The following retrospective contains spoilers for the whole mod. So, if you haven't played it, might be a good time to bounce.

Today is December 22nd, a whole year since Ribbit's full release came out. A year later, and somehow I find myself talking about Ribbit again. There is a point where I would eventually like to move on, so this'll most likely be the one and only retrospective you'll get.

And you may say, "yeah, right, like you said you wanted to move on 5 months ago." And, to be fair, 5 months ago, I didn't think I'd get an opportunity to make Ribbit's sprites better. Hence, I'm in the process of digging out this mod one last time, with me and Devilredd giving it the spit 'n polish that I thought it always deserved. And, hey, while we're doing that, why not open up a little about what I think of this mod a year later?

Where to begin... well, as with every project I'll probably ever make in my lifetime, there's gonna be points I'm fond of, and points I'm embarrassed over. Things I could've done better, VS. things I'll fight to defend with my dying breath.

Two weeks past the release of Deltarune Chapter 1, I was getting accustomed to the fact that I've been building up a community of Twitter followers, hooking them in with my various dumb little attempts at modding Undertale. At that moment, not only I had Undertale to work with, but this whole other 3-hour thing. And, y'know, I could've just sufficed with making a bunch of short memes, but I thought to myself, wouldn't it be more fun if I offered a collection of memes in interactive form?

Except, that was already in development, and it's called Deltarune Repainted. Oh, and there were at least two other Repainted mods being made by other teams at the time. It was a bit of a smothering of meme mods, and I was only one guy compared to the main Repainted mod having a whole team. Whatever I was going to make along the same line, it would've just been viewed as a lesser Repainted.

So, okay. Change of plans. Let's create something that would be far less likely to be attempted by others. I didn't wish to treat things competitively. Within fan communities, and the Undertale community especially, I don't view competition as healthy. Even if you told me "Ribbit is better than X", it'd just suck for my work to be used to degrade someone else's. Every project should shine on its own terms, and be judged by itself.

Of course, influence and inspirations are unavoidable, but they should be mixed with your own special element. It's what I think every project should strive for. And that's what I attempted with Ribbit. To create a Deltarune mod that felt like something I would write, rather than something Toby Fox would.

Of course, then comes the next dilemma: I'm not Stephen King for crissakes, I'm some bloke that one day decided he liked to write.

With Ribbit, there was this initial thought that the entire mod would be played entirely straight-faced. No memes, none of the humor I use on Twitter. Instead, a focus on story and a lighthearted sense of humor that could fit in any work, and could be enjoyed by anyone. But then... would anyone play that? If it was done well enough, there was a chance, but with my lack of track record, I did not have the confidence that I could pull off something this ambitious and nail it. Moreso, I didn't feel confident that I could convince most people to play it.

And so, that's when things became unorthodox. Ribbit became a combination of narrative and shitpost. The shitpost is to draw the player in with something familiar, with the eventual goal to present them something less and less familiar over time. The narrative was presented in a mystery format, essentially being a bunch of scattered jigsaw pieces that you can either engage with as little or as much as you want to.

Did this work out? I mean, kind of, but, yeah the whole thing's a mess. I was playing Bayonetta 3 recently, and thought to myself "shit, I kind of Bayonetta 3'd my own story before Bayonetta 3 came out." In the sense that I went for something that only makes sense if you delve into the optional lore.

But, y'know, I've been wanting to try something like that since years. A kind of mod where you head into it with the expectation that it's not gonna get that deep, but by the end, you're reading extensive lore files with one bombshell dropped after another.

Even if people hated this approach, even if the lore files still didn't do a good enough job at clearing things up... I am glad I tried this method at least once. And now that I know the problems with it, I can take them as lessons for my next project. Which in all likelihood won't do the optional lore file thing again. I really need to make a simpler story sometime.

Still, in spite of the mod having its flaws... in spite of the couple embarrassing mistakes I've made across its development, by the time the full release came out, I feel like I've ironed them out to the best of my abilities. And, even now, I can look back on the full release pretty fondly.

I am about to reminsce. This means spoilers for the mod going forward.

Remember the cracktro intro? Y'know, that visually-busy screen you see everytime you boot the mod up. I've wanted to open up one of my games with a fake cracktro since 2015, and I've waited 5 years for the opportunity. I like to play with the idea of having my creations cycle through multiple aesthetic styles. It was also just a good way to indicate to the player that there's some pretty custom stuff in here, and they may find more of its kind if they keep going. I remember.

Remember the part early on where Susie kills you and sends you into a game over screen? That was my very first custom cutscene ever made. And at the time, those things were batshit difficult.

The current Undertale Mod Tool supports the far more readable Decompiled code, but at the time, all you could work with is Disassembly, and just about anything could break if you didn't edit things exactly right. Getting that cutscene functioning gave me this rush of dopamine. Sitting back, wondering "Holy shit, did I just do that?" I remember.

Remember Noyno's exposition about ghosts, and your ultimate goal? The one prior to Lancer crashing into him. Wanting to strike the best possible first impression we could, we spent 3 months getting the art for that scene together.

And it was tricky, because at the time, I didn't know how to extend scenes, or add any more dialogue. So I had to abide by the exact amount of lines that the original scene had, and form a whole new scene around it, that explained the rules of the story and your goal in it. Matty spent at least a whole month drawing that flower field. I remember.

Remember the scene where Susie impales Lancer with the robot arm? You may be able to pick up that this scene was the point where I learned how to add more dialog. And boy, did I went crazy with the possibilities.

NPC's from thereon went from having like, 6 lines of dialogue each, to 60. Not wanting to choose between 5 jokes, I wrote in all of them. And that may have been a bit too indulgent on my part. Sacrificing the game's pacing for my own amusement. It's not something I wanna repeat going forward, but I'm glad there were some that enjoyed it.

Remember... the forest? Like, all of it? The point where the training wheels fully came off, and some real crazy shit started happening with the mod. The rule became that there needed to be at least one custom thing per every room or two to keep things constantly fresh. Whether it was something more minor like the Rabbick turning into an error message, or the big setpiecy stuff like EarthBound or the WarioWare moment, the mod diverged significantly from just doing basic edits of existing cutscenes, and veered further into original content.

There were some hitches. We nearly fucked up and got the mod stuck in feature creep mode. But by the holidays of 2020, I sat down, and cut what didn't look promising, while finishing up the coding on that which I felt would blow everyone's socks off. It was a tiring month, but the forest was worth it. Some of my most chaotic work yet.

Remember the prison Lancer fight? It was one of the earliest planned scenes of the mod, dating back to 2018, before being made in January of 2021. By far, that scene went through the most revisions. Lancer was originally treated as the bad guy (to the point of serving the MOTHERs), followed by both Susie and him being the baddies...

But it kinda made me think, would that scene matter if there was nobody to root for? So by the end, I wound up wanting to make both characters have a sympathetic angle. Making it clear that Susie is being controlled by something against her will, while Metta, though a bit self-centered still, ultimately wanted to make their robot friend proud.

If we take out all of the jokey scenes, the Metta pre-fight is my favorite scene in the whole mod, potentially because of the amount of revision work that went into it. All of the little reveals, the new angles that Susie and Metta get as characters, building up to the most tense fight in the whole story. With its ultimate outcome officially marking the mod's final shift in tone.

Remember EveryName? I mean, I figure anybody who hasn't played Ribbit at least might've heard the EveryName fight in passing. Which was overall the goal. Ribbit wasn't easy to sell as a concept, it felt too personal to me, and not clear enough to anybody else. It's not like Bed Lump mod, everybody understood what that mod was about when I simply said its name. But, how to sell Ribbit...?

Well, by the time I got to EveryName, I picked up on how to create custom bullet patterns, so... why not go all out, and make that the selling point?

EveryName is one of those concepts that floated in my head for many years, but even as development on Ribbit began, I had severe doubts that I could pull it off. It was the end-all-be-all. Whereas Manos was the final boss to the mod's story, EveryName was the final boss of my at-the-time programming capabilities. The fact that not only I pulled it off, but 85% of my vision for it happened exactly as I imagined it, is incredible.

I cut a handful of attacks, and some cutscenes when you die, but the overall fight ended up being the kind of thing I want to do more of in the future. Intense, fast-paced, keeping you on the move, constantly changing, visuals constantly shifting...

That's not to say it didn't have its problems. EveryName represents a fascinating divide. I've seen people think it's one of the best fights they've played, expressing that they want more like this in Deltarune. Then there's the ones that think it's unbalanced, unfair, and miserable to play through. Which is funny, because they should've seen the playtests.

I've had over 8 people test this fight immediately after I finished making it, and not even the most experienced of them could get past the Flowey phase. Nostalgia required 100% TP, only gave you 6 INV FRAMES instead of 24, getting hit took way more TP than it does now... a lot of attacks were way tighter, faster, and two of them were literal bullshit, they were nigh undodgable. I remember spending 3 hours adjusting that attack where EveryName tosses a bunch of swords at you.

Something important I've learned, is that while testing and making attacks, you are gonna have infinitely more time to practice them than the average player will. Thus, you will end up far more skilled at them, and find it difficult to gauge how to balance things. An attack pattern that you may find "too easy", could be just right for the player.

So, upon that disastrous playtesting session, that was like 2 whole days of me adjusting the balance little by little, until the point finally came where every playtester could beat it.

And even then, it's still pretty god damn hard. That being said, in its final present state, I don't think it's unfair. It was just built for crazy people. The kind that could pull off almost-no hit Sans runs. The optionality of the fight gave me a lot of leeway to build it for the most toughened of Undertale players, though I tried giving a bunch of optional tools to ease things up, such as the ACTs, the checkpoint, the Invincibility Mode...

Oh, by the way, the halfway checkpoint isn't a cheat. I don't get why people think that. The fight is literally 20 minutes long, guys, I'm not cruel enough to make you do the whole thing everytime.

I remember you.

Remember MANOS? Manos, Manos, Manos... how did you even end up in this mod? Contrary to semi-popular belief, this is not in fact my favorite movie. It's a terrible mess of a movie. But, I did always enjoy shlock, and so I gravitated towards it. Eventually wondering to myself, "What if I took this universe and expanded on it?"

Ribbit was meant to be built for at least two playthroughs. I don't think I succeeded in conveying this very well, but basically, when you encounter the final boss, and you find out it's a reference to this obscure-ass 60's movie, maybe even giving it a watch... Coming back into Ribbit, I was hoping some would realize that nearly every MOTHERSPAWN you encounter is a Manos reference in some way or another.

Is this really important? No, probably not, Manos at the end of the day is just the big bad. I suppose one of my flaws tends to be to care about the detail of something more than the actual reason of it. That's another thing I oughta work on.

The MOTHERSPAWNs were a mixed experiment to me. We did them not out of a desire to do something special, but because we were limited in what we could do. And in this case, I don't feel like limitation bred creativity, it mostly just stifled these designs from being memorable.

Everyone who I've seen do the quiz answered the "How many unique MOTHERSPAWNs have you seen" question wrong their first time. And I think that's a failure on my part.

Okay, but BAD END was fucking rad though, we can agree on that. Right?

One last thing. Just to delve into what Ribbit means to me nowadays. Because what it means changed a lot over development.

Eventually, it became a reflection of my 2018-2020 feelings. Exploring fears of abandonment, the fear of being trapped in an inescapable situation, questions about mortality, corrupt and stable family bonds, dreams, the future...

The theme of the future became the most important aspect of Ribbit to me. It's not one that I initially thought about much, but as I grow up, I become different. And as with anybody playing the mod, I theorize about what I made, because I made it in a period where I felt lost and confused.

And, my takeaway is this: The mod's main story takes place in an imagined future, the kind of future our minds are afraid of. But, since 1.5-F, a new ending was added that unlocks a different outcome to the story. And it represents the kind of future that really happened. Mundane, uneventful, yet peaceful.

As our mind is anxious, it veers into the worst possible outcomes and treats them as if you're about to unavoidably collide with them. But then you wait, you wait, you wait, and you seem to brace yourself for a long, long time. Until you realize, that, well, things are alright. Maybe not amazing. But there's still a chance to turn things around for as long as you're around.

Oh, and as for where the memes fit in all of this: Coping mechanisms! Come on. We joke to forget about our fears. Is this too stupid? I'm not sure, I believe in it wholeheartedly, but don't let it be the canon takeaway. It's just how I think. How do you think about Ribbit? You don't actually need to answer that.

That concludes the retrospective. Oh, I'll be posting a small update about the YOU redesign in a handful of hours, look forward to that!

-Maxine