ahmwma
@ahmwma

I submitted something to the Decker jam, somehow, against all odds.

Link to the itch.io page

It's very small and it's probably a little laggy, depending on your browser, but it should still work okay on mobile.
3 points if you find eggbug.


ahmwma
@ahmwma

A couple more notes about how this was made.


On the left, my first sketch of the scene. The new underpaint mode is really helpful for figuring stuff out.

On the right, a copy of the main card-in-progress -- the Desk, Window, and wallpaper were mostly set up but I still had to decide what else needed to be drawn and how big each item would be. Because it was a copy of the main card I could scribble ideas on it, and then copy those scribbles into new blank cards to be refined into sprites/canvases.

Work in progress of an animation of a drawer opening
work in progress of an animation of a teacup and a cat
work in progress of an animation of a pocket watch
made with @nex3's grid generator
These are a few examples of what my sprite WIP cards look like (I had about 20 of these at the end)
  1. The first card with all the drawers has those 'in' and 'out' buttons so I could script the animation of the drawer opening with and without the pocket watch in it before bringing everything over to the main card. The tiny square at the top is the checkbox that the script checks to know which animation to play. Picking up the watch from the drawer changes the checkbox.
  2. The middle card had a few different attempts at the shelf design before I figured out the right size. The cat pieces are here. Uhhhh... I was very indecisive about the teacup animation so there's a lot of different versions of the frames cut up all over the place.
  3. The pocket watch has a idle animation when it's on it's little stand, and a sparkle plays if you click it when it's up there. But it also has it's "laying down on the desk" sprite and it's "being dragged around" sprite. Lots of yellow ovals. All the little boxes around the watches are to make sure each frame is the same size for the animation. The guidelines are erased before copying the frames into a canvas that will be the source for a zazz.flipbook animation.

This is the final Desker card in Widget mode. There are 101 widgets.

A pixel scene of a desk with many white rectangles all over it

There could have been a lot less than that. There's better ways to do the things I was doing but it was a case of Gotta Go Fast. And if I wasn't 100% sure how to do the better version of something... I did it in the worse way I already knew.

I've had a larger point-and-click decker project in progress for a long time now (It's not a good game but it's taught me a lot) so the ways I've been building things in this style feel very obvious to me at this point, though it might not be clear how it was made (in decker specifically) to someone new to it. It's mostly transparent canvases! Prepare your object sprite, select and copy, switch to widget mode, Edit > Paste as new Canvas. Change it's settings to borderless and transparent, probably, if that's what you want. And there you go.

And... yep. That's what I wanted to say. Okay bye. :eggbug-classic:


@redrevelry shared with:

You must log in to comment.

in reply to @ahmwma's post:

There's not actually much scripting or anything technical here, it's just moderate familiarity with the program and a lot of pixel art. (But I will take the compliment for the art! Thank you so much :eggbug:✨)

If you ever have any questions about how to do something that you want to do in Decker, feel free to ask! I'd love to help, and I think any other deckmaker would as well.

in reply to @ahmwma's post: