You can purchase your judge pass here: https://www.patreon.com/VNDevTalk/posts/spooktober-novel-162552448?utm_medium=cl... When submitting your project, use the Patreon order code in the submission form!  If there are any questions or concerns, you're welcome to reach out at Stella@spooktobervnjam.com or reach out on our Discord here: https://discord.gg/devtalk

New this year:  The first 100 participants to purchase a pass will receive it at a reduced price while those after will receive it for the full price.  No subscription is required!  The post looks like this:

Last year, we sold 191 passes. While that sounds like a good thing for us, it's a bit more complicated than that.  Read on for more info.

So why is there an entrance fee for the mainline prizes?

The quick answer? To reduce the number of entries that judges have to review annually.  The fee introduces friction in the process for participants. 

Two years ago, we had 7 judges responsible for judging and eventually ranking 272 submissions in less than 30 days.  On average, a judge had to review 70 entries in around 21 days each to maintain the standard of quality of review that we’ve kept.  Ask any of them.  It’s a staggering and taxing task despite the joy it brings us.

Recruiting new judges has been met with significant difficulty, since many people we would consider experts in this simply are not available to take on the tremendous workload at hand, and without more judges we cannot promise a lighter quantity of work per judge.  This creates a bit of a catch 22 when recruiting.

I prefer to do good business when I can.  I don’t take sponsorship money from people I don’t think a sponsorship with us could actually help.  Similarly, I can’t keep asking the judges, who have been loyal and enduring despite the hardships, to continue at the rate they’re going.  We are fully expecting to only have 5-7 judges this year, and the jam is trending towards 300 submissions this year.  Worst case scenario, we're looking at judges needing to review somewhere near 120-150 entries each to maintain our standards.  We need a method of mitigating the administrative strain the event causes without compromising the integrity or quality of review. 

Here's some other answers to questions:

• Everyone is still able to participate and compete in Spooktober.  That will never change.
• Open compete categories will be nominations based, with public vote ranking taken into consideration in addition to community and judge nominations.  Judges will continue to review the nominations and select winners there. (Roughly 6~ entries per category, per judge.)
• The 1st, 2nd, and 3rd place prizes require a the judge pass to qualify a team for consideration.
• Judge passes also entitle participants to pitch and present in a special competitive Meet & Greet, focused on helping people find teams and team members seeking to compete for the grand prizes.  This Meet & Greet is scheduled towards the end of August, and purchase of a Judge Pass is required BEFORE that date in order to present.
• The goal of this pass is to reduce the total number of entries the judges need to review from 250-300 to 100 or less.  This would amount to each judge only needing to review 30-40 entries each and permit us to continue judging at the quality we want to maintain.  Yes, because we sold 191, the normal price is now $15 rather than 10, with the first 100 receiving it at its original price.
• Proceeds from the passes will be given to the judges to thank them for their time or given back to the community at their discretion.

It's fine, you can make a translation for it if you want.

No, that wouldn't count.  Credits and other information about the visual novel not in the visual novel itself don't count.

Welcome to the jam! Once you've read the rules on the main page, here are some more specific cases to give you an idea of what you can work with.

If you can't find your specific case or situation, feel free to ask below!

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GENERAL CLARIFICATIONS

You can:

• have more than a single choice or fork in your VN/story
• use your existing universe so long as the player does not need prior context to understand your entry
• have unlimited solid color backgrounds in menus and in-game generated by the engine, alongside your illustrated BG
• use Text-To-Speech without impact on any audio limits
• use any freely available asset (paid, Creative Commons, and others)
• provide additional information on the VN's website including separate character drawings, backstory info, banners and cover images, provided they don't make diminish the VN-only experience
• use your own existing assets not specifically made for a VN/game (e.g. vacation photos, childhood drawings, old poem)
• use previously created custom menu styles/GUI, even if they appeared in other games before
• submit NSFW/R18 work, provided it's tagged/flagged appropriately
• create additional simple shapes by code (e.g. squares, circles, etc.)
• draw an image by code, but only when the results are equivalent to having a single sprite and single BG
• prepare code for basic VN functions (e.g, skip, auto-forward, text history, save/load, etc.) in your engine of choice
• use any engine to create a game that is considered a VN first and foremost (e.g. due to the required assets needed, an engine such as any version of RPGMaker would not be allowed)
• update your game after the jam is complete (we highly recommend making it available as a separate download for posterity's sake, but this is not necessary)

You cannot:

• use sprites, backgrounds, scripts or other assets made or commissioned for a different VN/game project before (even if it's unfinished or unreleased)
• Use generative AI in any aspect of your production or pre-production.

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ONE SPRITE

It is within the rules to:

• have many facial expressions for the sprite by changing eyes, nose, eyebrows and mouth
• have many off-screen actors / characters, so long as only one is visually represented by a sprite
• have a character sprite that includes a separate auxiliary character that does not feature in interactions (e.g, a woman holding a baby, a pirate with a parrot, blind person with dog)
• have multiple "characters" associated with one sprite, as long as those are all a part of that singular entity (e.g, a medusa with talking snake hairs, a person playing with sock puppets on their hands, etc.)
• have a "suggestion" of another character represented by a shadow or a reflection with very vague detail (see Illustration/CG rules)
• have an "extra item" which is a single non-central element that will be hidden (man loses a hat, child's balloon flies away) or appears. 
• have a single alternate movement of a single body part that is drawn differently (head, single arm) so long as it doesn't change the pose, and so long as the VN does not also use the allowed "extra item"
• use the single sprite for twins, clones, ghosts, swarms, etc.
• mirror and otherwise transform the sprite in game
• show only a portion of a sprite, including cut-outs or zooms.
• have an inanimate object as the sprite (e.g. UFO, a portal, a robot)
• having multiple small ambient objects as the sprite (e.g. adding traffic to the city, searchlights to prison)
• fully or partially assemble a sliced up sprite in game, and apply effects to individual elements (e.g. a snowman's head)
• animate parts of the sprite to achieve effects of breathing, bobbing their head, or other idle animation (this includes the usage of programs such as EmoFuri, Live2D, or Spline which do not require drawing new frames)
• create minor frame-by-frame animations involving features of the face, such as blinking or mouth movement

You may not do the following:

• have multiple changes of clothes for the sprite, or any other separate layers that overlap with their non-transparent parts
• use a sprite overlay to vastly transform the background (e.g. pre- and post-war city)
• create extensive frame-by-frame animations of the sprite outside of parts of the face (e.g. snapping fingers, turning a hand around, etc.)
• change the sprite's pose significantly (e.g. move the torso)
• drawing alternate forms of hair or shaded clothes for any movement

Illustrations (CGs) can:

• be used instead of a separate sprite and background
• feature a character with expression changes and other alterations analog to sprites
• feature simple crowd silhouettes, or suggestions of people without identifying details

Illustrations (CGs) cannot:

• show multiple people in high detail
• show a silhouette next to a fully shown character

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ONE BACKGROUND

It is within the rules to:

• use the engine's built-in functions, code, or scripting to alter the background (e.g. blur, night filter, mirroring) 
• have a small looping animation (e.g. inside of train with passing scenery, waterfall)
• use zooming, panning and cutting around a larger image
• reveal previously obscured information or areas through pans, zooms and cuts
• use layers to show a sliced up an image as a single background (no opaque parts of layers can overlap)
• use custom particle effects, so long as there is only one type of particle being used (e.g, cherry blossom petals, fire, etc.)

You may not do the following:

• create secondary versions (via multiple separate files) of the background image (e.g. blur, night version)
• use masks (via multiple separate files) to create secondary versions of the background image on screen
• use an image which is created in such a way that focusing on segments effectively changes scenes
• remove parts of a background to create a new scene, even if parts of it were seen in the original (e.g. there is a wall a window with a view outside, and then that wall is removed so the scene is now outside completely)

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ONE THOUSAND WORDS

When in doubt, pure words counted by Google Documents are to be taken as standard. 

Counts against the 1.000 word limit:

• foreword / afterword / author's notes
• text of all the VN's branches combined
• text of choices
• images of letters or longer-form text
• any additional parallel language / translation
• custom menu items like "Start your adventure" instead of "Start"
• emoji-only statements (count as a single word)
• emoji made of words (count as the amount of words in the emoji)
• ellipses (a freestanding ... is considered a word by most word processors)

Does not count against the 1.000 word limit:

• minigame using words if it's purely a game mechanic (does not advance story)
• chapter names, even if displayed on screen
• signs, posters, even if they relate to the story
• short factual glossary, if explanation cannot be reasonably provided in game
• in-game content warnings
• credits, help / controls
• user input text
• emoji used to only accompany and reiterate a word or statement
• repeats of blocks of text achieved by scripting (e.g. common route, recurring dream)
• surplus text generated from a base text that is within the word count limit (e.g. chat bot, AI generator)
• name tags, so long as they are not directly conveying narrative
• image captions intended to describe visuals to players with low vision conditions for accessibility

Concerning the last point, please utilize an engine's accessibility features and do not abuse image captions to add to the narration in a way that moves it forward. We trust that participants will consider making their games more accessible to low vision readers in good faith.

If you are using Ren'Py, we suggest npckc's Caption Tool in order to add image captions to your game.

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ONE MUSIC TRACK OR ONE AMBIENT BACKGROUND NOISE

It is within the rules to:

• use a looped sound effect acting as ambient background noise (e.g. rain)
• use a track with multiple melodies / styles, if it existed prior to the jam, and only a single segment is looped, with another segment looped only for a special short segment / occasion.
• alter the pitch or speed of audio via code

If an ambient audio file you create or find has multiple sources of different audio (e.g. a storm may have wind, rain, and thunder) and you do not control the timing of the other recorded audio, this all counts as one ambient track. If you do control the timing of other sounds, this counts as your sound effect.

You may not do the following:

• create or use a track by combining composed music and ambient sounds
• use a mash-up or mix of multiple songs with timed transitions (megamix, medley)
• have additional menu music that loops (if the VN also has in-game music/ambient noise)

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ONE SOUND EFFECT

The single sound effect...

• can be used multiple times
• cannot be looped continuously (if yes, it counts as background noise per the last section)
• can be made by a person different from the voice actor (we consider this to be a foley sound)
• can bed altered via code

This limit does not apply to interface sounds, which are considered part of the GUI. Having different sounds assigned to button hover, activation, etc. could be an accessibility feature for low-vision players, as that's audio feedback for different actions.

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ONE VOICE ACTOR

Your entry's single voice actor...

• can use use variations of voices
• can have their voice modulated and processed to create completely different sounding voices
• can be replaced by sound effects / beeps processed to act as voices (this does not count as the sound effect)
• can speak lines not part of the VN's text, provided they don't go over 1.000 words combined

Regarding usage of voice beeps in lieu of voice acting: you may create different beeps per character as long as it remains consistent to that character.

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SPLASH SCREEN / MAIN MENU / GAME MENU ART / GUI 

The main menu / title screen background is now considered part of the GUI and thus is not beholden to many of the previous year's restrictions.

It is within the rules to:

• display multiple splashscreens before the start (e.g, for the jam, engine used, studio logo)
• have multiple variations of the title screen / game menu background
• show as many characters / objects as you'd like
• show a different location from the one in the game
• use a combination of the sprite and background or the one CG as the main menu
• have multiple typefaces

You may not do the following:

• show any part of the main menu in the flow of your script if it is different from the assets in the game

Regarding image buttons that appear to be objects: these buttons should only appear as a choice, and the images should not appear again in other parts of the game due to the fact that this can be abused to bypass the item/arm/head change limit.

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ONE THUMBNAIL ART 

The restrictions for the itch thumbnail for your game's preview have now been relaxed, as we recognize that it is an important aspect of marketing your game to potential players. It is within the rules to:

• show as many characters as you'd like
• show a different location from the one in the game
• create any animation for it, even one with multiple frames of animation

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ONE PROJECT

One person in the O2A2 jam...

• can only be the primary creative lead for a single project (e.g. producer, director, author)
• can additionally be a secondary creative contributor for someone else's project (e.g. draw a sprite)
• can further collaborate on other projects in a non-creative role (e.g. coordination, marketing)

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OFFERING WEB BUILDS OF YOUR ENTRY 

If you offer both a web and downloadable version of your game, you may optimize effects (e.g. video backgrounds) for the web build as long as the downloadable version follows the rules. You may want to note differences between versions if applicable. Please follow this rule in good faith.

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OMAKES AND FANDISC RULES 

An omake means "extra," as in extra/bonus content for source material that you own or have permission to develop for. Fandisc is another term for the same concept.

It is within the rules to:

• reference assets from your main game to create new assets (e.g. redrawing a sprite or BG, making a remix of a song, etc.)
• reuse code from your main project to expedite development (e.g. recycling animations, code for setting up images, etc.)
• use the same GUI from your main project

You may not do the following:

• directly reuse any non-GUI assets you have created for your main game

We highly suggest writing your omake in a way that those unfamiliar with the source material are able to enjoy it, but this is not a requirement.

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FANGAME AND DERIVATIVE WORK RULES 

Fangames or derivative works are generally unofficial works based on source material that you do not own or have express permission to develop for. The O2A2 Jam Hosts are not responsible for any cease and desist notices for individual entries should they occur.

It is within the rules to:

• adapt an existing fanfic or other work you created or have permission to use into a visual novel format

You may not do the following:

• directly reuse any assets from the official source material (this is piracy!)

We highly suggest writing your fangame in a way that those unfamiliar with the source material are able to enjoy it, but this is not a requirement. For your protection in the majority of cases, we also suggest turning donations and PWYW off for fangame entries.

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TRANSLATIONS/DIFFERENT LANGUAGES

In the case that you want to release a game in several languages: the restrictions on 1k words and the one VA would apply to each version.

It is within the rules to:

• make a game with several languages, where the text of each version does not surpass 1000 words.
• use a different VA for each language.

You may not do the following:

• use more than one of any other asset that is not affected by having different languages in the game.

Hey there.  So the way the shader works, there's not much I can do to address this in the short term.  RenPy sizes the text area to be at its largest even if it only draws text into a smaller area.  The shader works by filling and scattering in the drawable space, and when that drawable space is larger than the actual draw, these sorts of things will happen.

The fastest and probably least fun way to fix this would be to edit the font to remove the extra space.

That is very, very strange.  Which version of RenPy are you on?  I'll need to see if I can reproduce it so I can tinker with it.

I might have an idea of what's going on?   Where are MVNTitleMap and MVNSTSOR located in your project?  And can you copy/paste your table from step 3 here somewhere I can see it?

As long as you followed all of the directions, it should just work if you slip it inside of your main menu definition.

Can you tell me what version of Ren'Py you're on?  I can see if I can reproduce issues with the directions.

I've uploaded a 2k and 4k pack as a premium, but if you want to upscale from the default 1920x1080 from the free one, I won't be offended.  

I more or less just applied a scale up and smoothing on the originals.

Yep! I can probably produce a larger scale set, but if you want something short and quick, you can pick out your favorites, upscale their map graphics, toss some kind of edge smoothing filter on it and use that.  

Also sorry about not fully responding to the previous message before.  My energy levels have been low with everything going on, I more than likely just forgot to finish writing the response lol

It's fine!  The comments on most of my packs are basically that anyhow.

I'm also available via Discord in DevTalk if you want more real time support/questions.

As for the functionality, yeah it's supposed to be multiplied.  I don't have it directly in front of me to double check, but I believe I used multiplication so that intensity could overshoot it.  Most colors are in expressions of fractions, meaning if you multiply the RGB it by anything larger than 1, it should drive the value/brightness the other direction rather than only darkening the visuals (e.g, by multpllying (1.0, 0, 0) and (0,0,1.0) to produce (0,0,0))

If you want to toss the variations my way I wouldn't mind putting it in the next time I update this pack.  Admittedly I am drowning right now in event prep for our upcoming VN Competition, so it might be a while.

Hey there!   So you would not be able to redistribute them, but B is the perfect way to handle something like this.  It does require an extra step on the user's end, but this allows me to conduct updates to improve functionality without needing to coordinate with other folks.  

I'm happy that it's helped kickstart your own creation and I'd love to see the link when you're ready!

Yep.  The screens version of the implementation actually doesn't care about the contents of the screen you display, just the fact that it is a screen,

Yep!

One of the things I think is a helpful recommendation for folks who want to shoot for animated or film like presentations is to look at things like storyboards and animatics for inspiration.

I think a lot of people are missing out on the potential of visual novels as near-cinematic experiences because they look at other productions with significantly more support and finances, and then just decide that visual novels couldn't ever do that or get close to it.

Animatics are animated or sequenced storyboards.  These have obviously had a lot of work done to them but you can see in their frames where the overlaps are.  Here, they trade fidelity and definition for movement, but what if we adjust the knob slightly back the other direction and pick up more definition at the cost of having less movement? Say we fill in the characters and the outfits with color and detail, but have less frames of movement?

That's essentially what visual novels are in varying degrees.  I wonder how much we can adjust the knob in the format to get what we're looking for?

I'm glad you like my assets and resources!  I think about visual novels far too much and it's nice that it's appreciated.

I'm convinced folks who hate visual novels just haven't seen the one that'll convert them yet.  I often wonder if other mediums faced this type of rejection as they popularized.

Thanks!

Awesome!  Welcome~ A lot of people come to visual novels from comics!  

One of the things I hear folks gushing about is being able to reuse assets instead of having to draw ever panel.  There's a lot of effort/time saving methods you can employ in comics but the conventions in visual novels let you get away with a fair bit more since you can construct sprite expressions.

Honestly, I'm partial to comic and manga panel aesthetics in VNs.  If you're just starting out and like the idea of bringing comic elements into VNs, you should check out Dead End Junction.  It's a pretty basic example compared to what you might see in physical media comics, but it demonstrates just enough to show what's possible without setting the standard.  Many visual novel engines, including RenPy and Naninovel, have the ability to use text bubbles.  They can be a bit tedious to map, but worth it if you're about it!

The Visual Novel Developer Network is conducting 2 team building Meet & Greets for Cute Girls Doing Cool Things!

The Meet & Greets are happening tomorrow, May 9th, and again on May 23rd at 2 PM Eastern!

Come hang out with us in voice and text to meet other developers, find teammates, recruit team members, share project ideas, and get ready for CGDCT! These Meet & Greets are the best time to connect with people before the jam really gets rolling.

Voice participation is encouraged, but absolutely not required. You can participate entirely through text chat if that’s more comfortable for you!

Meet & Greet #1: https://discord.gg/VabcAmJGVB?event=1489277234098213099

Meet & Greet #2: https://discord.gg/VabcAmJGVB?event=1489277236430504116

Whether you're a writer, artist, musician, programmer, UI designer, or just curious about joining the jam, come stop by and say hi!

It can be applied to an entire scene and all of its contents by applying it to a layer or camera, or you can apply it to individual elements like just a character sprite or a background or screen by assigning the transforms to them.

You can get more details about transforms over in the official RenPy docs if you have questions:

https://www.renpy.org/doc/html/transforms.html

Oh, this is sick.  Is there a way to style and group different types of footnotes?  Like say if I wanted to pop a tool tip up that's a different color/style in the text box for things like People, Places and Events?

The theme is open to interpretation and is not meant to be restrictive.  You can build something based off of the literal meaning of one or both words, or the combined meaning of the words.

Yes, you can have multiple languages in your game.

Alright, thanks for confirming.  I'll try to spin up my test project and test and debug soon.

I'd need to take a look to know for certain but my initial thought is your perspective being disabled.  Is your perspective enabled on your camera? 

The calculations are balanced with perspective in mind, but if that isn't on then the front and back wouldn't actually change the distancing and the offsets would shoot them in whichever direction if you tried to use them.

My second thought is I goofed up the transforms somewhere.   It's entirely possible that I goofed up one of the transform coordinates and no ones ever caught it.

Yep, super heroes fit into both supernatural and fantasy, depending.

We'll be hosting a live team building event called Meet & Greet in our Discord on the 20th at 8 AM Eastern!  If you are looking for a team or team mates, be sure to join us.  Voice participation is encouraged, but not required.  These events are the best way to quickly find a team or additional team members, so don't miss out!

You can join our discord here!

Dug into it.  So either your fonts folder is empty or doesn't exist.

If you unzip the fonts zip into your \game\fonts folder, it should fix that, alternatively if you put your preferred fonts into that folder, it should work too.  It just needs something there to display.

Take your time, I'll see if I can just grab the latest one and test it against it in the mean time.   Feel free to hit me up on our Discord too if you want more real time back and forth troubleshooting.

Sorry for the delay on getting back to you, can you tell me which version of RenPy you're using so I can try to reproduce it?

Generally we prefer submissions that were made explicitly for the competition, but as long as it fits the themes and otherwise follows the rules, it's fine.

As long as your submission follows the rules and is within the ballpark of a visual novel or other narrative game, it's fine.

If you open up MVNActionFXTemplates.rpy, you'll see a list of transform definitions. 

https://www.renpy.org/doc/html/transforms.html#transforms

I your script, you can apply these transforms to various displayable and images in your scene to produce the effects. The guide on the page here should help you figure out how to set each one up. 

If you know which effect you'd like to use, I can give more specific instructions on how to use them, too, just hollar and let me know.

Yep.  If you're going into it from a completely fresh project, redownload the MVNBubbleControls.rpy and try again.

I missed a bit during testing where if the bubble.json file doesn't exist or the ID is completely unassigned, it would throw an error.  That should be fixed now.  My B.