Are we all really surprised by this prediciment? Let's be honest with ourselves here.

I'll go over the main contributing factors that led to its cancellation, what my plans for this mod were before I decided to put it down & some other things.

Why cancel it?

Time and poor organization skills were the main enemy here, I think.

To those that aren't in the know about my current (overall) plans for FNF mods, I've lately been trying to finish them one by one, focusing on each of them until the "queue" is all complete. DREAMFUCK was placed further down this queue, which was my first mistake, considering how at the time I really started doing this it had already been a good 6 months since I last checked in on the project and was already forgetting how far exactly into development we were.

To clarify on how bad things were, all of DREAMFUCK's progress was being made in a single GC, and while that helped the team be active while development was still a real thing that was going on, it was at the cost of not being able to organize our progress: our GC pins were a mix of backlogged assets and funny messages, and I don't think all of the assets were even able to get pinned, leading to us eventually losing our way on how much work we had completed/had to be done. Our coder had stated their preference on waiting for all of the assets to be completed first before getting to work, too, so it wasn't like any of us could rely on "the latest unfinished build" to check how much we had implemented in-game thus far.

And here's the other thing, too - it's been one year since DREAMFUCK's demo was released! That's old as shit! A lot of the team members seem to agree that our work back then doesn't really fit the quality of our current works, so we agreed that when we hypothetically were to get back on DREAMFUCK we most likely would spiritually be restarting from square one, which is...ehhhh. I dunno...alright, I guess? When you're trying to check boxes off a list as efficiently as you can, doing something like that can be a huge time killer, though, which would be unfavorable.

Lastly, I have to admit that I'm simply not as into Yume Nikki as I was before. Not to say that I've fallen out of love with it, though, I think it's a wonderful game!!! My interest for it just isn't really as front-and-center as it used to be, which would probably affect how I would approach DREAMFUCK, and I'd rather not have my works feel like chores! I think it'd be probably for the best if I just let this thing go for now.

Plans

As I mentioned before, the DREAMFUCK dev GC is a total and utter mess & I feel like trying to filter through it to figure out who made what would be more trouble than it would be worth, so I unfortunately won't be able to showcase everything that I made for DREAMFUCK. To make up for this, however, I wouldn't mind talking about the plans for what would have been the full version of this mod:

• Four more songs with Madotsuki as the playable character, going against Poniko, Uboa, Monoe & Monoko (forming a 5-song "Story Mode" with Window being the introductory song).

• A secret sixth song where Madotsuki goes against FACE. Monoe would be there, too.

• An extra Freeplay song against "Jimbo" paying homage to pureko, a Yume 2kki-centric Youtuber that I really like.

• A Madomori song that was ported from another cancelled mod of mine...? I wasn't really too sure on whether or not this would have stayed for the final product. (It probably wouldn't have stayed.)

DREAMFUCK Art Sampler

"Everything" doesn't mean "nothing", though! I'd feel really bad if I cancelled the mod without showing actual proof of our efforts, so I decided to dig through the pins of the dev GC and showcase a couple of things (that I made mostly by myself) that I thought would be worth showing off! :)

Jimbo sprites from the aforementioned bonus song. Keep in mind that these are a little outdated, though - he's supposed to be looking towards the left!

Various Urotsuki sprites that also would have been used for the Jimbo song (IN ORDER: main, game over (MethyThe2nd helped me finalize the game over animation!), extra). You would have been playing as two Urotsukis at once, one of them being pureko himself and the other being 0decimal (who's popped up in some of his earlier videos from time to time).

A mockup of the Freeplay menu, namedropping two of the other songs after Window. (Akhirio helped me with this one, haha!)

Monoko sprites that I made for a special event in the middle of her song. Those that've been around my general vicinity for a while might remember these being shown off in a Help Wanted post!

A Monoe CG that would have been used at the very end of her song.

Conclusion

THE BIG QUESTION THAT NOBODY IS ASKING: "Will you ever come back to this mod?"

HAHAHA...maybe. I don't know. Definitely not in the immediate future, though.

I should restate that as I'm currently typing this, I have currently been trying to go through my FNF mod queue as fast as I can, and with both that and other matters in my life (academic & personal) to simutaneously juggle, adding more projects to the list (no matter how big/small in scale they might be) will most certainly affect my schedule and how fast I'll be able to burn through everything in the long run. Maybe when everything's done and when I have more free time to spend, I'll consider coming back to it...

I suspect that a little while after this gets posted other team members will attempt to showcase their own works for the mod. (I hope the musicians at least release the songs!) It kind of sucks how this mod has to end this pitifully, given how we actually managed to get pretty far into development before things started to fall off (based off my recollection of events, at least)...oh, well. They can't all be winners.

I'll miss DREAMFUCK! Even if it wasn't really one of my better optimzed mods development-wise, it was still fun to make & just as fun to bond with members of the team over it. I don't regret making it at all, and I hope I at least inspired others to make projects similar to this one through its existence!

Until next time, Corthon.