Devlogs in the jam community area? That’s an excellent idea! I want to participate. On the other hand, it’s halfway through the jam period, and all I’ve got is vague character bios and a backstory that might not make it to the game! I’m sure this is fine.

Developer: Acin

Themes: found family, identity, culture clashes, living in a forest (because I will squeeze every story into one if I can), queer history, late 19th Century US military

Blurb:

Lieutenant Reneau lacks a certain confidence on what to do with the feared Corpsetalker sent to his camp. The ungodly consultant’s arrival is complicated by the soldiers’ whispers of “Do not suffer a sorcerer to live”. Upon their meeting, Reneau is not entirely convinced the Corpsetalker is alive….

He is about to learn how choices are not made easy around this stranger.

(Sorry, it isn’t clear, but these two are potential lovers, depending on the choices made. (And either way will fit in with “Spirit of the Latch”.))

Word Count: 2300/?????

Sprites: 0/3? One has character sprites I can use as a base for his younger form. The other I’ve had an mental image for a while, which is actually rare for me. We’ll find out if I can apply that to a drawing.

Backgrounds: :whistles-innocently: Look, I’ll find references eventually. In time, maybe. Everyone enjoys vague color blotches in the meantime, don’t they?

Audio: Uh… yeah, the timing is not fun. My preferred source for sound effects is undergoing a big discussion on “AI” labels, and I’m not really in the mood to listen to old recordings of military marches. …so maybe I’ll recruit help to sing old folk songs and record more sfx than what I’ve stored.

GUI: I’ll build something. Believe it or not, this is one of my favorite parts of game design. A few unpublished games have helped me better understanding screens and effects in the interface; that might help here.

Logo: This is one of the last pieces I put together. It might be the very last, uploaded minutes before the deadline if my past jam history is an accurate pattern.

Title: TBD. Above is a “working title” as a placeholder.

Sprites update: I’ve started on the main characters. Ash looks adorable with shorter hair.

Reneau is currently darker and has more rectangular features than intended, in my attempt to make the mixed-race character too pale. He’s supposed to be passably White, but I made the mistake of grabbing a deep shadow on a historic figure drawing of uniforms and going with it until I stopped to compare him with Ash’s sprite. Oops.

His skin is a pretty brown in this version, however. I might start over without a reference and squeeze in a background character using the misdraft.

A half-formed plan for the game artwork is to scarcely use it. The GUI can set up the scenery, the character sprites can be worked in to look less like dolls in theater and more like book illustrations.

The characters are bookish, as in bibliophiles. That illustrated prose style could suit them.

Speaking of suits, the US Army uniforms of the time are kind of funny. There’s a distinctive look to 19th Century cavalry, evil and creepy in view of the massively cruel crimes against humanity committed in the real history of the time; yet edging up to 1900, the Army overall was trying to figure out how French it wanted officers to look. Sashes? Badges? Medals? Tassels? Stripes? Functional or decorative hats? How important is underwear? Especially as I’m not intending to stick entirely to history, this gives me leeway to play around with what looks good to me on the characters.

Music: Good news. Popular love and comedy songs that originated in the late 1800s were recorded in the early 1900s and preserved by the US Library of Congress. My search for music to use in “Spirit of the Latch” was overly restrictive, because I didn’t have a list of titles to search up.

I’m removing the backstory from the word count for as long as that’s my reference, not a part of the game.

Word Count: 1k for the opening scene.

Sprites: Maybe halfway through drawing full bodies for the main characters. Additional expressions later?

Only the the head and shoulders might be visible, most of the time, but even if I don’t do much else, I would like a reference for character graphics.

GUI: This has been sketched out on paper. I’ve decided to use my photos of historical sites and rural public spaces as art assets.

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.

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.

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.

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….

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.

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.

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.

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.

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: 8.6k, not counting an optional sex scene of 1.5k words.

This will be over 10k words, the longest of my completed writing projects published when it is released.

My regular prose novels (>50k words) were only ever partly shared. “Spirit of the Latch” is 5k words.

We have only a few days remaining to the jam deadline.

Character sprites and backgrounds are in flux. Because three major scenes haven’t been completed, I’m holding off on some decisions for the visuals.

What I draw in preparation for the scene is different than what comes out of a scene. I can’t fully realize things visually and need to feel out the setting and characterizations through their interactions to understand the details.

If somehow you’ve been hanging around me and my publications online to have witnessed covers art and illustrations I’ve made for my own stories not matching colors or shapes as depicted in the story: that’s part of what went wrong. I worked on the graphics without referencing the narrative carefully. The other part is that illustrations sometimes need to portray a concept more than they needs to be accurate to the story narrative.

Plus, sometimes, the pictures are both wrong and correct at the same time. Seriously don’t read all of “Little Red’s Hoodie” if you aren’t into subversive literature or are currently struggling with the over-prevalence of horrible bi antagonists, but the closing lines are an explanation of why the cover art doesn’t match the opening lines.

My point is I worry about these mismatches.

So far, nine character sprites are in use. I’m estimating there will be ten, with three additional variants of the main characters replacing two side sprites that I might write out.

There might be two fullscreen character graphics. I’m not sure I can include them next week.

All the backgrounds need finishing. I wish I had help picking through source materials for reference, but that’s my own fault doing this solo.

Someone (remaining anonymous) has made an animatic for a logo screen for me that I might develop when feeling mentally worn out from seeing an excess of the same script and characters. (Jumping around tricks my mind into relaxing.)

Today’s clearest goal is to create a temporary cover icon and project description to avoid working entirely on those on the last day.

The jam submissions period has ended. My project is not there.

I misremembered the time for the deadline after pushing too hard to reach a submittable project. At this point, I’m relieved. The exhaustion or food poisoning or whatever it was that hit me was not fun, but whatever I would have uploaded yesterday would have been a mess.

The narration hadn’t fulfilled some promises made on this page. It needs more scenes to hold together the plot and better scene transitions through the entire story for smoother emotional transitions.

Some illustrations are rough, which would be okay for an “Incomplete” submission. That doesn’t bother me when other developers put out games with suggestive art that will be repainted or polished later. But missing chunks of a Mystery story that’s supposed to have strong relationship development? Oh, no, that doesn’t work.

A demo might work out.

I didn’t start preparing a demo until after the deadline.

The main rough draft is at 9.7k words. That’s not counting the 1.5k sex scene mentioned previously. The total word count might end up between 14k and 20k. I’ll have a better sense for total word count when I’m healed up some.

Estimated completion is end of September, assuming it doesn’t need another month for workshopping with sensitivity readers.

Everyone on my side is getting pulled into multiple direction because of medical emergencies, job searching / new employment, back to school (and the resulting illnesses because too many administrations consider that unavoidable), etc. That meant none of the playtesters I was hoping for are available. Maybe this month, September, will be less dramatic in real life?

There are events I’m hoping to be in decent enough condition to attend. (Sure would be great if more people wore respirators and planned for safer air quality either way! Less stress in planning! Fewer events cancelled! Less brain fog all around!) Anyhow, the reason is there’s a chance of talking to drag queens, Native American elders, swamper descendants, railroad historians, and forestry experts to better lean into the historical and cultural themes.

Am I taking research for this project too seriously? Almost certainly and definitely not. What’s the point of historical fiction if it’s not an excuse to find out what other people know of history, hm?

Anyhow, work on “Camp” continues. A demo will go up this week. That might be available tonight if my husband can poke at it for 20 minutes to catch typos or any GUI wonkiness that I’ve missed.

Congratulations on reading or scrolling this far. Have some draft illustrations.

The demo for “Camp” is finally up.

https://falsfiction.itch.io/spirit-of-the-camp

By the way, I’ve been meaning to say something since first reading this game jam page.

It’s okay to leave X-Twitter. There are many reasons to escape.