Dr. Bitsy-Love, or: How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love Small Projects

Hmmm, I seem to remember having a blog... whatever happened to-

Oh.  Oops.

Yeah, to say the least it's been a minute or so since my last post.  But, hey, I've been doing lots of stuff and accumulating things to write about and share so why not hop back into my bloggin' shoes and talk about what's up?

Let's start with the journey I took in making several games using Bitsy.

What's Bitsy?

Bitsy is a deceptively simple browser tool used to make deceptively simple browser games.  Just about anyone could pick it up and make a small game and just about anyone can play the games made with it.

It was developed by Adam Le Doux a while back and he's been supporting it and the consequential Bitsy community since.  A community which, I must say, has been putting out games at a rapid pace for the past couple of years.

It's important to note that Bitsy is an incredibly (intentionally) limited suite of tools for creating browser-based exploratory narratives.  As a developer you are equipped with:

1. A single player character (or "avatar") with a single 2-frame animation
2. As many background and wall tiles as you want (which share a 2-color palette) which each can have 2 frames of animation
3. As many NPCs as you want, who share the same 2-color palette with the player character, who stand stationary as walls playing a 2-frame animation and create dialogue boxes when acted upon
4. As many inventory items as you want, which are similar to NPCs but are collected when bumped into

And that's just about it.  You can also create multiple 16x16 tile "rooms" with "exit" tiles which switch rooms and move the player character.

I stumbled on Bitsy while feeling a little down-and-out as a developer and was looking for some game jams to participate in.  When I discovered a Bitsy jam, I opted to attempt to participate, having an affinity for limited devtools, but quickly found that my ambition was more than a little bit unrealistic and my submission for the gamejam was never completed.

Not to be discouraged by the initial failure, I decided to go all-in on Bitsy and learn just how I could unearth potential buried in such a simple set of tools.

1. Operation: Labrat

Not my first (or even my second or third) idea for a game made in Bitsy was Operation: Labrat.  The concept of this one was simple: I would create a very simple set of rooms in an underground laboratory and then force the player to traverse many wacky multiverse iterations of that same setting, with differing colors and themed NPCs signifying differing universes.

This concept was 100% built around what Bitsy was good at at the time: duplicating rooms, simple environments, reassigning new palettes to similar environments, and quickly creating simple NPCs with simple dialogue.

Despite that this is the first Bitsy game that I made, and the fact that it's a bit over one year old now, it remains one of my favorite game narratives I've ever written.  There's something about surreal sci-fi adventures that just really tickle me.

It's important, I think, to mention where I was at mentally at this point in time.  I had been recently let go from a well paying job that kept me well taken care of and was 7 months employed at an Amazon "fulfillment center" which was a... less than an optimal job for me.  A lot of my attempts at development had either become overly ambitious failures or released as small-scaled score building browser games.

I yearned to make something with scale and impact; and despite Bitsy's low resolution and capabilities, Operation: Labrat had hit a lot of the marks for what I wanted to make.

So I made another Bitsy game.

2. Pμcman

Pμcman (pronounced "P'mook-man") was an experimental game to say the least.  While Operation: Labrat was a concept designed to explore reiterations until it reached its natural conclusion, Pμcman was a concept designed to grow exponentially until I either completely ran out of ideas or felt that the game started overstaying its welcome.  As a result, the game is (for a Bitsy game) massive.

I had become somewhat sadly accustomed to the idea of failure and ennui at Amazon, where expectations are often set higher than most employees can reasonably reach.  I felt directionless, trapped in a dead end job, and often surrounded by people who felt similarly condemned and wouldn't even put up much of a facade to hide this fact.

Most of the writing and scenes in this one were written off the cuff with little in the way of a real plan behind them, including the accidentally fitting and existentially horrifying ending.  I was just doing what came natural with this one, almost like doodling to let off steam, and the end result is kind of a perfect time capsule for where I was at mentally and emotionally in October of 2017.

3. Thank You For Everything

There's not all that much to say about Thank You For Everything that it doesn't explain itself ingame.

After reflecting on how Pμcman helped me to deal with a lot of the ennui I was feeling at the time, I decided to make a game that would be some kind of a deliberate reservoir to hold a lot of frustration I was feeling revolving around some friends I had fallen out with following their transformations into becoming drug addicts.  I dishonestly said on the game page that the stories were entirely fiction (in fact, the only thing fabricated about the stories are the names of the characters), but I guess I didn't want for the events being so personal for me to get in the way of people hearing and understanding the events of what went down.  Basically, I didn't want for the tragedy of the situation to be overshadowed by people pitying me for the part I played in it.

4. Bric-a-Brac Shop

Bric-a-Brac Shop was the first Bitsy game that I completed for a Bitsy game jam, and it took me just under 6 hours.  By this point I was getting really good reception on my previous Bitsy games and was riding somewhat high on the thought that I was pushing the Bitsy engine in interesting ways, as though I were some kind of Bitsy pioneer.  Admittedly, some of it was kind of going to my head, and I kept wanting to outdo myself with newer and more interesting ideas.

To that end, I grabbed an old Game Maker Studio project I had previously thrown together in the hopes that I might create a script which would convert images to Bitsy scenes so I could create a visual novel styled haunted house game in it (which was scrapped due to how many screens and tiles it would require to create a project of the size I had envisioned).

Regardless, this ended up being a big project of pure exhibition of how much of a show-off I can be when I come up with a neat development trick, and the community was supportive and receptive to the ideas I brought to the table.  It was a success, and I felt a lot of accomplishment in my first Bitsy jam entry.

5. Diplomat Simulator

There's a strange phenomenon that permeates through many forms of art, and Bitsy games are no different: sometimes a quick piece that you create with no ambition on a whim becomes one of your most popular pieces.  Such was the case with Diplomat Simulator.

This was created with a very similar conceptual premise to Operation: Labrat, where a simple environment is revisited repeatedly with iterative changes, only this time the environment changes to reflect the changing state of the world as you play as a diplomat passing notes between two rulers of their respective powerful nations.

It's hard to place this one in relation to my state of mind at the time it was made since it really was just made the instant the idea for it popped into my head.  It may have taken 3-4 hours to complete from start to finish and ends on a rather silly note to defuse how dark it becomes (especially given the political climate surrounding the time I made this).

6. A Midnight Star

My second jam entry was A Midnight Star, which I also made in a very brief amount of time shortly after coming up with the concept.

By this point in time my employment at Amazon had really begun taking its toll and I felt demoralized, exhausted, stuck, unhappy, and frankly kind of fatalistic.

When I saw the theme of the jam was "Midnight" I immediately tapped into an aesthetic I often dream about but have trouble representing in art.  It's an aesthetic that gives me great feelings of nostalgia and whimsy, so I wanted to explore it and take a stab at it, if not to adequately convey those feelings then to at least immerse myself in something that brings me joy.

My life situation bled in, however, and my improvisational storytelling ended up crafting the tale of a star who becomes irreparably separated from their home who must then find a place to live among mortals.

While written in language which makes it seem like this will be an exciting new adventure for the star, a lot of the melancholic fatalism of the star's fate bled through.  While the game, its aesthetic, and its story were received well it stands as one of my least favorite of my Bitsy games.

7. Detective Gumball: Murder Mystery

In February of 2018, my attitude toward my job at Amazon had shifted from one of frustration and dread to one of solemn acceptance.  I was frequently at odds with the HR department over a leave of absence which I had to take after being too sick to drive to work after working through one of the worst flu seasons in years.  I felt unwelcome at work and repeated attempts to resubmit paperwork which the HR department frequently conveniently lost so they couldn't let me into the building made it hard for me to keep caring without suffering some kind of psychotic break.  Many of the negative feelings I had during my work on A Midnight Star had subsided to make way for a numbness of emotion.

As such, I could put aside my negative feelings to focus on again attempting an ambitious exploration of Bitsy's abilities with the Bitsy Jam entry Detective Gumball: Murder Mystery.

This game was somewhat inspired by the way that I have no idea how to play the board game Clue.  I decided to make a bit of a joke by framing the game as one where the player must collect evidence to determine who committed the murder, when in fact whomever you accuse at the end will turn out to have been the culprit.

Using the inventory item feature in Bitsy I made it so the confrontation with any of the accused suspects would change depending on which clues you gathered on your way through the mansion.  It played out almost like a video game version of a madlib detective tale, and in the end I was very happy with the results.

8. Welcome Archaeology Enthusiast

In late March of 2018 I was let go from Amazon unceremoniously and without being given a reason.

Absolutely everything in my life was suddenly thrown into question.  Would I be able to continue paying rent?  Would I be able to find a new job having been fired from Amazon?  How do I contextualize myself when so much of my time had been consumed by giving all of my energy and thought to an abusive company for over a year?

At the same time, there was an archaeology themed Bitsy Jam underway.

What resulted was by far the most bizarre Bitsy game I've developed.

Welcome Archaeology Enthusiast is the type of game that is pissed off that it exists so it decides to take nothing about itself seriously.  From the very first NPC the player encounters completely bashing the concept of archaeology to the lack of any actual archaeology being present in the game to a secret character who insists that archaeology doesn't actually exist, this was almost more of my attempt to push the good will of the jam curators by seeing just how loosely they would enforce adherence to a theme.

This is also hot off a discovery I made that, by editing a Bitsy game's raw data, you can give any animation ingame more than 2 frames of animation (as demonstrated in this tiny exhibition game I made).  Oh boy, I sure did take advantage of that when creating the surreal, abstract landscape in which these equally surreal characters live.

This is one of the Bitsy games that I'm most proud of, not even being sure I could revisit it as I'm afraid I may mess too much with the winning formula if I were to do so.  I highly recommend that anybody reading this check it out.

9. Raining Cats and Dogs

By April of 2018 I was unemployed and able to sink a lot of time into game development, which also meant that I had a lot of time to sink into making Bitsy projects.  When a Bitsy Jam came along with the theme of Cats and Dogs, I decided it was time to sink some real time in creating a worthwhile traditional narrative.

Thus, we have Raining Cats and Dogs.

This was a bizarrely cathartic Bitsy project, as it was rare that I would sit down and just create a fully fledged story with motivated characters just to play it out in an interactive story format like this.  There wasn't even very much that I did that was experimental, aside from some geometrically designed dialogue portions which combine the dialogue trick from Detective Gumball with some of the geometric art style of Welcome Archaeology Enthusiast.

Raining Cats and Dogs remains one of my best received Bitsy games, and probably for good reason.  It's one of the few Bitsy games where I pulled my head out of my ass long enough to create good content over exhibitions of scope or innovation.  In the end what I created was something that I think successfully created an emotional reaction from the playing audience, and that's something I'll always consider a success.

10. Sinking Treasures

When June rolled around I was looking at getting evicted, despite having a good lead on finding work.  It was tough, because I had been working on gamedev projects that I didn't want to just abandon because of monetary issues.

Around this time another Bitsy Jam had come up and I decided to participate by creating Sinking Treausres.

Sinking Treasures is a game about a deep sea diver who has partnered up with a sea captain to hunt treasure, despite that the diver cares far more about sketching the fish and chasing this feeling he once had while having a dream about giant sea creatures.  The dream he describes, of course, is a recurring dream of my own, and that drive to express specific complex feelings in a way that others would understand is a big part of what I want to do with my own drawings and my games.  So, obviously I would try to express that by having a player experience it firsthand as the diver.

To give the game that melancholic and bittersweet attitude that I'd grown to enjoy injecting into my narratives, the game ends with a decision that the player must make: either leave the sketches behind so he can carry the treasure to the surface, or return empty-handed but keep the sketchbook.  Neither option is necessarily the "good" or "bad" ending, though one of the endings carries with it a bit more closure and finality.  In a way, this and Thank You For Everything are my two most personal Bitsy games, since they speak so directly and honestly from my own perspective.

11. Where Do I Fit?

A few months later I was moved back in with my parents and had started my new job as a group home counselor.  Over this time I would join Bitsy jams but never submit anything as I didn't have the time to finish anything.  I'd work long nights and spend a lot of my time wondering what I was doing with my time.  Most of my coworkers were either criminal justice majors or en route to become healthcare professionals.  I'm a computers guy, but I was working in children's mental health.

I felt out of place.  Not only that, but before this job I was working as a stower at Amazon, and before that I was leading a team of writers at a behavioral health agency.  What the hell was I doing?

Amidst these feelings I started a new Bitsy project on my laptop and was done in 2 hours.

And so was born Where Do I Fit?

Where Do I Fit? is the antithesis of every Bitsy game I had created prior.  While most of my games aimed to create something deceptively complex by pushing the limits of what Bitsy should be able to do, Where Do I Fit? aimed to push the boundaries of how deceptively simple a game could be.  The graphics were simple, the story and character motivation were simple, the language used was simple, and the gags throughout (while complex behind the scenes) were simple visual gags.

Fitting with my identity crisis at the time, the game revolves around the frustration of having an identity crisis and the theme of a lack of satisfaction follows through even to the ending.

This is another one of the Bitsy games that was pretty universally lauded, and it's since made me reconsider what it means to create a meaningful game which connects with people.

Throughout my time making games for Bitsy I kept trying to push the boundaries and create something that's more than the sum of its parts, but the real winners of the lot were usually the ones which embraced their simplicity and tried to do little more than tell an emotional story.

I think that I learned a lot from using Bitsy over the course of a year of using it.  I have plans to make a handful more Bitsy games, and should be contributing to a group project by sometime in February.  While I haven't had that much time to develop games, Bitsy has always been a good tool for creating something that means a lot with the little resources I have.

All of the games I mentioned here are free to play at my Itch page, along with several other free games I've developed.  As for Bitsy: I hope all of you check it out if you have even a single expressive or artistic bone in your body.

Want to help me keep making free games?  Try checking out my art shop and buying some cool merchandise with my characters and designs on it.  It helps me stay alive long enough to make stuff!