ALT-Engine Micro game jam

What is Bitsy?

This "tiny" engine was made by Adam Le Doux who writes:

hi! 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.

What are we doing today?

By the end of class, we'd have made a Bitsy game in groups of 2-3 and (hopefully) also do a class presentation of our projects! The time limit is part of the game jam challenge ✨

Schedule

Prompt

Generate your bitsy game ideas with the following sentence:

a (noun) is wandering in (a place). upon (arriving at / encountering) (a specific location / object / person in the place), a story about (a topic) unfolds.

We’ll return to this in a moment. But first how do you do things in bitsy?

Intro to Bitsy

Here's our Tutorial Notes: Bitsy Workshop

Let's brainstorm some ideas!

You’ve gotten a quick taste of the engine, so let’s come up with some ideas!

1. Grab a paper.

2. Write a version of this sentence with the parenthesis filled in with your own ideas:

   a (noun) is wandering in (a place). upon (arriving at / encountering) (a specific location / object / person in the place), a story about (a topic) unfolds.

3. When you’re done. Put your paper on the designated idea table.

Let's put it to a vote!

Each person gets Three votes

Read through the ideas. Place a sticker on your favorite ones.

We’ll take the top 4-5 ideas and write them on the board!

Let's get into groups!

• Three people max.
• Workshop the idea, make a sketch, storyboard, plan what you’ll make (remember that your game can be small)
• Divide up the work if needed. (writing, drawing, sounds, bitsy assembly)
  • Have a "developer" work on the core interactions of your game using placeholder interactable objects and rooms.
    This person would implement the dialogs, variable actions, and exit/endings of the game; and eventually compile the finalised assets made by other team members.
    
    There could be multiple developers working on different parts of the game -- remember to plan ahead for how certain variable data should be labelled to avoid conflicts when merging.
  • Have only ONE (1) person working on room and tile designs.
    Merging room and tile data can get especially tedious, because you'll find yourself needing to re-index a bunch of tile assets...
    
    Other game asset data like sprites, avatars, items, and audio are comparatively easier to compile from multiple sources.
• Make sure to add an ending somewhere in your project!

Notes on collaborating across multiple devices

Behind the scenes, bitsy is just storing everything as text.

Take a look at the “Game Data” tool. If you scroll around (or search for names), you’ll be able to find the data connected with your sprite / room / color palette

You can copy and paste things from one game data file to another.

If you’ve decided to use any hacks or plugins this might be a bit more tricky.

... THE MOMENT YOU'VE ALL BEEN WAITING FOR!

Some course reminders

• Homeplay Response 2 is due next Tuesday.
• Project 3 Proposal is due next Thursday.