#bitsygame

This is my bitsy game I made using the Bitsy Game Maker by Adam Ledoux via itch.io. Bitsy is a little editor for little games or worlds. The goal is to make it easy to make games where you can walk around and talk to people and be somewhere.

My game is item collection based. Players go from room to room collecting diamonds which lead them to a key that unlock where the Queen is being kept in chains by the King. Along the way, you discover more about their marriage and how they got to this point.

When making this game, my focus was to trying tell a story but later I wanted to incorporate an element of fun so I decided to be open minded and add more rooms. This gave room for exploration as the game is set in a castle to be stuck in one room wouldn’t make sense. I initially didn’t understand how to use tiles and items correctly and so my design was very basic and objects which I didn’t want to be collected were collectable. However, with small research i.e. playing other people’s Bitsy games I overcame this. I was then able to make use of the exit tool allowing for users to go back and forth through rooms if they wished. I also added a conditional whereby when a set number of diamonds were collected a message would appear. My best discovery was that I could make certain tiles walls and that each tile didn’t have all have to look the same.

For this piece of work, we were tasked with creating a game using the online software “bitsy” that had to evoke thoughts of vintage games, however this is due to the limitations of the software. Bitsy uses an 8X8 pixel grid that allows the user to paint into it creating the player avatar, tiles (To be used as scenery/walls) sprites and items, but with only this sized grid it was immediately very challenging to create anything that appealed to me, however with a bit of time and creativity I have created a game that I feel gives the impression of old Gameboy games, such as the legend of Zelda, purely off the art style. However, there is another challenge to overcome when using bitsy and that is you can only have two frames of animation per asset, so simple movements were required.

My game (Into the Mine) is a very simple adventure game where the player is required to find an item and return it home, with a bit of exploration and challenge, as there is something else in the mine. However, we were also set a time frame in which our games must be completed by, three minutes, so I was unable to create huge amounts of rooms and paths for the player to explore, so I had to keep everything concise a focused, however regardless of these limitations I feel as though my end product is a very charming game with a great art style. If I were able to have had unlimited time using this software and creating my piece I would have gone much further with it, adding extra items, characters and locations.

 Bitsy runs off of HTML in a user’s browser, and allows a creator to change certain aspects of it, however I am not proficient enough with the language to create any real differences, however I was able to add background music, which really adds to the atmosphere of the game whilst still keeping in with the retro feel.