hello!! I recently participated in ghost masquerade 7. while I did write a small afterword for that event, I wanted to expand more on my blog about my inspirations and planning for my masquerade entry, as well as what I learned from the experience…
for those unaware, ghost masquerade is an annual event where ukagaka developers submit new ukagaka under pseudonyms, and then the general public is given time to play the submitted ukagaka and speculate on what developer submitted what.
ever since ghost masquerade...5? I wanted to participate in the event. for ghost masquerade 6 I had a really lofty idea that I didn’t end up finishing… I would like to return to the concept for that ukagaka at some point, but they were shelved after masquerade 6 finished. I did want to come back to them for ghost masquerade 7, but I greatly underestimated how busy and tired I would feel during march-april, when I was working a part time job. as such, I didn’t work on that ukagaka concept at all. I was going to give up on participating in ghost masquerade for another year, but I took a second look at the freeshells I had downloaded and my eyes caught on the “one sheep” freeshell made by asaka-san. an idea for a small ghost came to me, and I started drafting dialogue for them, with the intention of finishing the ghost in about a week, since I was only starting about two weeks away from the deadline, and I wanted to leave extra time for my entry to be checked since I was writing my dialogue in english and the event organizer only spoke japanese.
I initially thought about writing my ukagaka in satori, a shiori (read: ukagaka programming language) that is suitable for writing dialogue, but another ukagaka dev (zichqec) brought up aosora. aosora is a very new shiori that is based on satori and javascript, and doesn’t rely on characters only found on japanese keyboards like satori. I ended up trying out aosora for my masquerade ghost since I thought it would help obscure my entry (being that I had only published ghosts in YAYA before, and used satori only for the dark pot event). it was a bit tricky to figure out, especially because I wasn’t starting from a template like I do with my YAYA ghosts. I studied the code of hoard of shinies very closely to figure out how to do basic things like change the talk rate and repeat dialogue. I still ended up with a major bug where dialogue that occurs natural (not through the menu) isn’t able to be repeated, but I fixed it for the post-masquerade release. right now, the code in my masquerade entry is very sloppy since I was on a tight timeframe, so don’t look too closely at it…
the name “midnight sheep” was something I came up with spontaneously, and it stuck since I couldn’t think of anything better. I didn’t have it directly in the ghost, but I did write down a mini bio for the ghost in order to keep track of facts about the ukagaka. the character in the ukagaka is named “leone”, and they are a senior in high school, around 17-18 years old. they use they/them pronouns. they have two moms, an older sister who is in college (josephine), and a younger sibling (the user). they are an insomniac and lactose intolerant. the premise of the ukagaka is that the user has woken up in the middle of the night and encounters leone, who is similarly unable to sleep… in my previous “serious writing” ukagaka, lunar leporidae, I gave the user a general role (scout to earth) and wrote dialogue that would reveal little inconsequential things about the user, like an aversion to turkey bacon. I took a similar stance with midnight sheep, where I gave the user a general role as “younger sibling” and then used dialogue to reveal little facts about the user in the world. I don’t like writing a very solid persona for the user, be that gender or personality, but I think shaping the user’s character through tiny traits is fun… although for midnight sheep, I did have an age in mind for the user (12-13). this was because I wrote some dialogue about the user having their horns grow in and the growing pains associated with that, and I imagined that as being part of puberty for the sheepfolk that exist in midnight sheep’s world. I did like writing the sibling relationship between leone and the user; it’s not something I get to write often with my other preexisting original characters.
I didn’t develop the general world of midnight sheep that much during the ukagaka development period. generally, midnight sheep exists in a world where humans with animal characteristics are common enough that there are specialized products and programs geared towards them. I wrote it kind of on a whim, but a lot of japanese users commented on the line where leone laments not having a specialized pillow for sleeping on their side with ram horns… I depict my internet persona with ram horns, so I have thought a decent amount about how that would affect things like wearing hats and sleeping on their side, haha. I envisioned the pillow leone was referring to as being shaped like a neck pillow, where the ram horns would have a hole in the center to rest in, but some japanese users brought up box pillows from the edo period (that were designed to prevent elaborate hairstyles from being crushed while sleeping) as what they thought it was. I thought that was a really interesting little cultural snippet.
plans for the future… I found out after submitting midnight sheep that asaka-san actually has a second sheep person freeshell with a similar theme to the one I used. in my mind, that other freeshell is josephine, and I am tossing around the idea of having a random chance for josephine to be there when you boot midnight sheep up… that opens up opportunities for more conversations that don’t just have to be directly at the user. I do want to write more for midnight sheep in the future, as well as add in some of the bits of polish I usually do with my ukagaka (menu theming, custom ico), but I am a bit tired of looking at aosora (and to a lesser extent, programming languages for ukagaka in general) so if I end up writing more for them, it will be a while until I implement it. at the very least there is a download for them available that has update functionality.
other small trivia things: the thumbnail for midnight sheep uses a font that is actually one of my friend’s handwriting! decomake collaborated with me on a previous ukagaka, so it’s like they indirectly contributed to midnight sheep in a way…
my pseudonym for the event was “gregarious crab”. on a very old and defunct tumblr blog I used to run with a couple other people, I was mod “GC” after my tumblr handle at the time (which I will not be repeating here. respectfully). I almost went with “grotesque crab”, but wondered if that would be a bit too strange… gregarious is another fun word though.
overall I am really happy I was able to participate in ghost masquerade this year as a developer! I definitely would like to plan out a bigger ukagaka for next year’s event… I think as I continue to partake in these small focused ukagaka events my planning methods get better and better….
you can download midnight sheep on my github.