Week 5 - Bitsy game - A walk through the river valley

It's the end of week 5, and I indeed made a bitsy game, A walk through the river valley.

Bitsy is a fantastic tool to make small, minimalistic, lo-fi experiences where you walk around and talk to people. It can be used to make old-school adventure games, where you collect items and try to find uses for them, or games where you just interact with the environment to piece together a story, as in my game.

It's very simple to use, it provides enough constraints to force you to focus on the story you are telling instead of visuals, but also it's open enough that you don't really feel limited in the type of story you can tell. There's absolutely zero programming (unless you count inserting some tags into text as programming), and even a non-artist such as yours truly can make some 8x8 1-bit sprites that look at least passable. Normally I find no-code game making tools very cumbersome and I'd rather write code than drag blocks around and fiddle with menus, but Bitsy has none of that. It's so simple and focused that you don't really need any code or blocks to drag. You just draw objects, place them and write text for interactions.

What also surprised me was that the online editor is responsive, and it actually is a viable option to make a game using nothing but a phone. It's a first for me. Construct 3 advertises itself as mobile-friendly, but its mobile interface is horrible, and it's absolutely proprietary anyway. MicroStudio could theoretically work, but it's a nightmare on a small screen, unless it's a tablet, but even then you need a keyboard or you'll go crazy in five minutes. Godot web editor specifically states that it doesn't work on mobile. Bitsy, on the other hand, is pretty, sleek, and works very well on my tiny 4.7 inch Safari. And since you don't need to write any code, the only time you need to type is when writing dialogue, and so it's bearable.

I've also learned that I really like making this type of games - short, narrative-driven adventures where you just explore and interact with the environment. I especially enjoyed writing all the dialogue (or monologue in this case), the game touches on the pretty heavy subject of having ambivalent and outright dark feelings about parenthood, but it was incredibly cathartic to just get this out of my system. It was also extremely fast to put this together. I've had very limited time this week, and I still managed to upload it on Saturday, while usually it takes me until Sunday evening to get something going. Neat!

This is definitely not my last Bitsy game. The editor is has its quirks, but it's a joy to use, and I really enjoy the games that it can make.