.0 was also the first version to be open sourced under the MIT license. Anyone could inspect and contribute if they so desired. Everything was great, and everyone was happy. Except…

Can you make it so we can change the install directory of mods? I’m not really fond of installing games on my C drive [Please add] custom installation locations since my C drive is exploding Maybe add a feature to change the location of installs? I would really like to change the Mod Manager’s directory

and…

I noticed that .rar files don’t seem to be compatible. If there’s a way to do that, that would make things even easier for me and other people.

and…

You should comment and document some parts of the code btw

That’s where we are now.

Looking to the future — DDMMv3

Doki Doki Mod Manager version 3 is in the works, with the fourth (including a scrapped one that’s only visible if you look at the GitHub repo) iteration of the UI.

Doki Doki Mod Manager — version 3.0.0

The new version is being rebuilt from the ground up to be as close to bug-free as I can possibly get, with an even simpler and slicker user interface, and (perhaps most importantly) integration with the upcoming Sayonika mod database. This, if things go according to plan, will be the spiritual successor to the original “Mod Store”, and should feature a much wider selection of mods.

I’m very much looking forward to releasing version 3, and I’d like to have that happen before 2019. No promises!

Conclusion

It’s been a great year for Doki Doki Mod Manager! Well, it’s been the only year, but it’s grown from a small side project to a fairly popular tool for installing and playing mods.

Looking forward to seeing you in 2019!

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Doki Doki Mod Manager is available to download at https://doki.space. You can also join the Discord server at https://doki.space/discord