itch.io

Peek has since been deprecated by its creator. (I’m going through this thread and leaving notes to save others from dead end searches.)

Itch.io Support responds slowly, but I hope everything works out without too much trouble.

Normal? No.

Double-check you don’t have browser or account settings that might hide the game, then report the sale to both your payment processor and Itch.io if it doesn’t show up.

Edits in previous posts are to clean up janky sentences.

My manuscript will need either an editor or two days at the end when I can focus on line revisions and only that (for this project).

WC: 5,000 words. Halfway written?

I’m going to test out a change in style to display more regular prose around dialogue. Some of my instinct is to describe facial expressions that could be drawn onto the sprites, but I’m also dealing with an imbalance between short one-liners and full paragraphs that shouldn’t be broken apart.

Sprites: ~5/5

All characters who will appear in a side view have sprite bases, which I’ll continue to work on to match the style, plus one effect layer. Facial expressions will likely be added later.

About the style mismatch: I don’t make each character the same way. I need more experience to develop a consistent process.

So far, in general, I prefer to start with a photo, or from a composite of photos, that are in the public domain or have permissive licensing to block out shapes with approximate colors in a digital painting program. The eyes are my first focus for fine work, and those set the initial shadows and highlights for the face and visible parts of the body. Other references on screen, in books, tactile objects, or from live models are used as I make changes to clothes, posture, coloring, etc.

The sprites remind me of Frankenstein’s monster in progress.

By the way, do you know the original book version (by an 18- to 19-year-old woman inspired by the best known bi disasters in modern history (her friend)) was very different than monster movie depictions? My memory from when I last read it was that Frankenstein’s attempt at the most perfect, beautiful man was made with the purpose to help him feel love and acceptance. He immediately ran away from when faced with his creation as a living person. The ugliest feature of the “monster” was implied to be an unsettling gaze. Like a newborn’s before it developed into the gaze of a neglected kid who doesn’t know how to hide their hurt?

Anyhow, he had super healing that might have covered any stitching used to hold his disparate stolen parts together.

Somewhere out there must be a gay Frankenstein where the creator wasn’t a flighty jerk afraid of his homoromantic urges, and he spends the years raising his strange son with his wife, husband, or a group of friends while he continues to grow himself. That creation is as beautiful and happy as the rest of Doctor Frankenstein’s family is. That derivative story would be directly about naturing, not predominately about the horrific consequences for being an arrogant tech bro with too much hubris and an inability to learn from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.

There are reimagined tellings where both Frankensteins don’t need to be yeeted off a cliff.

Backgrounds: roughly half done. More research is needed on lighting for tent interior scenes.

Audio: The musical selection is lacking. I’m considering adding vocal effects to fill in silences for auditory lovers.

WC: 3700.

Sprites: 3/5 serviceable.

I’m hoping to make that a full 5/5 tomorrow.

Backgrounds: 5/7 started.

Premade brushes for Krita speed up the painting on nature over houses and modern vehicles. I’m particularly fond of “grass”.

GUI: Have a guitar, as a treat.

The background is not an example of Krita brush use, only of Aseprite scribbles.

That’s nicely clear. Lovely.

Cool.

Is it this one?

https://kasuraga.itch.io/mouthwashing

On the site, available for download, but shadowbaanned (unindexed).

Your submission should be made only in the jam’s timeframe. Other than planning or outlining, please do not start before the formal start date. Use your best judgement and your honor.

I don’t trust my judgement aligning with others’. Opinions, please?

There’s a project that would fit well with this that I started and stopped when I changed my mind about its focus. Some of the mechanics, story lines, and images are maybe halfway serviceable. If I start over with the script and and make sure to keep the existing photos out of the media mix so there’s no overlap in project files except for code (maybe not that, if I swap out the programming languages), then that counts as made only in the game jam?

Or is it better to skip this jam because I’d publicly mentioned working on the game concept before, which could cause confusion?

Or, on the other side, the work of searching for and manually cropping images counts as prep work and can be kept?

Nothing but potential game titles and vague descriptions was shared, because I was mostly testing out some of what might be possible for me to do before.

These answers helped. Thank you!

Good luck!

Your art is beautiful. I’m looking forward to seeing your VN up.

We may use this in our Ren’Py projects?

My guess: Fear of being accused of copying Tolkien, feeling too much like Dungeons & Dragons, or approaching any similarity at all to Rowling.

That might explain why elves are prolific in queer works, actually. I don’t at the moment have it in me to delve into what I mean, but Baldur’s Gate 3 touches on that area. Critical Role does, too. “Our elves are different” is easier to say if they’re overtly queer, even if examples have been accumulating through the past 20+ years.

As for Japan, you might notice that European (by which I’m including the UK) settings, character types, and old folklore are currently popular in Japanese media. Mangaka have been traveling for research for some years now, picking up stories that weren’t mainstream and felt fantastical.

Wherever you’re getting your info, it’s not a good source.

Rowling featured automobiles, trains, and modern residences in a folklore-based series full of slave economics and discrimination against Muggles. Regular tech was used to show off how wonderful (mild sarcasm from me here) child endangerment and the brutal labor of a slave class is. The books were written in a city known for its Medieval architecture when home computers and cell phones were generally unavailable to kids and young adults. Being able to message someone or see their face long-distance in real time seemed like magic.

The real-world setting already feels different today to how it did then. But that’s an Urban Fantasy series set in modern times showing modern technology. Certainly not Medieval. It’s obvious in the art and adaptations that the students typically aren’t dressed in Medieval clothes.

As for the other example: Tolkien set his Lord of the Rings’ Middle Earth in prehistory, thousands of years before the Middle Ages / Medieval period.

Our real world Middle Ages had robots, computers, skyscrapers, innovative fabrics, and medicinal studies in addition to the remnants of earlier “magic”, or spiritual practices that today’s religions and fantasy fiction pull from. They were “Dark Ages” because of how much oral traditions and long-term records were lost.

Ancient times had technology today’s peoples still trying to relearn. That includes some type of computing, energy storage, and impressive feats of manufacturing and construction that reshaped skylines, shorelines, and our bodies.

One of the reasons I like when classic fantasy and science fiction tropes are mixed, which I’ve seen done since the origins of the genre, really, is it seems more honest about how humans do things.

Many Fantasy writers deliberately simplify as much as they can. There’s a reason the supposedly complicated politics in epics tend to be built on stereotypes. But that’s not the only method already in use.

By the way, much of the history of real-world tech before the Industrial Age won’t likely pop up in chatbots that were built from badly scraped datasets. That’s because what’s been filtered out and manually screened. Just like in the Industrial Age, the best known makers and users are subjects in feminism and Queer Theory studies. Those records are disappearing fast because of destructive political situations, but it’s where to look if you feel like digging into history for inspiration.

WC: 3200.

I should try to pick up speed, but I’m feeling uncertain about main plot points. Interviews I was hoping to do with subject matter experts might not be possible until this fall.

Do y’all know any drag performers who have an interest in rural or Southeastern US queer history at the end of the 19th Century…? The reading material I found for cross-dressing is interesting, but it doesn’t cover anything about personalities, common practices, or what people today think about the time.

That line of research is for side characters. If needed, I can bypass them in the story.

Skipping over the big mystery reveal is less of an option. I’m trying to find clearer resources, but the real-world destruction of archives, library collections, and search tools over the past ten or so years is showing.

Moving along….

Backgrounds: ~4/6 started. One is an abstract placeholder with a palette, two are rough drafts, and one is complete.

My collection of reference photos (taken on trips over several years) is a mess because of repeated computer crashes. I still need to consolidate backups that have different naming and organizational schemes.

Oh, no. I’d wondered why I had only see fan remakes, not the original game. I hope the developer is out there somewhere, doing okay.

I think you chose cute subjects and an interesting concept that makes for very challenging pixel art to practice on.

To help me explain why, I worked out my own version for comparison. I’m aware not everyone wants unexpected depictions of their pets from strangers, so no hard feelings on my side if you prefer to skip it.

Anyhow, my suggestion is to draw Harry and Carrie separately. Draw them at different sizes. Get a solid feel for their features and how each works in different settings, assuming your game backgrounds won’t all be the same.

You’r at a good starting point.

You’re still using X-Twitter?

Parts of Cloudflare went down again yesterday. That happens almost daily with various parts of the service.

https://www.cloudflarestatus.com/history?type=incident

The Cloudflare screen appears regularly for me. It changed how I move around the site and where I interact, because I’m tired of the interference going from one page to another, whether or not I’m already signed in. The checkbox usually pops up after several seconds each time, but sometimes it only refreshes and refreshes and… I give up.

Unrequested advice: add profile images.

On Mastodon and the wider fediverse, which is made up of sites on different platforms able to send posts between them, the general assumption is that accounts without an avatar/pfp and banner represent a throwaway bot, someone who didn’t stick around for more than a day, or someone blind.

There are blind game developers and Blind-centered sites on Mastodon. If you’re one and don’t have graphics to show off, that’s okay. It can be better to say that.

What happened to the creator of Flappy Bird?

I started with 2D platformers, realized that was far beyond what I was ready to take on with how long it would take me to figure out the available software. Nodes? Mapping? Pixelax or however that’s spelled? These were totally unfamiliar unless I considered vague memories of making vector art in Inskscape or watching behind-the-scene specials for animation. Watching developers struggle with exports and backups of Scratch on one side, pretty much everything including game playing in Unity, and the slopification everywhere, I realized I needed to be picky about the programs used.

I was coming from story writing; webpage building; raster art on free, low-resource software; and very limited experience as a game player. The obvious way for me to start learning gaming concepts and culture was with visual novels and mixed-type game development spaces like here.

I’m planning on returning to my 2D platform games next year, likely in Godot or with LUA, assuming I can afford to maintain any computers then. 😅 I sporadically focus on the sprites, backgrounds, and instructions for those games.

I guess my point is to figure out what you already know and are comfortable doing and build up from there.

For your last question: As a pixel artist, I’m fond of (genuine) pixel art. 😄

A heads up: there are players who will skip games made with AI “as a tool” in any way and ignore anything the publishers offer from there on out.

Even a small use of what we’re calling “AI” in the wider world (and not the “enemy AI” from decades old games) has shown to cause long-term damage to the user’s perception. It’s basically designed and pushed to act like an addictive drug. Study results on this are alarming with how hard the Epstein class or whatever we’re calling it’s being pushed everywhere.

Most models seem to contribute to massive social and environmental damage.

On the social part, it wasn’t uncommon the past few years for digital artists to switch to pixel art to shake off or mess with scrapers for AI training datasets. The people who then spent that time feeding and tweaking scraped assets and art portfolios to train models to spit out credible pixel art have created widespread despair and outrage. That’s what you would be choosing to continue into by using “some” AI for pixel art.

Hiring an artist or finding an art mentor is easier when there’s trust, which for many creators is broken when presented with “slop” or otherwise pressured engage with someone who might not understand the basics of consent or moral rights.

This site is full of pixel art freebies that may be used as training assets and test fillers until you know exactly what you want for your game.

I bring this up because I feel sad when new developers learn about the potential consequences too late. Obviously, you can and will do what you want.

I lost most of my available time in the day to figuring out multiple ways to animate an element of the interface. The effect is kind of ugly and confusing. The side view area, which shows a profile image of the character who’s speaking, can be opened and closed. That’s it. Is there a purpose? Nope!

That effect might not make it into the game release.

The good news: the effort gave me practice with image maps, mouse areas, layering screens, and drawing metals.

Word Count: 2600.

Side profiles were easier to figure out than they would have been at the beginning of the year. Knowing roughly how screens work in Ren’Py makes a big difference.

Word Count: 1800 words.

This needs to be my primary focus this week. I’m looking for subject matter experts to deal cautiously with the themes, which are frequently misinterpreted by the wider world, but whether I’m doing this on my own or getting help with the regional history, completing a rough draft would be good.

Sprites: 2/? serviceable.

Too many speaking characters are in my mental sketch of the story. I’m not sure yet what to do about that.

Backgrounds: 2/6 sketched out.

I’m reconsidering how I want these to look / be made. Digitally painted, watercolor and colored pencils , or pencil sketch on yellow paper? Typing this out, I realize I don’t have the skills for the last option in the list, the middle might be too difficult for the reader to see through the text background with my limited skills in the media, and the first is the easiest with the digital photos I already have on hand to paint from.

Audio: 3/? songs collected, none cleaned up or re-recorded. Sound effects to be determined by how the story goes.

As a sidenote (or rant), it’s upsetting how much folk culture is slipping away, badly documented.

One example is how recordings and articles about them are disappearing from the US Library of Congress, a federal archive of cultural history. Every time I’m hit with a 404 error page and what looks like phishing attempt from the current regime, I want to roar. They don’t need my email to report missing pages that describes the mutual influences of Black / White folk music around the turn of the 19th and 20th Centuries or a description of an overtly queer pre-Hays code film. Finding broken links has been an automated process for decades. And, JFC, I poke at archives enough to clearly see the pattern of what goes missing.

Another example is how ignorant the explanations online come across. Ignoring the obvious AI junk: Redditors say “The Red Rocking Chair” is about a no-good wife being sent away by a man who chooses to raise a child alone. Maybe there’s a version like that. The oldest recordings that are easily accessible are for a nursing song about a working father grieving as he takes care of a newborn while waiting to afford a burial for the body of his dead wife.

“Sugar in the Corn” can be about a drunkard getting in trouble around a farmstead, but older versions are also certainly about male homosexuality. The song is sung in different ways, from erotically queer to comically straight when government censorship hit. The way the much older song was recorded in the 1930s, the only way the singer didn’t know it was about men eagerly having sex with men would have been too young or oblivious of the meaning of the lines that he faithfully sung.

Anyhoo….

GUI: Where most of attention has been. I’m trying to resist the temptation to animate everything. But you know, it would be fun….

When it comes to digital art speed, I feel like a clod of mud.

This mud rolls onward.

I was able to make progress on animated facial expressions, cleaning up art, and correcting the script… all for a different game! Improvements to “Thorny Morn” are going up this weekend if I’m not too exhausted from personal happenings that are wearing me out.

The changes in “Thorny Morn” will work as reference when I’m coding for “Camp”. That work does count as work on “Camp”, too.

But for development specific to what I’ve taken to calling “Darling Spirit of Camp”? No progress of note from today.

How about I describe a few technical accomplishments from the previous few days? For context: I’m using Ren’Py 7.4.5. Differences between this version and later ones are at https://www.renpy.org/doc/html/incompatible.html.

First, I learned NVL mode is easy to use. I use it for a few anonymous lines in “Thorny Morn”, but I still was surprised how simple the process of customizing it is.

Matrix Color on screens was harder to figure out. After mind-numbing rounds of guess and check from incomplete instructions and examples, I managed to make any screenshots in the Save/Load screens turn into grayscale or sepia tones. They shots transform to look like old photographs.

Font switching and other interface features from “Spirit of the Latch” have been copied over to “Camp”.

To do: Learn how to set up side profiles for speaking characters.

Doing everything that’s expected in one month (which is what I’m doing, too) is intense. Translating on top of that is impressive.

If you get stuck with the coding, I hope you ask for help here. Some of us, including me, might be able to offer suggestions.

Okaaay, I didn’t know about this disturbing bit of history.

The zine format and the panel style that is reminiscent of the sealion and “Yet you live in society” comics make for a succinct way to learn about the paint, which works well as a metaphor of today’s popular “tool”.

Thank you for this work.

https://redrookinteractive.itch.io/scifi-sound-design-pack-volume-1

You might need to completely delete the link and recreate it. The current link still looks like (text: itch.io)[link: gumroad.com].

The link is redirecting to Gumroad.

Everything in this mockup is subject to change. Some of it I already know is wrong and expect to redo later this week. The screenshot is to show that there is visible progress.

Latest developments:

• I picked a general setting, further south than what I as initially thinking, because I have photos, museum notes, and access to books from trips that would be useful.
• The blues in the uniforms and the skin tones are feeling closer to correct.
• An outline is coming together, and I’ve got ideas about how to cut it down to a manageable size.

Some thoughts from story worldbuilding research:

Relatively peaceful doesn’t mean the US military or the businesses or any property owners stop committing cruel acts with massively devastating consequences. This shouldn’t surprise me by now, and it is part of the story. The big trick is to writing in general is to use enough of the real world that the story world is believable or interesting without showing too much of its horrors.

One of my favorite ads, found in Pussy: Her Language (1895)

Men’s shirts were a competitive fashion industry. Nevermind (for our purposes) the politics of fabrics or the arguments about whether or not the maiming factories were evil. The styles are different in every ad, drawing, or preserved garment from the time period. I was hoping to figure out which style to go back to use in “SotL” before its next version release, but uhhh….

Nineteenth century uniforms were far less consistent in style, materials, and colors than what museums and books tend to let on by selecting the stereotypical examples to display. Is this relevant? Yes! The US Army and its members experimented with uniform materials and styles for several decades after the Civil War officially ended. In the specific decade I’m researching, 1890s CE, the US Army was using the light tan color for cavalry and its (wait, WTF?) tropical invaders. Everything from the specific color to coat length to decorations could vary from person to person, especially among the officers, who would present themselves according to personal preferences. That means there’s freedom to mix and match and still be able to justify my decisions. I like that.

That sounds deeply frustrating. I hope you can get away to somewhere calmer and more helpful.

I deleted my account years back and eventually stopped paying attention to the stream of scandals and the legal action against Elon Musk (that’s barely covered in news media that frequently tries to cover up all his business failures and political messes).

From what I remember: Aren’t external links heavily restricted? Isn’t the majority of the platform potentially malicious bots? Aren’t all images used for training or manipulation by Grok, which is notorious for deepfakes and CSAM?

Why bear with all that? There doesn’t seem to be any value at all in Musk’s X when genuine engagement and interest in creative projects seems better on BlueSky and Mastodon (fediverse).

Hey, “Luddites”. Have we all read this comical history?

https thenib.com/im-a-luddite/

Special mention: Lord Byron, who was a a Luddite, famous poet, and inspiration (through a prompt!) for 18-year-old Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, a story about a man who refused to take responsibility for what he generated from stolen body parts.

I’m aware there’s an implied threat when an AI prompter uses the word, yet it mostly feels like a compliment. “You believer in the value of people over profits, you.”

I’m disgusted that people who are disproportionately harmed by the AI industry and its fascist, world-burning funders are still being used as supposed examples of who’s helped in creative projects by AI “tools”.

Please stop pretending the scammers pushing so-called AI into everything are doing any of this for us.

They took away our transcripts to be replaced by undecipherable junk. They stole our alt text for training. They spied on our the keystrokes and screen movements when we stayed up late in nights making art to ignore the unmanageable pain worsened by bot harassment on our phones and computers. They added our biographical photos and medical records to datasets for porn machines (which are also reusing images of enslaved and abused children) and for LLMs, respectively. They’re deteriorating lifespans and quality of life.

They fired the machine learning researchers and AI developers who questioned the extreme ethical violations or pointed out how harmful stereotypes are bolstered by their models.

They’re taking the space, water, minerals, and political energy to boost billionaire goals of planetary domination. There’s nothing democratic in this.

This isn’t color fill, dictionary word matching, or customizable keyboards we’re talking about here. Many of us with disabilities would have been far better off with trust, resource access, reliable communication in art communities, which the AI boom has largely destroyed.

I understand that’s hard to see once addicted to agenic models or struggling to cool down between incomprehensibely large data centers built to control what we write, draw, say, and decide for each other.

But I hope one of these days you learn to stop repeating BS lines that many of us tired of seeing a year or two ago.

GUI development has started. This will be fun. The interface will be like a(n optional) game in itself.

One custom background / main menu screen has been sketched up digitally.

The colors on the sprites’ uniforms are giving me trouble. I’m digging into books and public domain websites for better references.

Story writing is on hold, too, while I research potential scenarios and terminology.

This period in US history is often ignored. Many of the best known authors were gay men, married women at least as famous as their husbands, Black (by today’s definitions), and/or freed from enslavement. Drag balls and dances were kind of frequent in the military, Washington, D.C.; vaudeville, and the Wild West. Quite a few notable photographers, painters, and performers were openly queer or associated with famous queer groups. Oscar Wilde was setting trends from oversees (while his noble mom was advocating for Irish culture through children’s books of folklore?); and before the massive chilling effect of some legal trials, there seemed to be considerable hope for progress between the deepest horrors of the country. But because it was relatively peaceful, the end of the 19th Century is something of a burned out hole.

The records exist. Finding them without the AI corruption or entirely lost context during this period of censorship is trickier than I feel it should be with access to the internet, historic museums, and a big library system.

Making up details from imagination when there’s a chance of including actual history that’s on the verge of being lost would make me feel bad.