(Turns out, this post got so long, it exceeded Gamejolt's allowed character limit... that's why I'm splitting it into 2 parts. If you'd just like to know how's the new story update progressing along, check out Part 2! Thanks!)

Hi everyone! Everyone who’s still around for Ribbit, anyway. Has it seriously been 3 years since the 1.0 release? Counting all the development time prior to that, that’s now 6 years I’ve been focusing on basically just this mod. Is that healthy? Is that wise? Shouldn’t I have moved onto other projects by this point? The answer may be “yes” to at least one of these queries.

But y’know, there’s a part of me that can’t let go until I see something happen with it that I’ve been trying to get to happen since 2020. Something I’ve scrapped, then revived, then nearly scrapped again… dozens of revisions, hundreds of mistakes, yet one consistent desire to just get this damn thing out of my head. For today’s anniversary, class, we are gonna talk about what it means to write a good ending.

“How rich!” Somebody british says across the room. “The creator of Ribbit, discussing what it means to create a well-written ending? Pish-posh!” I don’t know what the fuck pish-posh means, but, it’s true that Ribbit has been wrangling with the whole concept of a good ending ever since 1.0’s release, hasn’t it? It was one of the first, and the most prominent pieces of criticism I’ve received.

And if you’ve been around the block, watching any and all Ribbit playthroughs you stumble on, then you’ve probably already caught my ass swinging into a few comment sections to profusely explain the reasons for the ending’s poor quality. To be honest, I’ve been making a mental note to do that less going forward, it feels very insecure to do. Still, the point of that isn’t to excuse the problems, it’s to fully acknowledge them. I know the ending is kinda bleh, and I know the overall story is not well conveyed, to the point some people don’t believe there actually is a story at all. But don’t confuse this seemingly low opinion of my own work as me not believing in it. There’s a reason why I’m still here.

In truth, the goal of creating a “true ending” has been a much longer journey than just the story update I’m currently working on. I already had it set in mind around 2020 that after Ribbit’s initial release, I wanted to do at least three more major story updates, ultimately culminating in an ending that wrapped up all the loose ends in a vindicating, satisfying manner. I kinda forgot about this for a while, but looking back at all the notes and drafts I’ve made, the 1st run of the game was always intended as a bleak prelude to something more hopeful beyond it. I don’t quite remember if Yoko Taro’s work inspired me, or perhaps it was Higurashi, but the idea was there to make Ribbit into a series of timelines, ordered from worst to best. 

Today I’d like to reveal to you what these plans were actually supposed to be, the problems that prevented them from being made, and ultimately, how these plans led to the story update I’m creating now. I will be avoiding mentioning any old concepts that are being repurposed for the new update, but there’s plenty to discuss that’s never making a comeback. It’s gonna be a little delving into Ribbit’s development history, and some insight into how I’ve been iterating my writing process to learn from the mistakes that came before! I don’t know about you, but I’m excited! It’s statistically proven that people love talking about themselves!

The First Endings

Before anything else though, we should talk about the original endings I considered for Ribbit’s 1.0 release before I settled on the final shot of YOU and Susie’s standoff in front of the fountain. These endings represented an even bleaker and more cynical mindset than the more ambiguous ending I ended up going with, and you may have seen me detail some of them in the Developer Notes feature found in the game. Either way, here’s the rest of them in a more proper order:

• Before it was decided that YOU had the ability to grant people’s wishes, that power originally belonged to the fountain. Kinda funny how now, the fountain is just kinda there without any purpose, huh? In any case, YOU being intended as an immensely flawed character, their wish would’ve been to destroy everything. The game would then crash without any credits. The remnants of this idea can be found if you choose “3” in the bucket scene (which was also supposed to originally crash, but I realized erasing the player’s progress at that moment would’ve been super annoying…)

• Alternatively, YOU could’ve used the Fountain’s wish to make people be nice to them. On subsequent runs, all the mean-spirited dialogue would get taken out and replaced with nicer variants. I hate this ending even more than the previous one, since it implies the message that all people are horrible unless brainwashed to act nice. This is the cost of 2019 Max thinking how cool dark stories are, without any consideration for their takeaway.

• Another variant of this bleak ending was one where YOU’s wish transports them back to the Light World. But, the town is completely desolate, and everyone is missing. You were free to explore its empty roads and buildings, unable to find anyone, enveloped by the deafening sound of silence. It was kind of like turning the town into an exploratory liminal space. Eventually, the same conclusion would be drawn as the prior ending ideas: You made the wish to get rid of everyone but you, and it came true. Your only option left would be to close out of the game. The concept of “the game only ending when you decide to exit out of it” has a certain haunting appeal to it (see: Myst), but it didn’t change the fact that Ribbit’s approach was really just hope-crushing for the sake of it.

• Then there was another brief period where the above ending was expanded, so you could find various forms of Susie’s human friend throughout the town. These forms were not real, merely projections of the human’s past that you could replay by interacting with them. They would’ve shown that human friend’s descent from a kind friend to Susie, to one eventually possessed by THE GIFT and overtaken by bitterness and cynicism. I presume this would’ve somehow led into the reasons why Susie became the way she did, but I lost interest in pursuing this ending any further before coming to that conclusion.

• … Which, finally, led me to cutting out the endgame Light World town exploration altogether, in favor of the shot of YOU and Susie having their final standoff in front of the fountain. But, there were things cut from that too! Susie would’ve had this big monologue that would’ve lasted up to 15-20 minutes. Some of that concept got moved over to the story that Susie tells Noyno at the end, and the extended ending introduced in 1.5. But originally, it was meant to be far, far longer, and filled with much more clear-cut exposition regarding the truth of everything. A rough draft got made, but even as far as rough draft standards go, this one was pretty bad. Here’s an excerpt, if you’re curious

  

  (Note, don’t take any of these script excerpts as canon. They’re old, outdated, and back when I understood my story less.)
  
  In fairness to how boring this script is, there’s a little memo at the very bottom of it that says I should heavily tighten its pacing. So, I must’ve been fully aware that none of this was meant to be actually used, and was just me improvising a loose structure in order to refine into an actual usable scene later. Ultimately, the monologue I actually ended up going with turned out quite nicely, although at the cost of explaining a lot less. I figured that the endings I would add in future updates would solve this. Yeah, about that…

By the way, between you and me, I don’t actually mind exposition dumps. I still vouch that having overwhelming amounts of lore in your story is great, as long as you find interesting ways to convey it. Clearly, the text documents were a mixed bag, but amongst all the ways I’m improving my approach of creating these types of scenes for the upcoming update, one thing remains consistent: I love telling all my friends how many lines a scene has just to see their reactions. 

Scrapped Update 1: “EVERY” Update

Anyway, once Ribbit’s main ending was set in stone, I started thinking of additional endings that would feel really satisfying to uncover after you get that first depressing one. This led to the plan of releasing three major updates after 1.0. Internally, two of these were themed after specific Ribbit characters. This smaller, lower-scope update, meant to be made a short time after 1.0’s release was for EveryName, and largely intended to introduce a new gameplay feature, alongside some bizarre story ideas.

The new feature was a new difficulty called “Destroy”. If you’ve ever datamined Ribbit before, you might’ve noticed that the name for this difficulty appears in the text, including being set up in the code for the Results Screen. I never exactly fleshed this mode out 100%, but there were two important rules I kept in mind: One, I was not allowed to make bullets faster, or have them deal more damage. By the time I improved my coding abilities, this felt like a cheap way of increasing difficulty, and figured there are certainly more creative ways of doing it.

Two, the mode had to be based entirely around steeper, harsher resource management. Higher TP costs, lower inventory space to make you consider more carefully what you want to bring with you, I even considered Resident Evil item boxes, limited save points, and save points that wouldn’t heal you. There was also the potential to create new items, alongside replacements for other ones, in order to cater the game’s balance specifically to this difficulty. It was intended as a truly tense and strategical Deltarune experience.

Exclusive to the Destroy difficulty, was also a remixed version of the EveryName fight. It would’ve been half as long as the original fight, but would’ve had EveryName combine attacks from multiple characters at once, perhaps even some that didn’t appear in the original fight. The attacks would’ve been chosen at random, so I presume the conditions to win would’ve required the use of ACTs compared to the original’s sheer endurance… Oh yeah, “Modelista” by HiTECH NINJA would’ve played during this fight! It was originally used as a placeholder song for the original EveryName fight, but I guess I really liked how relentlessly intense it sounded, and it gave me the thought of creating a “special ultra-hard” version of the fight later… 

I was ALSO also floating the idea of having the remixed EveryName fight lead to one new joke ending, and one new horror ending, both of which I can share here! The joke ending was supposed to be a terribly acted drama play where all the issues of the main characters, including THE GIFT, get resolved through a series of lazy contrivances. Manos would’ve even shown up by ringing a doorbell and just casually chatted with everyone like it was a sitcom. But I feel like you can guess why this ending never got made. Nobody needed another unsatisfying ending, especially one that made fun of you for wanting a better one. However, the “drama play” aesthetic later ended up being used for the remade Quizzer death scene in 2.0.

Meanwhile, the horror ending involved an elaborate aspect of how the DESTROY difficulty would affect the rest of the game. By willingly making a certain choice to allow the DESTROY difficulty to literally destroy the game, any subsequent runs of the game would be progressively corrupted, an extension of Undertale’s post-Genocide ideas and some creepypasta aspects that I considered dreamlike in their unsettling nature.

On the 1st subsequent run, EveryName would be missing from their room. Following a pause, the game would suddenly skip you to the Results Screen, where a hollow, bizarre song played. On the next run, Onion-San is gone, the Broken Key Parts are gone. Random cutscenes would add weird, uncomfortable pauses and moments of silence, where the same hollow song would occasionally interject. When you get to the scene where Noyno is trapped in a cardboard box, Lancer & Susie never show up onscreen. Only their text boxes pop up one by one, both saying the word “ENDING:” The game skips you to the Results Screen again.

On the next run, Noyno is missing. Hollow music plays. The game ends. On the next run, YOU is supposed to wake up and jump out of Toriel’s bed. They never do. Hollow music plays. The game ends. On the next run, there is no next run. Hollow music plays on a black screen. You gotta quit out of the game. On the final bootup after that, the DELTARUNE logo appears, saying “COMING NOVEMBER 2018”.

So, fun stuff! Like a whole “Oh, the original game is taking back control of everything Ribbit modified…” It would’ve probably been pretty cheesy in execution, though. In any case, I must’ve liked the concept of those weird, dreamlike pauses combined with the hollow music, because that got reused wholesale for the Violence Route cutscenes, alongside characters disappearing from the world with no explanation. I wish I had more time to expand the Violence Route with these surreal concepts, I feel like I moved on from it too quickly in favor of… Count to 1000 minigames… Oh well, there’s always next time.

Scrapped Update 3: “Light World” Update

Don’t be confused by us jumping from Update 1 to 3. Update 2 was actually conceptualized sometime after 3. Hence why we’re gonna discuss 3 first.

As mentioned before, Ribbit was meant to be completed in three major updates, so this one would mark the ultimate finale of the mod. A climax that would have you confront THE GIFT lurking within Susie, in order to find a way to save her once and for all.

As the Update’s title implies, it would’ve brought back the ability to explore the Light World town, usually inaccessible in Ribbit for the most part. Following the completion of at least one run of the game, you would be able to unlock something in Toriel’s House that would drastically alter the town’s appearance to reflect Susie’s subconscious, kind of like Silent Hill’s Otherworld. 

Just then, an Emergency Alert (like the scary kind you’d see on TV) would display, overlaid on top of the screen. Voice acted, an announcer would warn you that Susie is on the loose, coming for you, and gives you basic tips on how to protect yourself: Do not make contact, barricade your doors, prepare a firearm, the standard stuff.

Set to “Radio” by The Avalanches, your goal would be to explore the Light World town in order to solve various puzzles scattered around it, all the while Susie would serve as a stalker enemy, randomly appearing throughout to pursue you. You could hide, run, or you could take the risk and fight her to temporarily put her down. The QC Diner would serve as your safe zone, a centre hub with the only save point in the town, an item box to deposit and withdraw items, and NPC refugees to talk and get additional hints from. Yes, I do love Resident Evil, why do you ask?

As fun as this update sounded to design from a gameplay standpoint, thinking of all the ways to create Susie’s stalker system that would really make her feel like an alive threat… I never actually figured out what I wanted to do with it narratively. Like, I knew I wanted it to end by having YOU save Susie from THE GIFT… but the bigger question was, how would they do that? What would be the most logical reason to free her that didn’t amount to just “power of friendship” or “recalling an important memory?” And how would Susie deal with the aftermatch, knowing THE GIFT stained her hands with so much blood?

One way I tried to lead up to answering these questions was by fully confirming it wasn’t Susie that you’ve been talking to during most of Ribbit, it was “Mary.” This “Mary,” who was formerly only mentioned in passing a few times, and whose silhouette was shown controlling Susie once in the pre-Metta fight scene, would finally go mask off and make their presence as the one controlling all of Susie’s actions fully known.

This reveal would take place about halfway through the update, as Mary would catch you and knock you unconscious in a scripted event. Here’s the interesting part, Mary would knock you unconscious so hard, you would briefly hallucinate a vision of an alternate universe in which YOU, Noyno, Susie, and all the other pals lived mundane, boring lives set in Papyrus’s house. Then, suddenly you would snap out of this vision, as Mary would kick you awake back to reality, in a cell they imprisoned you in. I liked the sudden mundanity of this scene so much, I used it as a base for the Future is Mystery ending. Although whether it was real or not was made more up to interpretation.

Following Mary kicking you awake, the following script would roughly play out like this:

As for where the story went from there, a lot of that was in the “still figuring it out” phase before it wound up getting cancelled. You would’ve broken out of the cell, found another Haunted Point, and fought a physical manifestation of the creature that was inside of it. Winning that fight would empower you with a new ability that allowed you to dispatch other Haunted Points throughout the town, making that the first instance of YOU having some way to fight back against Manos’s creations, including THE GIFT and these Haunted Points. I also tried to find ways to involve other characters back into the story, like Alphys and Noelle.

There was one other story detail that ended up being massively expanded on, regarding what Mary actually was. You might’ve heard me talk about this when I was guesting on a livestream at one point, back when I thought I no longer had the opportunity to do this… but if you’re unaware, you might want to save yourself the surprise, because this detail has barely changed since its inception, and is being reused nearly wholesale for the upcoming story update. I’ve been trying to make this fuckin’ connection happen for over 3 years now, and I can’t tell you how good it will feel to finally get there.

Finally, after a climactic showdown that would free Susie of THE GIFT, and the Mary tormenting her, an epilogue scene would play out where Alphys transmits Susie’s brain from her robot body, back to her original body. Doing this would mean Susie regaining all of her conscience, her feelings. She would feel the weight of all the people THE GIFT forced her to kill, all of the traumatic events that being a robot did not allow her to feel. The basic draft for this scene was kinda neat.

Scrapped Update 2: The Noelle Update

Ah, the mythical Noelle Update… there’s probably someone out there who still believes it’ll happen. Although it was originally meant to be a prelude to the finale of the Light World update, it was around the time of developing the plans for this update that Ribbit 1.0 came out, and I started to see the signs that not a lot of people were very interested in the mod. As a result, the EVERY Update and the Light Town update were completely scrapped due to their ambition outweighing audience interest. Meanwhile, the Noelle Update survived for a few months longer, and was attempted to be turned into the True Ending, for the sake of giving Ribbit at least some semblance of a conclusive end. 

It actually got pretty far in its writing, there’s a whole bunch of entertaining drafts and fully-finished dialogue for it, a lot of which I’ve found a big shame to scrap. Back when I released update 1.5, I shared a number of cut Noelle phone call conversations you could’ve had in this update. But, I only shared the ones I’ve found most important. Allow me to share some more stuff, including an intro scene for how you would obtain the Noelle Phone.

That’s about as far as I got with these phone call conversations. There were a few more notes for the ones I didn’t get around to writing yet, such as Noelle chastising you if you try to call her while in the middle of hanging out with Noyno, Susie, and Lancer… or, trying to use the phone in the epilogue would result in you faintly hearing Lancer’s voice. These were both eventually repurposed for Ribbit 2.0’s cell phone gimmick, but again, it is quite a shame most of these conversations were never used.

The plan for the story itself went something like this: Once you called Noelle in every single room possible, she would call you up soon after and ask for a password. This password would’ve been located somewhere within a new, fifth lore text document (which DID happen, but is only loosely related in the sense that it features Noelle). If you got it right, Noelle would invite you to her secret laboratory. You may be confused regarding what was with the insistence on making Noelle a scientist/inventor in these updates, but don’t worry, we’ll get to the problems with that, and many other things later. For now, we’ll just steamroll ahead like nothing’s wrong.

So you reach the secret lab entrance, and Noelle invites YOU and Noyno in, but tells Susie to wait outside. They take the elevator ride down, and chat about a few things I can’t reveal for now, but amongst them, Noelle tells Noyno of the problem with THE GIFT, and how they need to free YOU and Susie from it. Starting with just YOU for now, Noelle says she has a plan she wants to give a test run.

Arriving within the lab, there’d be about 3 new rooms you could explore in order to learn more about Noelle’s interests and her general outlook on things. Not much was written for this part, but what little did get drafted indicated the tone did not change much from the rest of Ribbit.

Once you were ready to move on, you would end up in a more ominous looking room, with Noelle’s back turned towards you. Ready to enact her plan to free YOU of THE GIFT, she’s revealed to be wearing a mask reminiscent of the Mystery Man’s look. You know, the guy most people think is Gaster. A rough draft was written for the ensuing scene.

“Wait, why is Noelle using a mask that looks like Gaster? Where did it come from? What is going on?” Like I said, we’ll discuss these issues later. For now though, the tone of the scene and the wide-open room layout was meant to suggest one thing: You were about to have a boss fight against Noelle. After all, the first update was meant to be called the “EVERY” update, in theme with the new EveryName boss battle, so it’d only make sense the Noelle Update features a fight against her, right? Let’s keep reading the draft.

Ultimately, the twist was that you weren’t fighting against Noelle, but you were going to play as her, fighting against a physical manifestation of THE GIFT brought out from the inside of YOU’s body. She would’ve retained YOU’s ability to ACT, alongside her own Chapter 2 spells. It’s not a bad twist, and certainly would’ve been an exciting surprise for the players used to this being a Chapter 1 mod, but it didn’t have the chance to get very fleshed out beyond that.

The fight would’ve ended in Noelle & Noyno exorcising YOU’S GIFT out of existence, YOU now being free of it, as their eyes lose their glow and return back to normal. After Noelle would’ve told you a little bit more about herself, it was now Susie’s turn to have the same exorcism plan done on her as well. But, when you returned back up the elevator to get her, she was missing. While attempting to look for her in the Field area, you would’ve found out all save points are back to their Deltarune star-shaped appearance, and your ability to understand MOTHERSPAWNs was gone. Eventually, a transition would time skip you to the point where YOU and Noyno reach the final set of Lodge rooms.

The rooms leading up to the Manos boss fight would play out pretty differently. For starters, the blue gate would’ve mysteriously opened by itself, allowing YOU and Noyno passage without the need for a “vessel.” The scene where Noyno wants to heal the NPC’s broken leg plays out a lot more wholesomely, including YOU helping out in gathering TP for the heal spell. by spinning nearby a pointy spiky object, to graze and gather TP from it. Arriving in the Throne Room (AKA Susie’s room), the duo would investigate for signs of Susie, until they would find what appears to be a goodbye note.

Further ahead in the balcony room, you would witness an effect that would fade the Lodge’s all-pink palette into white, bringing it closer back to Card Castle’s original appearance. This, combined with the blue gate opening by itself, implied that the Lodge was losing its influence over the world. 

You would quickly find out why, once you would arrive in the room where the Manos fight normally takes place. Manos was gone, nowhere to be found. All that’s left in its place is Susie’s axe, lying on the ground, yet with Susie still missing. The scene didn’t directly clarify what this was about, leaving things on an eerie, worrisome note. But, perhaps if it was further refined, the idea was that Susie came here to fight Manos all on her own, and despite the control it had over her, she managed to win. At the cost of her own life as well. This was her attempt at an apology for everything, a form of selfless sacrifice.

A LOT of blanks are in the script following this moment, but a rough draft for the very final scene was made. Following the aftermath of Manos’s destruction, along with all the MOTHERSPAWNs disappearing along with it, YOU and Noelle sit down in the now-peaceful Field. They reflected on all the things they knew about Susie, the things they didn’t… segwaying into YOU’s concerns about themselves, and a confession of the guilt they harbor for their past. Noelle thought about how to respond to this confession for a while, until finally she stood up, and ended the game on this note:

Roll credits.

Alright, so let’s actually dissect this one, as after all, this is the update that came the closest to being developed. I’d like to put a pin on the reasons that even if it was finished, it still wouldn’t have been a great way to end Ribbit. If this came out as originally intended, a penultimate ending to the Light World Update’s true ending, then maybe this would’ve been fine. But even then, there’s a lot of holes here. A lot.

For starters, the biggest problem comes down to these fuck-outta-nowhere masks. These masks were never established as being a part of the main game before, they were purely introduced for this update just to give THE GIFT a weakness, and thus move the story forward. There was no effort required to get them, barely any setup, Noelle just has them, because now she happens to be an inventor of, well, whatever the hell is convenient for the plot, I guess. It was a deus ex machina in its most contrived form. A Deus Ex Maskina, as it were. 

I realized this was a problem even back then, so I tried to invent an additional boss fight that would’ve given the mask concept a little more origin beyond just “Noelle invented it.” This boss fight was meant to take place in an empty movie theater, against an entity called “Former.” It was the Former Vessel, in other words, The Master from the Manos movie. 

Deluded in the hope that Manos will still take him back to serve as a right-hand man to the god someday, Former never realized Manos sealed him away here when he lost all his worth. And upon seeing that Susie has become the new Master, the Former lost his remaining sanity, overcome by jealousy, rage, and by a misogynistic disbelief that a woman could ever become his god’s closest servant. 

Tying this back to the mask, the loose idea was that Former was wearing it, you’d rip it off his face on the first phase, then effectively do the equivalent of stabbing a deflating balloon trapped in a cage on the 2nd phase as Former grew weaker with the loss of his mask’s power. With the mask exhibiting unique magical properties specific to those belonging to Manos, you would take it to Noelle, who would then reverse-engineer it to work against Manos, instead of for it. Thus, we now have something to fight Manos with, by obtaining a tool from their former servant. 

Okay, so that’s… kind of a better setup! But, there’s still no understanding of what the mask actually is, or what it did, or why Former still wore it… even if that was all figured out, there’s just something really off about the pacing of the whole thing no matter how much buildup I could’ve crammed into it. In the end, the problem remained that these masks were never established in the main game, and so would feel like a blatant patch job if introduced at any point now. And that’s as far as this concept ever went, before I realized it really wasn’t all that interesting. As for the Former boss fight, he managed to survive for longer, being considered for 2.0’s release, and even for the upcoming update. But, that ended up getting cut too. The concept of fighting a character from the movie sounded cool, but I could never figure out a good motive that wasn’t about the mask, nor any fun battle mechanics, beyond like… a stealth minigame… 

The other problem with the Noelle Update was Susie’s sacrificial moment. You’d think it would have a little more gravity to it than just having it take place off-screen, wouldn’t it? Again, one of those moments that could’ve worked for a penultimate ending, but was frankly a terrible idea for a true finale. No emotional weight to it, no direct acknowledgement of what her act meant, just a lot of uneasiness and confusion. 

The thing is, Susie already has a moment of sacrifice within the game’s regular ending. The wish that YOU grants at the end of the Manos fight was Susie’s. She had the choice of using it to get rid of THE GIFT, freeing her and YOU of a life of forced servitude. But, she instead used it to revive everybody else back into existence. She dove into Manos’s body to recover your SOUL, rendering her trapped inside instead. Even at her lowest, her most frightened, struggling against the GIFT that controlled her, she still mustered up the will to put everybody else above herself.

The reason why I dislike Ribbit’s epilogue so much nowadays, is because I don’t think most people even know that this moment exists in the game at all. One of Ribbit’s perhaps most important narrative moments, and it’s heavily buried under a final gauntlet of memes and jokes, while all the credit for who saved the world is accidentally implied to belong to YOU. When really it was their collaborative effort, and the strength of Susie to stand up against her godlike oppressor. 

The Noelle Update attempted this again, but this time, far more abruptly, and without an incentive. There was no reason why Susie needed to wander off to sacrifice herself at that time. She just did. Either way, by neglecting to focus on the deeds that YOU and Susie accomplished, there was a lack of vindication and satisfaction in your accomplishments. Even though you’ve made a huge impact on the world, it was simply not felt. That rarely feels good to do in a story. This is why the Noelle Update didn’t come out. And never will.

“Future is Mystery”

Skip forward a few months into 2022, I butt heads with a number of some not-very-good realizations. The Noelle Update lacks an understanding of what it actually wants to be, and is only good at being funny. Outside interest in the mod has by this point mostly dwindled, and on top of it all, my sprite artist buddy could no longer afford the time to help out with the mod, so I was left stranded as far as it came to art assets. I had to accept it at that point: I couldn’t create the type of ending I really wanted, and i wasn’t even sure anymore if I knew what ending that was. The Noelle Update was canned, and in its place, I created the only true ending I could under the strict limitations of no sprite artist, and about two months to wrap everything up. 

In hindsight, it really is interesting just what kinds of things people are capable of creating under limitations. The Future Ending is, by my take, the most interesting piece of Ribbit content currently in the game. It has a theme, a message, something more clear and less subconscious, which ironically, contrasts against the ending’s battle being the most abstract setpiece in Ribbit. I understand some people find it difficult to look at, which is why I’ll be including an option to skip it in the new update. But design-wise, creating the mechanics around this encounter after months of not knowing what to do with it was one of those rare “third eye opens” moments, a moment where every piece clicked together perfectly to form together the theme of “the fear of the future.”

The onslaught of scrolling recap text is the fear of everything being predetermined, unchangeable, and always at its worst. You bumble your way through as time uncaringly flows through you, lost, confused, overwhelmed. But as you spend more time within it, you realize there is a puzzle here, a puzzle meant to be solved. So you start picking up the pieces, you start taking charge, experimenting with anything you’re given… eventually, you see the patterns, and realize you are no longer overwhelmed by any of it. That’s when you finally wake up to a new reality, bearing witness to a never-before-seen future, one of mundanity. A realization that the future is never quite as frightening as the one we imagine in our heads. We grow comfortable. We grow bored. But in order to get there, you have to keep going, to make an effort to understand it.

In other words, the ending’s belief is that the future is an unpredictable mistress, and for every terrible day of struggle, you only need the one where everything suddenly starts turning in your tide. I still wholeheartedly believe in this message of “Future is Mystery”, and will continue to uphold it. On the other hand, though, there is something else in the message I left in-game, that I feel is heavily starting to show its age:

“I was not here to tell you how to live or feel about your life.”
“I was here to tell you how I’ve lived mine.”

Looking back on these words, I think there’s a partial insincerity to them. On one hand, the past tense of “was” refers to how I wrote the original ending of the game, and there’s some truth to it not being written for any particular audience in mind. Ribbit 1.0 was about showing three major aspects of depression, and three approaches to it. There’s those who succumb to it (YOU), those who manage to escape it (Noyno), and those who never do (Susie). There are other various themes of parental neglect, dissociation, and general feelings of aimlessness and uncertainty regarding the future. But I never really settled on what I wanted to tell the player first and foremost, so it really just came out as a smorgasbord of mixed, conflicted feelings directed at nobody in particular.

On the other hand, stories are made public so that others may get something out of them. This many years later, and with a different mindset towards things, it’s difficult to tell what I wanted Ribbit 1.0 to be for the player. But I wanted it to be something, some form of hope, a set of flawed characters to learn something from.

The truth is, upon seeing the initially tepid reception to Ribbit, I think I went into defensive mode, and said those words because I feared Ribbit would go on to be interpreted long after I abandoned it, as an endorsement of a bleak and cynical outlook on the world. Which I think checks out to some extent, the 2019 Max that came up with Ribbit’s concepts was really not doing well, and that reflected on the mod even two years later when it came out. But the 2020-2021 Max that tried to come up with all those concepts for a true ending wanted to say that it’s fine to acknowledge how things suck, but you can’t give up, because there’s still something in the world you know you want to experience.

The Future Ending wanted to say this too, and it wanted it to be so clear about it, I just decided it was gonna be me who comes out and says it directly to you. There’s a certain value in that, I feel. But by saying I was just writing for myself, or I’m only writing for you from now on, I lost sight of many things.

Writing is not a game of one or the other. You write what it means to observe from your perspective, for the purposes of sharing it with others. To say anything otherwise, is lying to yourself. And I definitely was, which is why some of that message will be relegated to the OLD writing style going forward. After all, Ribbit was made because I wanted to share my worries with yours. The Future Ending was made because I wanted to share my hope with yours. Now, the new ending is being made because I want you to know there is still something beyond hope. Hope is a valuable belief, but only one step towards reality. What does the promise of that hope look like when made real?

The Final Stretch

I cannot state hard enough that Ribbit would’ve been done at 1.5 if Redd didn’t come in to give it that sprite makeover for 2.0. And seeing that kind of incredible talent, I couldn’t resist. With his help, I had to give creating a true ending for the game one more shot. If the Future Ending was episodes 25-26 of Evangelion, all out of budget and time to cohesively wrap things up, then the update we’re now working on is intended as the big movie finale that’s being given the time and polish to really come together. In many ways, it is the answer to all the problems that plagued the Noelle Update, and all the scrapped endings prior to that. 

But, as you may have guessed, this ending took a lot of time to figure out too! Fuck!! The writing for the new ending began while we were in the middle of developing 2.0, but it quickly turned out that making this ending happen would take many more months to figure out. Me and Redd thusly agreed to shelve this story content until it was fully ready, and release 2.0 with a focus on just the art makeover, for the sake of getting Ribbit out of its Why-Does-Kris-Have-Eyes hellhole arc as soon as we could. 

Good thing we did that too! Let me break down some dates for you. November 2022 was around the time we started working on 2.0, alongside a script for the new story content. Then, that script gets shelved, Ribbit 2.0 comes out on May 25th, 2023, and Redd moves onto other things until I’m ready to call him back in. I continue working on the script. For two months? Five months? No. It takes me all the way until September 3rd, 2024, nearly a year and a half after 2.0’s release, just to finish the script alone. 

A year and a half of work, dozens of rewrites, multiple roadblocks, writer’s blocks, so many mistakes made along the way… the difference between this and all the mistakes of the prior scrapped endings however, is that this is the one where I overcame them all. And after all was written and done, I can re-read it over and over, thinking to myself “I think some people will hate this… but I am immensely happy with it. I want to do everything in my power to make this happen.”

It’s been a long road - and this has been a long fucking article to read sorry about that - but given that I cannot disclose many of the new update’s details for obvious reasons, the least I can do is show you what exact lessons have I learned from the past scrapped endings, that have allowed this upcoming ending to take shape into something I can be genuinely proud of. 

THINGS I’S LEARNED

#1: 2019 Max had a rather cynical mindset of the world, and though some of that was ironed out by the time Ribbit came out in 2021, you can still feel it clinging to those old remnants. One of the goals of the new update is to turn Ribbit into two distinct halves, with the Future Ending serving as an intermission, a bridge that allows you to cross between these halves. The 1st half will remain the same as ever, representative of 2019-2021 Max’s mindset. The 2nd half will indicate a shift in perspective, representative of the lessons learned by the more hopeful 2024-2025 Max. Yes, I am now calling the entirety of the current Ribbit “the 1st half.” Shouldn’t be too hyperbolic, I hope?

#2: The new update can only use pre-established elements of the story in order to fight back against THE GIFT. No masks, no legendary hidden tools of ultimate destruction, and most importantly, no easy way out. However this is getting solved, you’ve already seen the Chekhov’s Gun.

#3: The new update has to further meaningfully acknowledge Susie’s role as a victim of THE GIFT, and one half of the reason why anybody is even still conscious at the end of the game.

#4: The new update should shine a light on many of the mod’s questions, but to compensate, will open up a number of other questions with new disturbing implications. This will go alongside a greater focus on psychological themes that’ll expand on the flaws of various characters, including YOU and Susie’s strange dynamic… and the ways in which those characters may improve from their worst selves.

#5: Restraint. This will take form via a more structured balance of humor and narrative. Ultimately, the idea is to not run into another “Epilogue” situation where a barrage of jokes buries the point of an important narrative moment. Admittingly, I think it’s in the spirit of Ribbit’s identity to let loose and present something chaotic to the player, but I’ve learned that chaos can be controlled just as much as any other aspect of a story. To that end, jokes are doled out at more strategic intervals, while the focus on the narrative has been considerably increased. 

Something I’ve talked about on Bsky recently (which you should follow me on, kisses) is the side of Ribbit’s audience that would’ve preferred if the mod was all humor, and no attempts at story. This goes against one of the reasons why I made Ribbit, to prove that Deltarune modding can go beyond just shitposts, that it could engage you in interesting challenges, boss fights, and maybe even get you to think about the story’s implications on a grander level. If I tried anything less, I wouldn’t have been interested in making this mod at all. 

Of course, I’ve made no secret of it that one of Ribbit’s problems is its uneven balance of humor and narrative, but the solution to me isn’t “get rid of the narrative,” but to tip the balance completely. The way I see it, if I really want to make some lore, then it’s about fuckin’ time I put the humor on the sideline, and give you the best lore I can currently muster.

#6: Focus. Believe it or not, the original Ribbit never had a proper script to reference! There was technically a “plan”, but that came in the form of a single giant notepad file full of scattered, messy, rambling notes, which I just added to and plucked from as I made more and more progress developing the mod. 

Working on TS!Underswap, I’ve learned a couple things since about organizing your project. This has widely influenced how I’ve created this new update, starting by creating a full-fledged script before doing any other work on the update. Every scene was written, its themes established, so that no major changes would take place later during development, aside from minor adjustments. This marks a significant departure from the way I’ve made Ribbit before, and will no doubt be felt in how the new update flows.

#7: I don’t have to appeal to everyone. This is, perhaps, the most important lesson of them all. During the first couple initial drafts of this new ending, I had it set in my mind that what people wanted was a Happy End where absolutely everything turns out well for every character involved. So, I made several attempts to write such an ending. Some of them were particularly cheesy, I even toyed with the idea of a run of the game where the darker tone was replaced with a totally lighthearted one. But because of Ribbit’s influences in horror, such an ending never felt right. It’s not that happy endings aren’t possible in horror stories, but usually these ends come at the cost of something else.

I must’ve made at least half of the full script before I realized that all it amounted to was my own fanfic, a story consisting of nothing but resolutions to everything that everyone wanted. Ribbit was going from being too vague and confusing, to too blatant and explanatory, handing you every fantasy on a silver platter. I felt disillusioned by the way it was turning out, like it was made to appeal to everyone, except me.

But you know the old saying. In an attempt to appeal to everyone, you end up appealing to no one. I started thinking back to how Ribbit 1.0 felt like it was doing that too, trying to catch the comedy crowd and psychological horror crowd at the same time. Dejected, I started wondering if this ending was really even worth doing at all, and considered giving up on the whole thing, moving onto other projects while accepting that Ribbit was a failed story that spread its focus too thin, and that this update was falling into the exact same trappings.

But then… something clicked. Perhaps having these thoughts was like a harsh slap to my face that made me wake up to the reason I started writing in the first place: I want to tell stories that resonate with me, in the hopes that others like me will resonate with them too, or maybe even find an answer to something they couldn’t before. And suddenly, the update had a theme: In a world where everyone wants a different outcome, something has to be sacrificed in order for the people you care about to be happy. Perhaps that could mean sacrificing the needs of one audience in order to tell a story to the audience you really want. Or, perhaps it could mean taking back the expectations of what Ribbit’s ending should be back into my own hands, so I can simply ask myself: What do I think would be the best ending for everyone? I knew it in my heart. This is what the new update should be about.

But that’s not all, because once I started thinking this way as I wrote the remaining half of the script, there was one other new theme that snuck into the game, something that hugely expands on its characters, something based on my own past flaws, and the things you could personally learn from them. I can’t tell you what this theme is, you’ll find out when the update’s released. But I believe that this theme has made the update incredibly worthwhile to make, and rejuvenated my passion for telling stories. 

Sitting here with the complete script, I have something that has a cohesive beginning, a cohesive end, and a consistent theme tying it together. Admittingly, I don’t think it’ll fix the entirety of Ribbit, because all of the new content will take place during the 2nd run, and the 1st run will be Ribbit as it’s always been, warts and all... But, I think that for those who stick it out, this 2nd run will show a stark difference in how I tell stories. Because while games surely can be for fun, I still wholeheartedly believe mine can mean something more.

[Continued in Part 2, read it here]