Graphic Analysis: ddlc.moe

 Doki Doki Literature Club!

The website promoting the game “Doki Doki Literature Club!” (DDLC) is just as subversive as the game itself, with little clue as to it’s hidden genre until the very end.

Starting with the Client and what they hope to achieve, Team Salvato wanted primarily to surprise and trick their audience through their game while also slowly disturbing them as the game changed from a Romance game to a Psychological Horror. Thus they likely wanted the website to be secretive of the surprises they had in store. 

Team Salvato is an exceedingly small company with very few people working for it, headed by Dan Salvato himself. It’s very likely they themselves created the website, making it either during or after the game’s production. The team was formed initially to create DDLC alongside a followup game currently only known as Project Libitina, and thus the company’s goals tie very closely with the game’s. 

The next thing to consider is the audience. While the game’s audience closely ties to the website’s due to one promoting the other, it’s important to note that the website seems to focus on the uninformed half of the audience despite some things subtly nodding to some of the game’s horror and metafictional aspects such as parts being presented by one of the characters themselves or the warning at the end.

Starting with age, it’s safe to assume that the game and website intends on targeting the typical audience of an average dating simulator due to the Anime-esk artstyle, softer and more ‘cutesy’ colours, and simplistic design. I’d personally say this would target teens to young adults, with the audience likely spanning the 13 to 25 range, but more specifically focusing on those who are 16 to 21.

Next thing to note is the target gender. Despite the heavy use of typically ‘girly’ colours and softer design I believe the target audience is primarily single men due to the promises of love and dates with virtual women, the slogan and first thing on the page being “Will you write the way into her heart?”. I’ll go into more depth about this later, but I believe the colour and design choices are actually made to lower these mens’ expectations and lower their guard in an attempt to make them believe this is ‘just another cute dating sim’. 

Due to the audience primarily being in the age range of students and thus having little to no means to make money as of yet, it’s also fairly safe to assume their average income is lower. However their families generally would have to be at least decently sustainable as the anime influences and primarily online advertisement suggest a connection to the internet and involvement in the anime subculture therein. 

It’s a bit harder to get an idea of the opinions of DDLC’s audience with it becoming so broad, reaching 2 million unique downloads in just over 3 months. However the target audience did seem to be mainly young single men who are a part of the anime subculture of the internet who are also willing to play a dating simulator. From this we can gather that they likely had a less than active social life and intended to fill that void with a virtual experience, feeling that a connection to a virtual world and virtual characters would mean something to them and give them something to care about. This doesn’t have to be in the romantic sense even if that’s the experience the game advertises, many players of visual novels and dating sims finding enjoyment in just helping the characters in the story and interacting and learning about their lives.

Finally, their expectations are more obvious. The audience the website specifically targets is one that does not know of the game’s secrets, and instead fully expect this to be a standard visual novel. Dan Salvato himself has said that this was to lure the kinds of people who play those games or see those kinds of games as just “weeb games” and show them that the visual novel as a medium can be more than that. The audience expects and assumes the game to cater to the typical anime style of visual novels, and whether the audience likes that or not Team Salvato uses that to their advantage to help their subversion.

Now going over the actual graphical design of the website, there’s many things to consider, such as the Typography, the Imagery, the Colour, and the Layout. It’s also important to consider the personal interpretation and reaction to all of these. 

Starting with Typography, some small sections are written in a neat but simple typeface that resembles handwriting, and is used for bits like the store and the slogan. This typeface I feel seems inviting and almost warm despite not being particularly standout. I think this was intentional to add to the trickery and deception the website and game itself uses to draw in unsuspecting players to experience this without finding out about it first. The rest of the text is a fairly generic sans-serif font, using sections of bold to highlight key points as it’s trying to sell and describe the game to the audience. This is all presented from one of the character’s points of view, which to new people feels more welcoming and I believe is more subversion to make the audience trust the game. People who have played the game know that the character talking actually does break the 4th wall as a key plot element, and this website serves also as foreshadowing for the actual game’s story. Another thing to note is that most of the text is in the left 2 thirds of the screen, drawing our eyes to it and making us read it first. The only bit that noticeably brakes this trend is the slogan and the all bold warning at the end of the page, drawing our eyes to them again as it doesn’t follow the trend of the rest of the text.