DD: Development Diary

DDNikki / Dream Diary / Development Diaries



WHY THE FUNK
Dream Diary was seriously, initially concieved as an FNF mod.
IIRC, even in the past the tagline was still "the stuff of your nightmares".
The only update it gotten, aside from trying to remake the idea entirely, was adding Sayu to replace Cap.
After getting sick of waiting for a downloadable version of the seventh week,
I scrapped the mod approach entirely and made it on Roblox.


THE ONLY PARTS I REMEMBER PAST THIS
The first part I made was a spawn area, then that map image (click to enlarge).
Originally, the mascot was a different self insert;
a weird ice cream jester thing (Ice Juggler wasn't even a thing yet),
and the aesthetic was more like a sunset than a night sky.





At some point that was before I even made three buildings, I created Nikki just for this game.
I didn't even think of Yumerri directly... I just liked rabbits. Their outfit
was a horrible chimera of Jevil, The Noise, Spinel/Ralsei, and Cassandra,
all because of their prevalence in my dreams/nightmares, or something, I dunno.
Only way later did I make the "casual" outfit I use nowadays.
(Also, I saw this exact image in a dream involving Bulbapedia for some reason.)










The map barely changed, aside from Pico's place moving, the Gumball elevator moving into the mall,
"weird amusement park" being changed into a plaza thing way later, scrapping "some old lady's house",
and the whole train unto another island idea being trashed when I had a horrible nightmare.
I worked on the map first, then the characters. The ones I had problems with were...
Lilac's house, the graveyard, and the mansion, for inexplicable reasons,
Pink Diamond's garden, which I could only do looking at a bunch of reference images and drawing a layout,
and the Cosmic Carnival because of a lack of decoration ideas.
Somehow, the only characters I remember getting stuck on for a while were the Axolotl People and Cassandra.
The former to the point I made a shortcut open on startup named "You Bastard, Work On That Damn Axolotl",
the latter was a really convoluted way to get the gun working for both a normal player and the custom morphs.

(This is seriously what it looks like with the modified rig)


EVERY TIME, EVERY FUCKING TIME
One time, after that weird Habbo Hotel dream, I said in a Discord server,
If the teal-haired cassandra appears one more fucking time i will add her and the dreams she was in into dream diary,
and only a month later did I have that "anomalous classroom" dream. The rest was history.
Also, for some reason this also made me draw a bunch of graffiti to put on a single wall.
...I drew all of them in different styles to mimic having others draw them for me.
(The graffiti was originally on the Casa, but I moved it to that weird lamb building.)

WHAT NEVER CAME
Because the game's dead, duh.

Pico Day / Cassandra Update Electric Boogaloo (Maybe I'll make it in response to another project...)
All I remember at this point was there was a dream involving a weird Neco Spirit Cassandra,
which, ironically, also involved the Casa Madrigal and a bamboo forest. For some reason.
Also, there was gonna be an entire event that redid an event in a game which shall not be named,
which was literally just a reenactment of Pico's School. (That exploited loopholes in the rating system,
arguing that it only happened because of an admin, and not in the actual game
.)

Spooky down South (Half Halloween, half Christmas, so... it was a Thanksgiving update)
"Spooky" for the nightmares it added, "South" because... they all involved Kenny.
Literally the only Christmas-ish part of it was the entire map going to be covered in snow.
To add to both, ALMOST THE ENTIRE GRAVEYARD WAS REPLACED WITH HIM.
The event was gonna be an escape-the-room type thing, where you tried to help Kenny escape a house,
but then right before he unlocks the door, it just goes full Can Your Pet and the floor disappears,
throwing him in a meat grinder, which was both referring to that and a nightmare.

I have no idea why both events were that morbid...
The blood for the Class Dismissed event (and the entire game) was changed to purple out of concerns,
Spooky down South involved actual (red) blood, mostly because I was lazy and I didn't change it.