I made a game!

This year, I decided to try out something new: making video games. Truthfully, this is a project I had long dreamed of taking on ever since I was young and loved point-and-click adventure games. It’s just not a dream that I had ever taken seriously.

And then 2020 happened, and so many aspects of my life changed. Since my family and I started spending a whole lot more (read: basically all) of our time at home, I had more time for creative projects. Old priorities weren’t as relevant anymore, and this made room for me to take on new things.

Writing Stories with Multiple Endings

Also, something fun had happened in August 2020: I wrote an entire book as a gift for someone close to me, and within the book were four stories where the reader could choose their path and ultimately end up at an ending of their choosing. While many of the games I play don’t have the option for multiple endings, I realized that’s what I wanted to do: create games where I could tell stories that let the player determine what happens next, and ultimately, how the story ends (at least from a selection of endings I’ve pre-written into the game).

My Bitsy Game: Still Processing

What you’ll find with my first released game is that it’s quite simple. In short, Still Processing is a video game about grief. You can’t choose your path in this one. You can’t do much of anything except walk through the game and have a story told to you. In a way, it’s not much of a game at all. Still, I’m happy with how it turned out.

(Side note: sometimes I think about going back to change things in Still Processing. But there’s no real point. If I go back to change it, it’s no longer a ‘simple game I made in 4-5 hours.’ It’s no longer a little one-day experiment in game development. Going back to change little things here and there changes the entire thing fundamentally, and I’m not into the idea of that. Instead, I think it’s more important to accept it as how it is. What I’ve learned about creative work is there’s always something you can go back and change. But should you? In most cases, no. In most cases, it’s best to move onto the next project and not get caught up in the older ones.)

It’s not the first game I’ve been working on, and it’s not the last. One morning when I planned to do other work, I found myself browsing Itch and learned about a simple game development tool called Bitsy. Itch users were building short, simple games in Bitsy and uploading them to Itch—all without needing to learn to code. (As a side note, the other games I’m building currently are 1) using Unity and Fungus, and 2) using GB Studio.)

Why Bitsy?

Bitsy caught my eye for its simplicity. The character can’t look like much, there are only so many pixels allowed and animating the character doesn’t seem to be an option. The color palette is limited to three colors (and I chose some wild ones).

Once I found Bitsy, I knew I had to make a game in it, no matter how simple. When I started making my game, Still Processing, I knew I wanted to have it done within the day. I didn’t want to prolong the experiment of crafting a game in Bitsy. I didn’t want to get in my own way. I wanted to make the thing, finish the thing, publish the thing.

And so I did. It took me 4-5 hours to fully build the game pixel by pixel, adding a narrative, and I like how it came out. If you want to play, you can do so on itch.io (it’s an HTML5 game so you can play directly in your browser) and it’ll take you 5 minutes or less to play.

Isn’t it amazing how something can take 5 hours to create but only takes 5 minutes to consume? :)

Here are a few screenshots from the game:

Thanks for playing!

xx
Katie