Return To The Portait

Return To The Portrait is a fan work I made for Doki Doki Literature Club. It picks up from the end of the original game and involves everyone working together to find out the truth about their world and about Project Libitina. It features a ton of file tampering and other meta stuff like exploring the rules behind Club President powers. It also features Natsuki's dad, who is *not* a sadistic prick, and tries to give each character some limelight. Estimated play time is 8 hours (this is a complete guess, since I never timed it).

Since I was forced to develop on Renpy 7, it needs to ship the Renpy engine instead of using the one DDLC comes with (which is Renpy 6). So it requires a slightly different install process: unpack the mod distribution and drop the DDLC asset archives (images.rpa, fonts.rpa, and audio.rpa - *not* scripts.rpa) into its game/ folder.

Downloads

PC version

This is the "PC" distribution generated by Renpy, which apparently works on both Windows and Linux.

Mac version

This one I unfortunately couldn't test, since I don't have a Mac.

Windows-only version

This shouldn't be necessary as the PC distribution seems to work on Windows, but if somehow it doesn't for you, give this one a try.

Linux-only version

Again, shouldn't be necessary but I'm including it just incase.

Ending guide

Retrospective

I spent over a year on this. It was a rough one with this and everything else in my life fighting for attention. I had a bad habit of putting too many things on my plate without thinking it through, but this might've taught me a lesson for good. At some points I wondered if it was a mistake to start this. Once I even considered dropping it. I can't express how happy I was to be "free" from RTTP (that's really how I felt about it at times), and finally able to really pursue other projects, but I'm glad I stuck at it. This is an accomplishment I'll remember.

RTTP taught me a lot about storytelling. I'd like to write about some of the wisdom I've gained from the pains, though I'm not sure when I'll get around to that. It also gave me enough experience with Renpy to be qualified to review it.

Renpy review

I also wrote a self-critique of RTTP.

critique.gmi

Assets 4 u!

Most of the art I comissioned is Creative Commons Attribution, which means you can also use it in your own DDLC mods! Please credit the artists:

Linda, Libitina, Albert, and Adam's sprites are by Plural Roses. Also the warehouse interior water pit room (not the room at the back with the machinery).

Plural Roses on reddit

Agent Gold on reddit

Cult facility and warehouse exterior backgrounds are by TomTC.

TomTC on deviantart

Also... I spent $791 comissioning these assets and hundreds of hours developing it, so donations would be very much appreciated :P

donation info