The Ding Mod Files
Posted by anthony on April 21st 2024 at 8:37pm
This blog post contains spoilers for DingDong's Funkin' 2.0... if you even care about that. What? No this isn't just an excuse to test out this warning prompt, why would you think that?
What even is the Ding Mod?
For those of you who are unaware, the Ding Mod (aka DingDong's Funkin') is a Friday Night Funkin' mod made by me & a few other people who were kind enough to help out. In short, it's a "joke" mod about Dorbellprod's character DingDongDirt. Unfortunately whilst making it I fell into the trap of overestimating how much I could actually accomplish and that lead to the mod being cancelled.
That's it for the short introduction, if you wanna learn more about it, you should check out the GameBanana page.
Chapter 1: The Story
Before I actually start showing off content, I want to quickly lay out the planned storyline.
- Ding & BF rap near the Donut Shop (Donut Shop & Allergy)
- At the end of Allergy, Ding eats a donut, gets an allergic reaction and gets in a coma. BF infiltrates his dream and they have yet another rap battle (Abundance)
- Originally this fight was supposed to take place in a hospital, BF would rap against a heart rate monitor.
- BF & GF take Ding to rap battle next to a volcano
- (There's a lot here so I'll just leave a screenshot of the original Google doc)

- There's not really much lore here. It's just BF vs Ding's friends.
- The last song of the week is the real "boss fight" of the mod. It's revealed that Ding does not in fact have a nut allergy and it was all a placebo. We meet Micah, who is the true protagonist of the original Donut Shop video and who's been forgotten. (heh)
- This was just a really elaborate way to make my critical mistake of mixing up Micah & Ding work with the story lol
That's pretty much the whole story. Some parts are really weird and weren't thought out properly at all.
Chapter 2: Scrapped/Unused content
One of the earliest challenges in development was this Story Mode menu:
This was sometime around the middle of 2021, and I was a HaxeFlixel noob! This menu was coded so horribly I don't even want to talk about it, so we're going to move on.
The Story Mode menu was not the only one that suffered because of my indecisiveness and bad graphic design skills. Here's all the iterations of the main menu:

(NOTE: I only remembered this a bit later into writing this post but this isn't even the first iteration of the main menu. The first one just had the buttons aligned to the left. I decided to not include it because it's not really unique and also I can't find a screenshot lol)



The last one was the one where I finally started to figure out how to not make completely horrible graphic design but it was too late as at this point the mod was already cancelled.
I guess this is self-explanatory:

Allergy was originally supposed to have this donut noteskin:

As with the story mode menu, I was still a noob at HaxeFlixel and I couldn't get the noteskin to be properly aligned (as you can see) and it was also desynced from the music so instead of trying to figure out how to make it work I just got rid of it altogether.
Here's an old video showcasing them in their broken form:
Also related to donuts, the donut arrows!

Don't mistake them for the donut noteskin, these are a seperate thing. They'd basically act like hurt notes. If you pressed them you'd get an effect for a set duration of time where your HP would just slowly drain because you're allergic to nuts! Hohohoho! Get it?
A lot of the cut content follows the same pattern of me deciding to work on something unneccessary instead of completing the base game. One of these things are achievements!

These were the achievements that were planned to be included:

Some of these are commented out because of various reasons. For example "nutsdiff", "allergynotesoff" and "dingdongdoomnuts" are disabled because both the allergy donut noteskin and the NUTS difficulty was removed from the game. "dingdongdoomnuts1try" was originally intended as a joke for one of the beta testers but it was cut because if you failed it you were unable to 100% the game.
While playing around with the final build of the game, I found out that you can still trigger an achievement despite me thinking that I disabled them! If you input the konami code in the main menu you will see the achievement popup. It's bugged and shows up as an "Unknown" achievement, however this would've previously triggered the "REAL ocean" achievement.
HaxeFlixel's way of handling scenes is thru "states", so for example the main menu and the gameplay are in different states. You'd want achievements to be rendered on top of everything else so you can't accidentally skip over them by skipping states too fast or something. Because of this I had to step a layer back into the OpenFL world of things.
OpenFL is basically just a Haxe port of the ActionScript Flash API and in it the HaxeFlixel game object is just a sprite. The plan was to make the achievement popup an OpenFL sprite and place it on top of the game. Sounds good right? In theory yes but it turned out to be more complicated.
Because the achievement was running in a completely different environment than the game I had to handle stuff like positions differently and stuff like window resizing manually and it quickly became a mess.
The recently released (as of writing this) HaxeFlixel 5.7.0 update added a feature to allow drawing objects on top of the state inside the game object which would've saved me a lot of time and prevented the pain and suffering I went through while trying to implement it the way I did.
Also I made this fancy collapsible section just for this hehehe
Allergy had some special events that were cut! One of them was cut intentionally while the other one I somehow disabled accidentally. Whoops!
One of these is this cool cinematic effect in the middle of the song. I don't know why I added it honestly, I just thought it was really cool.
The one that was cut accidentally is the cutscene at the end of the song. Remember the story from earlier where I said Ding ate a donut and died? This is that part.
While these are not actually unused, I thought it would be nice to give you a better look at these loading screens since you don't see them for too long in-game. As a bonus you can see the sketches too! Yay!








Here are some audio files I've dug up. This one was meant to be used in the cutscene before DingDongDoom:
While this one... I'm not really sure! I can't remember what place this was supposed to play in at all.
Girlfriend sitting on a flying donut! Made for the Donut Dodger segment in DingDongDoom.

Chapter 3: Concepts, sketches & goofs
This is the first cutscene I made for the Ding Mod. It's used in the 1.x releases but this one is slightly different than the one in public builds.
The first ever concept for the mod was this shitpost I sent in Dorbellprod's old discord server. After this I got the idea to turn Dorbellprod's Donut Shop video into a FNF mod and that's what lead to all this.
This is the first ever proper sketch I did for Ding:

For the 2.0 update I wanted to redraw the Ding assets because they were weird and rushed. (The first version of the mod was made only in about a month)

These are all the variants of the redesigned Ding, including a taunt animation which I'm pretty sure is not used anywhere in-game except for the title screen.

While we're on the topic of character concepts, here's the concept art for Lapis:

If I recall correctly this concept of Ding near a volcano was also made as a joke, but I liked the idea and it turned into the main inspiration for the 2.0 update.

Here are some early concepts of stages, there's not a lot because at this time I didn't plan stuff out too much (I'm a little stupid like that):


The stage in Allergic Reaction was supposed to swap into a fancier version with filters and a sunset in the later half of the song.

An alternate version of Halloween, for whatever reason listening to it makes me feel like I'm going to have a bad time.
This is what Allergic Reaction could've looked like in a perfect world. Ding does a mid-song animation and the stage is actually aligned properly I think. The only thing that would be missing here is the swap to the sunset like I mentioned before.
We've basically covered everything at this point, so the rest of the content will just be some funny stuff from development.
Chapter 4: This is actually just the end
That should be pretty much everything worth covering. I hope I didn't miss anything because that'd suck.
This entire project was a mess and there's leftovers of a bunch of stuff in the game assets. If you want to see more unused content it might be worth looking through the asset folders. Who knows, you might find something interesting...
If you're interested in the Ding Mod you can get it from GameBanana, listen to the OST on SoundCloud or snoop through the source code on GitHub.
Bye bye!