Advent Calendar 2023 - Summary of 2023 in the Ukagaka Dream Team

This article is for the 23rd day of the 伺か Advent Calendar 2023. Yesterday I wrote an article detailing the completion of the Ukagaka Dream Team's project to translate Ukadoc to English. Today's article will be about all of the various events and accomplishments by folks in the Ukagaka Dream Team community (English community).

A lot happened this year, so it will be a bit long! I've split this article up into a couple sections to make it easier to navigate. First will be the various events that were hosted this year, and then other accomplishments that happened throughout 2023.

Index

  1. Events
  2. Other accomplishments
  3. Conclusion

Events

Ghost Masquerade 5

Ghost Masquerade 5 is not an event hosted by the English community, it is run within the Japanese community. We've heard about it over the years, but this was the first year that a few of us asked if we could participate. And, we were kindly given the go-ahead!

Myself and Galla released a total of 3 ghosts for the event (out of 107 ghosts total), although there were a few hiccups along the way due to life circumstances at the time. But, we had a lot of fun participating, and were blown away by the response to our ghosts! We didn't realize how involved the guessing portion of the event was going to be, it was very exciting. We'd like to participate again next year if we're able.

A few other members of our community got involved with guessing the authors of the 3 English ghosts. And even though there were only 2 developers, we still managed to make it difficult to guess! Next year I'd like to make some guesses myself.

Ghost Jam 2023

In May, we hosted the 5th Ghost Jam, Ghost Jam 2023! It's an event where participants create a brand new ghost within one week. This year was the first year that we were able to provide rules in both English and Japanese, and we also saw entries in Satori and Kawari for the first time! This year's theme for the event was "rain".

All in all, 25 new ghosts were published as a part of the event, made by 31 different developers. A few of those ghosts were posted within 24 hours of the start of the event! That's a first for us, and it's exciting to see that our understanding of ghosts is reaching a point where projects can be completed so quickly.

Idea Adoption Jam

In June, one of our community members (Internet Teacup) hosted the Idea Adoption Jam. This was the first event of its kind. It is very similar to Ghost Jam, but with the added twist that the idea for the ghost you create must be adopted from someone else. So, you must create a ghost based on someone else's idea.

We have a thread in our Discord server where developers can share ideas that they think are cool, but that they know they'll never get around to making. This is where the ideas were adopted from; the event was intended to bring to life some of the cool ideas from that thread.

This was also the first event not hosted by our community's moderators! We hope to see more like it as our community grows, and people come up with new event ideas.

The event had a fair turnout for being the first event of its kind, and for being a more complicated idea than the normal Ghost Jam! 7 developers created a total of 8 ghosts. This event seems to have attracted more experienced developers, with all participants already having at least one released ghost.

8/20 Hydrate Shell Jam 2023

In August, I hosted the 8/20 Hydrate Shell Jam 2023. It is an event where shells are created for the ghost Hydrate, a simple drink reminder ghost.

This event's title is hard to explain across languages, I think. It is based on a complex joke. But suffice to say, "8/20" means "August 20th", which is jokingly referred to as "Hydrate day". The ghost Hydrate was released on this date, and now this event takes place every August 20th, and lasts for just 24 hours.

Hydrate itself is a very simple ghost, which just reminds the user to take a drink at the specified interval. It tracks various stats, but it's not very complicated. The default appearance of the ghost is a water bottle.

Over time, some additional shells were released that looked like different drinking vessels. Eventually this lead to the joke being that anything that could hold liquid would be considered a "valid" Hydrate shell. So, folks have taken to using it as a creative exercise, and a fun, small-scope project to do. Shells include everything from bottles and cups, to test tubes and canned food.

So, in this event, participants had 24 hours to make some kind of "drinking vessel" shell for the Hydrate ghost. This year, there were 9 participants, and 11 total shells.

Etc. Jam 2023

In September, we had Etc. Jam 2023, a brand new event. The purpose of the event was to make (almost) anything besides a ghost itself. Balloons, plugins, guides, etc.!

Our hope was to encourage devs to try new kinds of projects that they hadn't made before, in order to learn more about them. We also hoped to encourage some newer developers to try some smaller projects, to get their feet wet and show that ghost projects are within their grasp. Additionally, it helped to boost the number of community resources we have available, such as freeshells and balloons! It was a pretty ambitious event in its goals.

A lot of different things were made in this event. All in all there were 11 participants, and they submitted 27 entries (6 balloons, 9 shells for existing ghosts, 4 freeshells, 7 calendar skins, and 1 guide).

Needle Day

Needle Day isn't an organized event like the others, but multiple folks participated, so I think it warrants a mention. In Ghost Jam 2022, Galla and I created a ghost called Needle, which pokes other ghosts. For the past 2 years, we've given it a major content update on the date 11/11, November 11th.

We update it on 11/11 because the date looks "pointy", and is, in fact, the "pointiest date". This suits the aesthetic of the ghost, so we've chosen to use it as an update goal, and in 2022 we released 2 additional shells for it on that day.

This year, our plans were more ambitious, and we released a total of 11 new shells for the ghost on 11/11. 2 other members of our community were inspired by the sudden influx of shells, and made an additional 4 shells shortly after! So in total, 15 shells for Needle were released on (or shortly after) 11/11.

Other accomplishments

SSP Angel release

SSP Angel is a ghost made by myself and Ayakamtka, Galla, and Yuyudev. It acts as a guide ghost to SSP for English users, and answers a lot of basic usage questions, helps with troubleshooting, etc.

This ghost came out in March of this year, and I think it has been a major help in getting more English users on board. We still get all kinds of questions from new users, of course; we knew this wouldn't solve all of them. But it's been very useful to be able to point new users to this ghost, and answer mostly the odd questions that don't come up as often.

Several new users have told us that they've learned a lot from this ghost, and oftentimes they already have the ghost installed before we've even recommended it! I'm very happy to see that it's making some impact, and I hope that it will give new users in the future a solid foundation of SSP/ghost knowledge to work from.

Major wiki updates

Last year we released the Ukagaka Dream Team Wiki to the public. As you can see from the links in this article, we've been making extensive use of it. We've gotten a bit behind on the upkeep, what with so many events this year causing a flood of new pages that need to be written, but it's been very helpful for keeping track of everything.

We've been making various upgrades, including an overhaul of the Guides section (the rules around guides hosted on the wiki are now simplified), several improvements to our tagging system, and beginning to switch the timezone used for release dates from EST to UTC.

I don't remember all of the work that was done this year, but suffice to say that the wiki is alive and well, and has been very helpful for keeping track of the things people have made.

Wiki News Feed and Birthdays List

In addition to the above, there are a couple of new features on the wiki's front page that I think deserve a special mention.

First of all, we have a news feed now! This news feed is edited collaboratively (by some trusted editors, since it's a part of the front page and therefore a target for spam), and we list any new releases or updates that we see to ghosts/etc. within the English community. The news feed links to the page for that item, and the announcement of the release/update. This has really helped to make the activity of the English community more visible, especially to users that aren't a part of our Discord server.

In addition to this, there is also a "Birthdays" list. This lists the "birthday" of ghosts/etc., based on the date they were released. It is more of a list of "release anniversaries". Right now the list has a lot of days with no entries, but our hope is that it will fill out more over time, and be a fun way to discover older content, or reminisce about old projects.

Research into other SHIORI

The English community has primarily used YAYA or AYA for ghost development, as these SHIORI are well suited for creating ghosts in English. However, we've been curious about other options for years, and this year some serious research has been going into investigating other SHIORI.

In particular, Okuajub has been researching Kawari, and is working on a translation of its documentation. He also released MesoMeso, the first English Kawari template, and is working on a more fleshed-out middleware system in English to make it easier for folks who are not programmers to get into making ghosts.

As mentioned previously, this year's Ghost Jam had a ghost submitted in Kawari for the first time, and that was also done by Okuajub as a part of this research! Hopefully having more SHIORI at our disposal will become a useful tool, and make ghost development accessible for more developers in the future.

New templates released

We had a lot of new templates released this year! For the first time, ghost templates were released that broke away from the structure of the templates that the English community has tradiitonally used. This, I believe, has started to lead to ghosts with more varied structures and content.

Additionally, there were some templates made for other types, such as shells, balloons, and calendar skins. These were primarily made for the Etc. Jam, and to make it easier to quickly start developing projects of these types.

The following are the templates that were released in 2023:

This is a huge increase in the variety of templates available! I hope that it will lead to more and more experimentation, especially as we're coming to understand all the different pieces that make up ukagaka. We've already seen a lot of varied ghosts be made with the Simplicity Template, since it was released early on in the year.

Ukadoc English translation completed

As mentioned in yesterday's article, we've been hard at work on translating Ukadoc to English, and that project has finally reached completion! It will require ongoing maintenance, but the bulk of the work is now done, and English users can browse the document much more easily than before.

I think this will help us make huge strides towards demystifying ghost development, and mean that we'll see more ghosts released over the coming years, with greater understanding of the system as a whole. That means more possibilities to be explored! That's my hope, anyways.

Conclusion

This year has been an excellent one for the English community, and I think we're on a very good trajectory right now. Ghosts are becoming more widely understood, and ghost development is getting more and more accessible all the time. We're starting to develop more resources to aid the development process, and all the events throughout the year acted as motivation for people to come in and participate, and sometimes to try out ghost development for the first time.

I think the next few years will be exciting! I hope to bring more good news next year at this time.

Thank you for taking the time to read this article. Tomorrow's article will be handled by おもちよいち!