Thriftgirl was my first time working with Decker by Internet Janitor, an engine for HyperCard-like games. It's a wonderful free tool behind hundreds of games on here.

This post goes over some thoughts and tricks. It's not quite a tutorial so there's one linked below!

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Quick links

• Documentation (+tutorial)
• Extra modules
• Decker game jams
• Open source images
• GIMP image editor (+tutorials)
• Color palettes (+palette importer)

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Micro-engines

Decker sits alongside other micro-engines like Bitsy, Twine, and Videotome.

Though you can always bend them with mods, each has a distinct visual identity* and language of player interaction.

Bitsy's got (mostly) 2-color palettes and arrow key movement. Twine's got a text heavy interface with interactive links. Videotome strips down visual novel engines like Ren'Py.

I love Decker's twist of dithered black-and-white visuals, clickable buttons/images to move between "cards", and chunky pixel fonts. It's easy to import an image, see it crunched-up, and immediately feel out what's next. Its Button and Contraption Widgets also allow for customizable retro GUIs.

The heavy limitations mean almost anything you put in will be visually coherent (not just in your game, but with other Decker games).

More directly than the engines above, you can import images and sketch over them within Decker, shifting the workflow closer to making a scrapbook or collage! Electric Zine Maker also does this well. Working in both feels playful in itself!

*Em Reed's 2019 Game Art Engines Talk and communistsister's Stuff I thought about when making Videotome are great. They made me rethink what to look for in engines and the indie scenes around them.

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Dechniques

preprocess in GIMP

Decker automatically converts imported images to black-and-white and dithers them. This sometimes looks too grainy (especially on photographs). You can use Photo Editors like GIMP to "flatten" image colors so Decker's dither is more consistent. It's like cooking - sometimes we'll peel veggies so they fry better.

Some effects I tried:

• Increasing Saturation/Contrast/Brightness/Exposure (exaggerates light/dark areas)
• Threshold (flattens all pixels to Black or White)
• Posterize (reduces to smaller range of colors, works great at 2-5)

This depends on how much you want to flatten in the original image. A simple threshold worked for the anime screenshots, since there's very little random shading.

You can use Decker's Pencil to clean up any ugly artefacts left once you import!

twine-style links
I'm very used to Twine-style interactions, where a part of the text is underlined and links to a new passage. The easiest way to move between cards in Decker is through Button Widgets, which I used for the final linear section.

For most of the links in Thriftgirl, I did this instead:

1. Make an empty Field Widget
2. Go to (Tool -> Interact) and click on the Field
3. Type in text directly
4. Highlight text to link
5. Go to (Text -> Link)**
6. Type in the name of another Card***
7. Go to (Widgets -> Locked) so players can't edit the Field like you just did

**This is also how you can change Fonts within a Field. It won't be within the Field's Widget properties, since different parts of text within one Field can have different Fonts.

***You can put full internet URLs here too!

inverting

Select any area in Decker and visit (Edit -> Invert, Flip, Rotate). Sometimes an inverted image is more striking! Flip and Rotate are great for creating room to then place text in.

Widgets can also be inverted or made transparent (very handy for invisible buttons that go over an image or text).

palette changes

I changed Thriftgirl's palette using the command line (Decker -> Listener). Since this also affects the palette used to render the editor itself, I wouldn't recommend it! I'll use the Deckstamp contraption for future projects.

creative fill

Decker's Flood tool is great (it's like MS Paint's Fill). Selecting it (Tool -> Flood) will open up a Style toolbar (Style -> Stroke) with cool patterns, including four animated patterns. Make sure you change the Stroke though, the Fill pattern is for the inside of the Filled Box and Filled Oval tools.

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I can't wait to try more with Decker. Contraptions and scripting might open up other interactions. Players could "vandalize" pieces through the Canvas and Field Widgets.

If you've played Thriftgirl, you can guess how I feel about 2025 so far (terrified), but the unexpected response and all the other artists I've found from it have been a bright spot. Keep making stuff. And thank you for reading!