itch.io

Nice to see someone else talking about not “writing scared” when it comes to representing minorities one is not a part of, LOL. I am also a very strong believer that it’s better to take the risk and just learn from potential mistakes than it is to cower away and try to keep everything sanitized.

I had realized when I was first working on writing projects and getting friends to beta read them that, a lot of the time, even if you fail at what you were trying to do in your writing, people will still generally be able to tell what you were going for. Like you said, I think it’s usually pretty clear when the creator of the Thing has any genuine empathy towards the characters they’re representing or not. That really emboldened me into writing about a lot of things that I originally worried might come off as insensitive or offensive if I messed them up. I have gotten increasingly positive reception from friends and randoms alike the more heavily that I have leaned into writing “risky”.

(edit for clarification: taking the risk =/= going in uninformed of course :P)

(decided i have more to say lol)

It made me really happy to read that you felt so passionate about your work for the jam in the process of making it. I always have such an endless, ravenous need to create and create and create, always working on projects and becoming utterly consumed by them (although some of that last bit might be a result of hyperfixation lol.) I think every artist needs to feel that way about something they’re making every now and then, at the very least. It’s just so rewarding to be able to see those creations come to life. So knowing that the jam was able to instill these kinds of feelings in people is everything to me.

Super cool post!! I’m kinda busy this week, so I was gonna play all the entries next week. But, honestly, since the jam isn’t super big, and since Decker projects aren’t that long, I was thinking of doing some little shoutout about every project in the jam rather than picking a top five. We’ll see how that goes, I guess.

Either way, I’ve been so happy to see how much the jam has inspired everyone. ^_^

Hi! You can shoot me a friend request on Discord (username is treegravy) when you're ready to submit, and I'll generate a late submission link for you. As mentioned in this post I just made, I have also extended the late submissions deadline to two weeks instead of just one.

Hi guys!!! As you know, the main jam submission period has now concluded. Like I said in the rules, I am allowing late submissions. I have extended the deadline for late submissions to two weeks (now until 12am ET on June 30th).

If you want to submit late, you can add me on Discord when you’re ready to submit (my username is treegravy) and I will send you a late submission link. Additionally, if anyone wants to join, I have a tiny little server that I’m trying to curate as a chill hangout space for creatives; I originally created it as a spot where people could keep up with my own work, so there are channels related to that, but you don’t have to be particularly interested in my work at all to be welcome ^_^ Note that the server is SFW, and you must be 18 or older to join. https://discord.gg/8mqSGbrkQG

Thank you everyone for participating!! <333

**edit: Reminder that you must already be entered in the jam to be eligible for submitting late!!!

SOOOO ADORABUBBLE ROZE Your style looks so cool in Decker too :D

I’m so sorry for your loss :( Late submissions will be accepted too, and I was thinking of extending the deadline for late submissions to 2 weeks anyway, so you’ve still got some more time than just the end of the jam if you’re still wanting to try to finish something. But take care of yourself first!

Ooh I’ll have to make use of this badge then….I built it on Linux Mint X)

Apologies for the late reply! From how you described it, it still fits within the rules. When I wrote the part of the rules regarding edginess I was mainly referring to things that are WAY more offensive than this, like topics regarding extreme bigotry or something.

WOAHH This is super cool!!!

As of typing this, all I have left to do is draw the end card, finish coloring most of the cards, and design the game page, and then my entry is complete ^_^ So at some point within the next 24 hours it will likely be posted lol

Fun haircut hehehe…..I had a cut like this myself once and I think my hair’s a little too thick to really make it work but this character is rockin it

Another thing I have to add to this myself…..You don’t have to create a literary masterpiece or something for people to still enjoy it and have fun with it. Enthusiasm is enough, presenting some fun ideas to think about is enough, really X) And like Swanchime said as well, finishing projects is absolutely the best way to hone your craft. You will be able to learn from each one in some way or another.

Hehe thank you!! Also lol yes knowing myself I probably will make another one before the jam is over.

Another thing, tangentially related, I think it’s so cool that you’ve been so active in this little jam community forum! I definitely did not expect much activity to happen here but I have been pleasantly surprised :> …I’m so happy to know people have felt so engaged with and inspired by this jam!!

Looks so cool so far! Im actually. uh. Kind of already almost done with mine lmao (stuck at home with chronic illness atm so not much else to do :P) Here are some cards from it. It’s called “I Always Dream of Falling.”

the edits were me trying to fix the images being skewed omg

(youtuber voice) Hey guys. Tree Gravy Dot Itch Dot Eye Oh here. And today we’re gonna be talking about the Top 5 Things I Wish I Knew As A DECKER Noob:

1. When you have any drawing tools selected, you can press M on your keyboard to hide the menu bar at the top, so that you can actually see the whole canvas. You’re welcome.

2. You can remove the menu bar at the top of your deck when you finish it by going to File => Properties and then selecting Protect.

3. Make sure you lock any widgets you don’t want the viewer to be able to interact with! Select a widget (or multiple) and then go to Widgets => Locked. Locked widgets will have a little lock icon in the top right corner when selected. There’s no risk of people being able to permanently alter your game or something like that, it can just be confusing and/or immersion-breaking to accidentally double-click on something like a text field and then be prompted to edit it.

4. You can change the color palette by dragging and dropping a .hex file on top of the program window. Lospec is a great place to search for color palettes. Decker uses 16 colors in its palettes at a time. There are ways to bend the limitations a little bit, such as using different palettes per card. However, if you’re new to using Decker, I highly recommend just keeping it simple and committing to just one palette all the way through. Remember that the black-and-white screen tones can be used interchangably with colors as well.

4.5. You can create your own palettes by creating a new file on your computer and giving it the .hex extension (rather than .txt for example), then opening it in a text editor. Type in your 6-digit color hex codes (hex codes being e.g. #ffffff) without the # sign, creating a new line for each individual color. The darkest color of the palette will be interpreted as its “black”, and the lightest color will be interpreted as its “white”; you will see the colors of the entire program shift based on this when using different palettes.

4.5.5. If you try to use your custom palette in Decker and the window just goes solid black, then click and drag a working color palette onto the window, check to see where you made any mistakes in your file, then try again. You don’t need to “refresh” the color palette in between like this EVERY time you import a palette that turns out to be broken, only if its so broken that Decker is unable to interpret it and thusly just interprets every color as being #000000/black…because, well, in that case, you can’t see anything…

1. Decker has a good amount of extra resources available for you to use by default. I highly recommend looking through the decks in the Examples folder and checking it all out. There are a lot of them, but not all of them may end up being relevant to you. I still think it’s worth eventually getting to reading (or at the very least skimming) through all of them at some point or another just to see what’s inside. You might end up being pleasantly surprised by what you find in an Examples deck that you had initially written off as useless to you.

Thabjs for watchinfg. Make suere you smash thaf liek button and

(Also, if anyone else has any tips of their own to add on to this, feel free!)

Hehe I do go for the alienation and dehumanization angle too. And how isolation especially can have such dire effects on the psyche. In the context of my own work, I think portraying the depths of misery that can come from being isolated by the scars of trauma just makes it feel way more special and important that the characters end up finding solace in each other’s company. I started writing to try to give myself hope in dark times, so I specifically wanted to show characters that have gone through (or even still go through) some pretty horrible stuff still managing to find their own happiness.

(edited to fix typo)

May she rest in peace with lots of treats….. :( <3

OOO nice ^_^ I will check these ones out!

Yea, most of the stories i write currently are about the characters in their high school years. Adair is at this point in the story’s timeline closeted nonbinary (AFAB). As for the aro thing, while not being understood for it quite as well by most people they know, they are definitely understood in this way by Ximun and a couple of their other shared friends.

I like to write about more intimate sorts of relationships that are non-traditional in nature. Mostly framed as very deep friendships, yes, such as in Adair and Ximun’s case, but also sometimes i like to write some alternate sorts of romances. So as a result Adair isnt even the only aspec character, I write a lot of them and a lot of different kinds of them. I would say Ximun also is aspec, though he primarily considers himself to be bi.

The magical setting involves everyone being born with magic blood types. So like instead of A, AB, O, etc. the blood types are magic and have special properties. Adair has the rarest one, which is astronomically more rare than all the others and makes them 1 in half a million. The magic in this setting is very weak however, I like to focus more on magic in more mundane everyday settings.

OMG this sounds so awesome lol. Very excited to read…..As much as I loved Count Kagura i admittedly still havent read your other works quite yet so I’ll have to get on that….. ;>

Im going to be writing about my characters Adair and Ximun (as I often do.) I have a lot of big plans for rewriting the origin story of their friendship that I had made last year, and I wanted my jam entry to be a sort of concept idea for the new prologue to that.

Against their will, Adair is always super popular no matter where they go. They were born with an extremely rare power that constantly broadcasts itself to those around them by emitting this huge aura of magic. Basically like a neon sign over their head that says “I AM SPECIAL”. Around the time this story takes place they have begun to fall into a deep depression. They obsessively mask nearly every aspect of themself to try to avoid any negative attention, but also to try to dissuade others from wanting to actually get to know them.

Meanwhile, the most notoriety Ximun carries with him is simply a little bit of a reputation among his fellow track kids for how erratic his behavior can be (he is plural). But then he similarly ends up getting shoved into the spotlight, albeit temporarily and to a lesser degree, for a significant athletic achievement.

Adair and Ximun meet as a result of their similar situations bringing them together. They become fascinated with each other almost instantly. In my original version of this story, Adair is really the one doing the heavy-lifting for their friendship in the beginning, but in my new version things are a lot more balanced between them right away.

I like to make it to where everything about their relationship seems really romantic from the outside, even though neither of them see it this way at all (Adair is even specifically aromantic.) It amuses me. I would say that nowadays my idea of their relationship is very QPP-like. That term doesn’t even exist yet when they become friends though…..lol

Hi! I’m so happy to see everyone’s looking forward to the jam!! :D I have experience just making visual novels with Decker, and I plan to make something related to the same larger storyline that all my works take place in. I wish everyone luck with their projects!! ^_^ I’m so excited to see what everyone makes.

Full creative liberty for now! Although, if I ever host another one, then there will probably be a theme ^_^

aw ^_^ im very happy u liked it so much…

TY OMG….i just woke up to see your chain of comments across my games….SO SWEET im so happy youve been enjoying the series!!!! T_T <33!!!!

Thanks for the shoutout!! :D I’ve become a really huge fan of Decker (…even though I’ve pretty much only ever used its absolute most basic possible features thus far) and I thought it would be an awesome software to host a VN jam around, particularly since it’s so accessible and easy to use!

Ok thanks! I actually hadnt heard of heckmaybe before this jam so I was wondering :o

I havent seen any indications of when the stream will be showing all the entries and i really dont want to miss it…..

TYSM!! ^_^ hehe. Also yes thats a good idea about adding the note to the DL instructions. I was thinking also i might try creating an entirely new Ren’Py project and re-importing everything just to see if that actually fixes it :o since there were also a couple of other technical oddities occuring while i was making the game initially. but until then I will add a note to the DL (…and leave it there if reassembling the project still doesnt work OTL)

This is extremely helpful!!!! Thank you!!

The project I was wanting to submit to this jam DOES technically contain blatant misinformation, caused by characters misunderstanding their own conditions, BUT I already planned to include a disclaimer about this at the start of the game alongside its content warnings (saying that the game contains some potentially incorrect and/or outdated information regarding certain conditions). I figured it would be fine so long as I included the disclaimer, though I still wanted to ask just in case this would be an issue.

Exactly what i needed!!! Lifesaver! Thank you so much!!!

Ive been trying to figure out how to do this for hours now, looking through Decker’s documentation, through the code in the dialog.deck module, experimenting with trying to write the code myself, and so on, but I have just for the life of me not been able to figure out how to do this one very simple thing (my coding experience is not with any language that has any similar syntax to Lil….) I want to be able to draw colored text on a (potentially also colored) static canvas, like how the dialog module allows you to do with fcolor and bcolor, to make what appears to be a field but with colored text. That’s all. I want there also to be able to be multiple like this that can co-exist at once, so simply importing the dd module did not work for my use case (or, at least, i couldn’t get it to work for this use case trying on my own.)

SOOOOO CUTE!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I dont actually remember from what song my introduction to the Meikas was (i think also 1 2 Fanclub) but I will always remember this Meika Mikoto MACARON cover https://youtube.com/watch?v=q_vvjvoOh9A

TY!! :D I definitely highly recommend it….suuuuper easy to get started and just generally fun to work with

TEEHEE ty roze ^_^

AWWW tysm!!!!!!!!!!! :DD hehehe

AW tysm!!! and hehe yes it is a series….but reading in order isnt required. Entries arent even released in order. lol. so i TRY to write them all with the idea that any of em could be someone’s first read. but the entries Do build upon each other in a timeline order/in general ^_^