itch.io

Oh wow... I can't wait to play around with this later.

For the record this has been in progress for a while. I just saw your comment when I came back here to add the findings to the thread. Thank you for at least looking at things.

The research was actually the simple part. The great effort was in getting confirmations from large amount of artists that they didn't give permission for their art to be used. But I think that it was necessary to avoid a different kind of pedant commentary -- the "Well, are you sure the art was used without permission? Couldn't the people behind the sites have contacted these specific artists?" kind of nitpicking. And now I've spoken to enough artists whose work was taken to be very sure about the scale of art theft.

But in any case I'm not the developer of Wigglypaint and have no sway over the license. I'm just an artist and community member who noticed that the creative works of people here on itch being were used as materials to scam people elsewhere and I really didn't like that.

Hmm! Yeah, my example in the book only goes one way... I'll have to think about adjusting it. 

But for now I'll explain some other ways to write that script here!

Because buttons can hold a binary value (0 or 1) you can set it to hold either of those values directly. 

Or you can tell it to be "NOT the current value". This will toggle it between 0 and 1 depending on which value is currently stored.

"!" is the Lil operator for "NOT" so it could be written like this:

on click do
thebox.value: ! thebox.value
end

I hope this makes sense? And thank you very much for reading! I'm always happy to clarify things!

Oh wow! It wasn't an intentional inspiration but now that you mention it, I see what you mean. And it's a huge compliment, thank you!

I absolutely love this! You've been working hard making so many useful things Missooni!

Sorry to get heavy in this thread but I have been looking into the fake Wigglypaint websites and I don't think there's any reason to make up stories about them being run by good-intentioned teenagers or people who "accidentally recreated Wigglypaint with an LLM" or whatever.

• The sites are often deceptive about who is running them: sometimes claiming to be IJ, sometimes just the "Wigglypaint Team". 
• They aren't using an accidentally similar program, it's usually either Wigglypaint 1.3 or Wigglypaint 1.5 with IJ's title screen credit removed.
• Many of them are monetized with ads, subscriptions, apps and referral links to AI services.
• The vast majority of them stole artwork for their "community galleries". One has even used stolen artwork for their promotional screenshots in the app stores.

And there's a lot of stolen artwork. Overwhelmingly it was taken without permission from artists posting their work here on itch.io. If you posted a drawing on the wigglypaint page here on itch between December 2023 and September 2025 your doodle may have been scraped into one of these galleries. This includes some of our own Decker community folks and even bigger names around the site like Leafo and Kenney.

You can see the write-up here. (It's not perfect, it was written to be a broad collection of evidence and a summary of the issues for affected artists. ) 

Or this spreadsheet of known stolen artwork connected back to the artist's itch.io display names.

This covers: Wigglypaint.com, Wigglypaint.net, Wigglypaint.org, Wigglypaint.io (a.k.a. Jigglypaint.com and the Jigglypaint app), Wigglypaint.run, Wigglypaint.fun, Wigglypaint.art, Wigglypaint.co, Wigglypaint.online, Wiggly-paint.com and Wigglypaintgif.com. 

There are others too, but without art theft or noteworthy lies they didn't make it into the writeup. Most of these sites appeared within a short period of time in mid-2025 when Wigglypaint had a spike of popularity on social media.

And I hope it's obvious (because this is the Decker forum) that the problem here isn't with modding Wigglypaint or taking it apart or learning from it. I've been helping people mod the program off and on and I will continue doing so as long as there's interest. Customizing the program for yourself is fun and easy to do.

The problem is people using a free program to run scams. Ripping off artists while using stolen work as the advertisements to lure them in. 

This is incredibly polished and cool already! I love it.

Proud to be a certified bug appreciator. 🫡

These are all great! (And I'm extra happy about the sticker contraption. I love it.)

I feel so informed and prepared for an emergency.

I enjoyed learning some fun facts. And about the robot helper too.

Yeah... that's the slime.

Hooray!

I'm so glad my book can be here to help, even for people who know how to make cool things in Decker already!

Good luck with what you're working on!

Eggbug forever!

(Also I'm so curious about this local Decker meetup... who, what, where, when... if you're willing to talk about it, I'd love to hear about it sometime.)

Well, you've definitely got me thinking that it would be good to write up more beginner-friendly notes about how to use Puppeteer...

But since that hasn't been written yet, I'm happy to help with whatever you're having trouble with right now.

For example: 

• setting things up in your project
• making the sprites appear
• making puppeteer and dialogizer work together
• making sprites move around
• something else?

I think you need to send the event to slider1 in a slightly different way:

slider1.event["change" val]

There's another post on the forums explaining more here.

And you'll also need to define what val is in this context. That could be in either script.

For now I put both changes in button script:

on click do
 slider1.value:slider1.value - 1
 val: slider1.value
 slider1.event["change" val]
end

This is exceptional. Strange and wonderful.

this really did make me smile!

I've sent you a friend request!

It was surprising how many there are! 

And thank you very much for checking out the zine.

Thank you very much for reading. :'D

(And I'm also glad that I've had to the opportunity to get to know your work too because of this recent jam!)

Adding on to Nice Gear's advice about cutting, there's also this little thing on the front page:

If you set the margins to "None" here before saving an image then all pages will be next to each other on the paper instead of having gaps between them. Then you cut the blank space on the outside, then you fold the smaller piece of paper into a zine.

This is great! (20% chance is as good as things got for me...)

Respectfully, I don't think this is true or a good perspective on the situation.

These sites aren't hosting copies made by LLMs. It's always just Wigglypaint from itch.io re-uploaded. The likelihood of a kid with an LLM "accidentally" generating Wigglypaint down to the pixel, every line of code and also the entire Decker software behind it 1:1... it's not reasonable. And I don't think this is a high schooler's misunderstanding either: 

1) Some of these sites' owners are easily identified as adults. 

2) Some of the sites claim, incorrectly, to be made by Internet Janitor or the "Wigglypaint team". 

3) Tons of them are monetized: apps, referral links to other services, ads and offers of partnerships.

And furthermore, sidestepping any software technicalities: Most of them stole art from the artists here on itch.io to fill up their galleries. One of the apps even used these stolen artworks from itch in their promotional screenshots until more artists bought the app and they could use newly submitted work instead.

I just want to be very clear that these larger deceptive sites are not just run by some confused kid.

Friends on Stilts. 🤔 There's something there. But really, all of this is great.

Your art and writing are so pretty. Well done.

This is so beautiful!

Thank you. The pure pirate sites are definitely the easiest to put in a box. Pure scam, pure deception. The threw a fake page up and then moved on. Okay.

It's the ones who keep building on their scams that get to me. And the site that bugs me the most is the one where they're not anonymous at all and they've connected their real reputations to their art theft. It baffles the mind. 

My mind, anyway.

And I'd rather have my mind baffled by MindApe. :) Thank you for reading and commenting. It means a lot.

I've had very mixed results with telling people directly. :') And I really do try to be polite about it because they didn't know. There are signs that something is wrong inside Jigglypaint but they're buried enough that someone just buying an app and drawing in it probably wouldn't notice the issues themselves.

Thank you very much for reading, Flocon! And good to see you.

I definitely count you among the community here. :') And likewise. Thank you.

Hell yeah.

Oh, oof.

Yeah, it really does. And thank you so much for checking it out!

I get exactly what you mean. :') Thank you very much for reading.

In the beginning I really wondered if I would find someone who gave permission... It wasn't impossible that one of the people running a site with a smaller gallery could have contacted people with an official looking email address or something. But. Well.

(Thank you for printing it out! I'm honored that it found a place in your zine collection.)

Thank you for your support through everything, Millie. ❤️

Having your own photos in this makes it that much more impactful, I think.

Y'KNOW... I did assume they liked dampness because of the terrariums they're sold in. I've learned a lot!

This is whimsical and splendid and also suprisingly educational! Very well done.