This article is for day 19 of the 伺か・伺的 [第1会場] Advent Calendar 2025 (Ukagaka/Ukagaka-like Advent Calendar 2025 [Venue no. 1]). Yesterday I wrote an article about the new forum we opened. Today I would like to summarize the activities in the Ukagaka Dream Team this year, as I have done for the past 2 years.
I promised in yesterday's article I would address this new website that currently has (almost) no styling. Previously, when I (Zichqec) write these articles, I have posted them on my personal website.
When I wrote articles before, I wasn't really sure where I should put them. Our wiki doesn't seem like a good place to put such an article, since anyone could change the contents. Our Tumblr blog would theoretically work, but I worried about things such as Tumblr not allowing visitors to read the full post contents without logging in. I had already been putting articles I wrote personally for the advent calendar on my website, and I opted to just keep writing articles there.
I've become less comfortable with that arrangement in the last year or two. We've been taking major steps to prop up the "Ukagaka Dream Team" as an independent concept, and as part of that, anything I write in an official capacity for the UDT should be very clearly separate from anything I write personally. So, from now on, posts on my personal blog will be for things I'm doing and running on my own, while any official business for the UDT will be handled here.
Additionally, we've been trying to get away from being tied to particular platforms. We've been aware for years that if something ever happened to our Discord server, we would lose a massive amount of information and it would effectively destroy us. The first step we took was to create a wiki, so that we could better organize our information in an independent place, and make it easy to find ghosts wherever they're scattered across the web. Second, we began hosting our events (such as Ghost Jam) outside of Discord, putting them up on our website for anyone to participate. And of course, yesterday we launched a new forum, our own space for talking about ukagaka.
The end result of these things is that we're running multiple sites in this domain! Combine that with me wanting to separate the UDT's blog posts from my personal ones, and it felt fitting to finally create a basic home page for the Ukagaka Dream Team to link everything up, and also move the old blog posts over here.
So why isn't there styling? ... I ran out of time this year! Hopefully next year I'll come up with something.
Translation endeavors have continued this year! The current ongoing project is a translation of the AYAYA wiki. So far it's still pretty early in the process, but a fair amount of the function list has been translated.
Another project that was completed this year was translations of Aosora's error messages and documentation. When I learned about Aosora and saw its potential, I asked if I could create translations for it. ななっち graciously allowed this, and so it is now available in English as well as Japanese. There are very few SHIORI which are readily available in English, much less with all of the materials available in English from the start, so I am excited to see what sort of impact it will have on our community! Thank you very much for involving us.
The SSP English translation also received an update! This was a more subtle change since most active users are familiar enough with SSP to operate it regardless. Hopefully it will help new users who are just starting out, though! Many thanks to Ponapalt for allowing me to work on this.
There have been multiple good developments on our wiki recently! Sometime early this year, I'm not exactly sure when, we got very far behind on creating new stub pages when a work was published. I would be sure to create a red link at the very least, indicating that a page was wanted so that we wouldn't forget about it, but without creating the actual page itself. I think this list eventually grew to 40 or more items long, and it was very intimidating to try to catch up on it.
That list seems to have drawn people though, because at one point, a few editors started to concentrate their efforts on it and work together. It was very exciting to see the list shrink each day, knowing that others were working towards the same goal! On November 16th, we reached that goal and cleared every single red link. Every link on the wiki now leads somewhere! There might not be much on those pages yet, but they at least have some basic details such as a work's date of release and where it can be downloaded.
After this success, we decided to try a new idea: wiki projects. The idea is that we set a shared goal with a clearly defined end that isn't too far out of reach. Then, we can work on it together, and hopefully recapture that cooperative spark! It's too early to say if this will end up working, but I'm excited to give it a try.
Additionally, we surpassed 1000 pages on the wiki this year! The page account is slightly inflated due to redirects, but not by a significant amount. That's a lot of articles!
Ghost Yaminabe-okawari (translated as Ghost Dark Pot (refill)) is an event hosted by netai98 where developers created dictionary files and submitted them without knowing what others were making, resulting in a chaotic ghost. This year, there were two entries from the English community!
It was very fun to see what each author submitted, and see the various styles and topics that were chosen. Thank you for letting us be a part of it!
Etc. Jam is an event run by the Ukagaka Dream Team where developers create ukagaka-related projects other than ghosts in a short period of time. It's a good opportunity to try out making balloons, calendar skins, freeshells, and more!
As promised last year, we moved Etc. Jam from the end of the year to the start of the year. This jam was held in March. We also moved it to our website, like we did with Ghost Jam last year, so anyone can participate!
This year we had a total of 23 entries by 12 participants. 8 balloons, 5 shells for existing ghosts, 6 freeshells, 3 calendar skins, and 1 guide.
Ghost Masquerade is an event hosted by あーるでぃー where developers submit works under pseudonyms, and then folks have to try and guess who made what. A few of us participated again this year, and it was a lot of fun!
We were also surprised to see multiple ghosts written in both Japanese and English, which made it easy for us to play with them too. It was a very kind gesture, thank you!
Ghost Jam is an event run by the Ukagaka Dream Team where developers create a brand new ghost within a week. The optional theme for this year's jam was bond.
This year, we decided to disallow premade assets which are only available within our Discord server. We also decided to require that all entries be submitted publicly, rather allowing them to be submitted through Discord alone.
These changes were a bit uncomfortable at first, since these things have been allowed for a long time in Ghost Jam. However, now that Ghost Jam is hosted outside of Discord, it didn't feel right to have special exceptions for folks who are in the Discord server. I think this was the right call, especially now that we have launched a forum. Whether you are a part of the Discord server, the forum, or neither, your experience with Ghost Jam should be the same!
This year there were 21 ghosts submitted by 22 participants. 6 of the ghosts were submitted within 72 hours or less, 13 were made with new assets only, and 2 also submitted a custom balloon made during the jam.
We were pleased to receive multiple entries in Japanese again this year. Thank you for joining us! And thank you to Don for maintaining the Japanese translations of the event materials that make it possible.
Aughost is an event hosted by myself personally, where I distribute 100 prompt words throughout the month of August, and developers are challenged to write new dialogue for their ghosts.
This year, I moved the event to my website, and you can see all the prompts on the Aughost 2025 page. I also created an Aughost Tumblr blog and began distributing the prompts there, since a fair amount of English developers use Tumblr.
It's a bit difficult to determine the success of this event, since several people may be following along without saying anything. I know at least a few people have said it was helpful though, so I plan to keep running it!
This event is for the ghost Hydrate, and is run by me personally. It is a drink reminder ghost, and developers create new shells for it, some of them very pretty, and others very silly! The "rule" is that a shell has to be a liquid or be able to contain liquid.
As with Aughost, I hosted this event from my website this year! I don't expect it will ever have that wide of an audience, but I didn't want it to stuck within Discord forever.
There were 12 entries this year by 10 participants, all creative and wonderful! They really make me smile to look at. This also means that Hydrate has now reached more than 100 shells, which I can hardly believe.
Idea Adoption Jam is an event hosted by Zdzisiu. It is similar to Ghost Jam, but with the added twist that you have to make a ghost based on an idea that someone else came up with.
This year there were 4 entries, and for the first time ever, 2 of the entries were based on the same idea! Two window ghosts were created, and they feel very different from each other despite their shared origin.
Needle Day isn't really a hosted event, it's just something that we do each year. On 11/11 (November 11th) Galla and I released an update to our ghost Needle as we do every year. This year, we brought it to a total of 1111 dialogues. This is less than we usually aim for, but we wanted to hit the number milestone.
We also released 11 new shells, and a further 3 shells were created by other developers. It's very silly, but somehow the community comes together to celebrate it each year, and it's very wholesome.
And that's everything! There was more this year than I remembered, I was honestly a bit surprised when I sat down to write this...
Our progress sometimes feels slow as we take small steps forward, but looking back at it like this, I can see that those small steps have taken us a long way. I look forward to what 2026 holds!
Tomorrow's article will by by 瑞樹ユラさん. Please look forward to it! Thank you for reading.