My Decker Wrapped 2025

yeah yeah everyone loves to post things generated by various "platforms" about what they passively consumed over a year but fuck that I am writing my own thing about things I've actively created!

In 2025 I have made in Decker:

  • Nine zines
  • 6 itch games (and game-adjacent experiences)
  • 1 short musical animation
  • 1 transitions module
  • 1 helpful guide
  • and finally the interface and associated bits for one standalone raspberry pi-based dedicated Decker machine

So, the nine zines. This was made up of issues 25-30 of Zine of Millie, more than half of the third season including the dramatic finale, and then the first 3 issues of my new zine of millie EX project.

Looking over zine of Millie, the ones released this year are the vast majority of my post-cohost output. I think I'm still sitting with the legacy of a lot of this work in particular being heavily defined by my persona and identity on that platform, since aside from existing friends that's where I seem to have found most of my audience. So it's felt weird putting them out without a corresponding cohost post where people will be sharing and commenting and such, it's a lot more just casting it into the void. I kind of feel like the desire to keep doing something interesting with the format has been both a motivation and a bit of a curse. Like, I felt like I couldn't keep just putting out low-effort stuff, but making the high concept stuff every time was difficult and sometimes also stifling, like in terms of working out where to fit things. And so this sort of led up to the season finale (since my seasons are 10 issues each for whatever reason) where I ended up having some concluding finality vibes (by way of a lot of End of Evangelion references) and wrapping up at least somewhat some of my running bits. Sort of getting to a point where I felt I could end it there.

And then there's zine of Millie EX. Out less than a month after I "ended" my initial zine run. I think it feels a bit like a breath of fresh air, like I've shrugged off the baggage and now I'm free to do whatever I want. The only thing really carrying over is the "elsewhere in the Deckerverse" segment, which I sort of feel like is the one thing I really feel strongly about wanting to continue, since like us decker people need to boost each other up I think, and I love to give props to my friends' projects! But otherwise it's felt really fresh, like as a series it feels like it has a very different vibe from the original run. My main thought is it's more visual oriented, with a lot more pure art pieces included (I especially feel this worked really well in issue 2). Honestly I'm really glad how it's turning out, like it's distinct from the old so I'm free of that, and each feels unique but also consistent. I guess this is the different vibes of pink-haired Millie as compared to blonde Millie? (god I really need to get an IRL pink wig)

The itch projects. Mostly created for various jams, and there's been a few of those this year. In addition to the traditional twice-yearly official jams run by IJ, there's also been treegravy's Decker Visual Novel Jam, and SWANCHIME's pink decker jam. Plus a few projects I've just done on a whim, because if I wanna do something I can just do it.

So yeah, to start off with, early in the year I put out Ember in the wilderness, which sort of sprung from the whole joke about "oh disco elysium should be about a cosy witch in the woods", and I kind of wanted to give a different take on what a woods witch would be like. So it's unfortunately a bit tainted with cosy game discourse but I think it's good, and it feels very "just doing shit I want to" instead of worrying about if/how it makes sense "as a game".

Another standalone "just because" project was little wordless trans story, which was basically a little thing I threw together in about an hour or so, basically as an experiment with some different art styles. Honestly at the time I was sort of thinking "this really could just be a zine page" but for whatever reason I released it standalone and it got a weird amount of attention due to somehow ending up in itch's "fresh games" section. Really it's just a short little wordless story about an egg-cracking, haha.

Next we come to the things I've made for jams. For the Decker VN jam, I made A stopover on SQ-75, a little multi-ending VN about my Mixx the Jump Jockey character, who shows up every so often in the original 30 issues of zine of Millie. And I say "little" but it was complicated enough that it took some time and required some keeping track of the different paths. It turned out pretty good though. It's kind of my most "pure" VN, since otherwise I've tended more towards the point and click adventure style.

For the pink decker jam I made Janky Pink Dance, a short little looping animation synced up to a Jankytunes soundtrack. I've seen a few people experiment with using Jankytunes themselves a bit, but generally not with the sort of high-energy upbeat music that I think is particularly suited to its limited chiptuney powers, so that's why I made this. It wasn't too big a project but it's fun.

For Decker Fantasy Camp 2025 I made project.deck, which I guess is sort of a video essay of sorts, in which I discuss in voiceover some of my feelings at the time about how my zinemaking was going, with accompanying illustrations. Really it was an experiment in doing a voiced Decker project, but it very much tied into what I was going through at the time in terms of how I feel about my creative output. So a lot of it may relate to what I wrote above.

Those three jams were kinda all bunched up really close together, so honestly my burnout feelings may well have related to that. Huh.

Anyway, there's also the two projects I did for Deck Month 3. And they're both pretty small, at least in terms of amount of time taken if not file size. And both are essentially experiments. And still pretty fresh as I write this, so it's hard to be particularly reflective at this time so I will see what I can do

Select a friend is basically an experiment in making an FMV game in Decker, a platform that doesn't really have video playback support as such. But with a little effort and elbow grease, you can make it happen. As long as you don't mind your file sizes going absolutely wild. This is another one that got a weird amount of attention, I think favoured by the algorithm somehow. I am not sure what people who don't know Decker and its limitations are making of it, since like sort of inherently the gag is "you did this in Decker?" but oh well. Mostly I hope it serves as inspiration for other Decker people to pinch my technique and integrate FMV into their own works if they want.

The other project for this jam is a storybook called A nice anime date, where I return to a few characters from my first proper game from back in 2024, Get Out And Run Some Errands, in like kind of a book style formatting. Decker recently added some pageturning style animations as transitions, and they made me go "oh that would work nice as a book" hence I made this. I actually started it before Select a friend (although the concept for that came first) on a whim. Revisiting these characters was fun and honestly it's also good drawing practice, like trying to make my characters feel less stiff and have more body types going on and such.

Anyway, final two projects up on Itch. One is WackyWipes, which are some transitions that basically do a wipe covered up with an image. Mostly these were intended as something for people to steal and integrate their own images into, but I'm not sure anyone has yet. The other is How to install Decker on Linux, an instructional deck born out of a frustration where people keep going "oh no how do I run this on Linux, I guess I'll just run the Windows version through Wine" instead of compiling from source like a normal person. It's basically just repeating the instructions from the github about how to compile. It's weird to me that people are using linux and not already understanding how to do something like this, maybe that's good that more people are switching? But people should not be afraid of compiling from source or poking at their computer in other ways!

Anyway, final Decker project has been, well, the Deck Kiosk that I keep posting about here. It's a standalone raspberry-pi based computer in a cute little classic mac inspired enclosure, with the intent of being a dedicated Decker machine. And as of a few days ago, its menu interface is itself a Decker deck, that uses some Danger Zone features to launch other decks and shutdown the computer. Although there's a few tweaks still needed to the case, I think at least software-wise I'd say it's at version 1.0 now, with the Decker-based menu being essentially complete, although enhancements may come along. I have put the launcher deck up on github for others to poke at, but really this falls in to the category of "physical object" so I'm excited to see people try it out if/when they visit.

So yeah that's my 2025 in Decker. I have a few ideas for things to do in the future and I'm already working on issue 4 of EX, so we'll see what happens.

God it's a lot when I lay it all out like this, huh?