Trans Joy Jam - Devlog 01

I'm writing down some devlogs to keep track of my progress for the 2026 Trans Joy Jam. The jam officially started on February 6th, but my jam partner Ray and I started planning on the 3rd. I think the planning phase of jams is extremely important especially if you're a more structured thinker like me, or if your projects tend to grow out of scope very quickly.

Tying down scope

We both knew we wanted some kind of writing, a comic or a short story.  I suggested a kinetic otome-inspired romance VN inspired by games like Cafe Enchante and Ayakashi: Romance Reborn since I have some knowledge of Ren'py but have never had a chance to actually put it into practice. Ray was happy to handle the art and co-write with me!

Due to the month long timeframe and the fact that this was both our first jam, we kept things extremely simple:

• Kinetic/Linear VN only with no branching paths - This is also beneficial for me since most of my experience with reading/playing VNs have been kinetic (Higurashi, Umineko, Ciconia, Z.A.T.O., HEARTLOVEPOWERTEMPLE)
• No complicated mechanics - While I thought about having some kind of relationship meter, I decided against it. We could always explore it in a sequel!
• 2 characters only, and 1 love interest - We both designed one character each and this made it easier.
• Limited palette - We'll be using a limited palette, specifically Night Rain by Maber from lospec. Limiting the palette will not only reduce decision fatigue for Ray, but will make creating a cohesive visual identity for the game much easier and will make photobashing the backgrounds less stressful.
• No artwork for the MC - While we did want to have artwork for the MC at first, we decided against it since it would be a lot of extra work for Ray, it would break immersion, and the MC is intended to be a player insert. Having room for player imagination would make it more accessible and trans-friendly!
• Artwork will use the same base but have changeable "faceplate" expressions - Using layered images in Renpy makes it extremely simple to make "sprite sheets", and this made things a lot less stressful for Ray.
• Selectable pronouns - We did want to have custom input pronouns, but I realized this would be very difficult since I have no idea how to work with renpy's GUI yet.  So I decided to try to at least have 5 selectable pronoun options.
• at least 4k-5k words - I've never written a VN before so I generally have no idea how long it takes for people to read one either...? Like a short one...? This word count is an estimate and I'm kind of expecting to write a lot less than this...If we can get to 2-2.5k I'll probably be satisfied even.

Progress this week

A lot of this week was extremely basic setup and planning, so most of the stuff I was messing around with was refreshing myself with some Renpy's most basic tutorials, how to play music, and learning how to use layered images. I'll also be using ellipsus for drafting with Ray and dimikira's sheetsToRenpy utility for exporting code and dialogue into Renpy!

Basic story outlining

I don't want to spoil too much of what Ray and I have in store, but we got the basic premise tied down! The most important parts for a short kinetic VN IMO are the beginning and the ending, and I want the ending to be kind of open-ended to allow for us to revisit this world in the future and for the players to sandbox as much as they want.

Customizing the GUI

I used a premade Fantasy GUI template by skolaztika and customized some elements of it. It was a little complicated, and I probably should've picked something simpler, but I was set on using this UI and I guess now I have to lie in this bed I have made.

I also made a mockup for the game's system tray icon which I think should be a wisp of foxfiresince the main love interest is a kitsune, learned how to edit the custom screens in Renpy, and change the main image on the title screen. All the assets here are temporary for now, and hopefully obviously they're all from Puyo Puyo.

Setting up custom pronouns

I used feniksdev's in depth pronouns for renpy and just looked at the code/documentation for it, though I'll need to experiment a little more since there are some pieces that aren't necessary for the project/beyond scope like custom input pronouns... I think considering how new I am to the engine though, we might stick to the preset list of pronouns...

Learning how to use layered images

The creator of HEARTLOVEPOWERTEMPLE wrote about layered images years ago in an ask and it intrigued me, but I never really knew what it was? I realized that they're basically sprite sheets and you can literally layer images on top of each other. Pretty self-explanatory honestly. This video and reading the documentation helped immensely, and I was able to get it working with some Puyo Puyo spritesheets as a test.

I can't really show it in an interesting way, but the code looks like this:

This code isn't very clean or efficient and I know there are ways to write cleaner code, but I'm just practicing okay?

And the images are arranged like this:

And calling the images/sprites in the actual story script looks like this:

Figuring this out was a massive breakthrough for me because to be honest: I kind of hate drawing lately, which is why I'm not doing very much of the art for this game jam.

Additionally, this makes the workflow for Ray a billion times easier since he doesn't have to draw a character multiple times and can just separate the facial expressions (eyes/nose/mouth/brows) from the base and I can group them automatically in the program.

Summary of this week

With planning and thinking time accounted for, I think I worked roughly 4.5 hours this week on the jam? I think I want to shoot for 6-7 hours per week if I can make the process more efficient, but this hasn't factored in writing time yet, which tends to take the longest for me to do.

My to-do for next week

• Get a draft done for the first half of the game
• Lock in a title?
• Get some placeholder assets in the game
• Name our characters (This is usually the first thing I do but I've never made a game before so I left it out for now).
• Figure out the key locations in the game and list them for Ray... I'll probably be editing and doing the image dithering though.
• Draft a logo?! I want to make it with pixel art maybe?