Bitsy Pieces
Bitsy is a tiny, in browser game engine that enforces very strict restrictions on the gameplay and graphical fidelity of its games. 8 pixels per sprite, 2 colors per scene, games where you walk around and talk to people. I find it hugely inspiring; Limitation Breeds Creativity and such. I use Bitsy to train my Level design, Narrative design, and Visual Clarity skills.
The Bitsy community has been very good to me, and my Bitsy games have been some of my most popular.
In the summer of 2018 two of my projects were showcased in a Gallery Show at Babycastles in New York City, along with several other Bitsy and Flatgame Devs. The games were:
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12:44 AM, a very personal narrative game about parties
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Har Azazel, a reinterpretation of a bizarre bible story
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My most recent Bitsy game is my largest, and also happens to be my most popular. It was, for a period, The Top Game on Itch under the tag and got a nice little review from Indie Games Plus.
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The main theme of the game is miscommunication, and the town is designed to be both a coherent city as well as convey a larger secret message with it's architecture when viewed as a whole.
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It was a fun challenge to get the level design to make sense as a believable space, and make sure all layers of the narrative had value on their own.
Another nice thing about Bitsy is that it's Open Source, meaning if you ever get sick of some of it's restrictions you can hack them out!
Because the community is so small, I think I've been The First or one of the first to do a few interesting things in the engine:
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Vertically Adaptive music (with only a single line of code added)
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use ambiguous loading zones for pseudo-randomness
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Have shadows for characters
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