Thanks for the feedback! And for keeping Bitsy and the Bitsy jams going. Bitsy / Mosi was the first game engine I've really stuck with, so you have my gratitude.
This is incredible, honestly. Beautiful artwork, interesting little puzzles, some great humour. Even just the turning of the phone is so simple, yet so clever.
This was great! Really enjoyed this. I agree with Raven, the choice of colours was very strong. The jumping to different tracks at the screen shake was a fun gameplay idea too.
What a sweet game. I was very impressed you to took into account all the different routes you could take. I don't think I saw any text that looked out of place, and I enjoyed them adding context and guidance to the other routes.
There were a lot of really nice bits of writing, particularly watching the horror movie in the bar. That certainly resonated with me and felt quite real :)
Very sweet! I thought the writing was very cute. Just a nice, wholesome game.
It probably wasn't the vibe you were going for, but I did wonder if it'd be funny to have different dialogue at the end for the pieces you viewed. Or in my case on the second run, not seeing anything :)
I was interested in how it all worked, so I copied the code from the HTML into Bitsy and saw the sheer size of some of those dialogue options. It was lagging for me as well just opening it, so have no idea how you managed to keep it all together and working smoothly :)
In hindsight, I think I was focused on the refugee quest due to them sadly coming in the news so often recently. I have a Ukrainian friend here in the UK who brought her family over last year, and I've been watching the news about Palestine recently also. It's been on my mind a lot, and the idea of those kind of people just trying to survive in a peace-time space for art, with art pieces depicting people just like them, was a powerful one to me.
Ultimately though, it was a game jam with limited time and think you should be really proud of the randomisation aspects. I think the quests are more of an 'icing on the top' really. I had been wondering if the game was related to how you experienced the war, as I had played your other games set in Ukraine around then. Thank you for sharing that.
Beautiful art work, again! I'm always jealous playing your games as everything fits together so neatly.
I read through the posts with Mandy and agree with you in regards to randomisation vs the plots in the game. I was very intrigued by the refugees quest, and particularly the concept of people suffering right next to art inspired by that suffering (and critics still being more interested in the art), and to be honest I was a little disappointed there wasn't a 'bigger' thematic resolution to it.
HOWEVER, the randomisation aspect did feel the main aspect of this game and it's superb. The fact that this game works so smoothly with how much is in it incredibly impressive. You definitely nailed that feeling of walking around an endless, confusing art space. All while still in vanilla Bitsy!? Great work.
My initial plan was to go from human, to Giraffe and then to T-Rex, but I ran out of time. And with how long it took you and others to make the giraffe, maybe it was a good thing :)
I didn't even think about restarting the room from fresh, but that makes sense. And yes, after finishing it I did realise you would be unable to reset the ones in the middle annoyingly. For some reason I thought I needed to have the sprites where you place the bones be 'walls', but I have just turned them into regular sprites now and it seems to work fine. At some point though, I would quite like to make a 'undo' button though I think it might be quite a coding challenge.
And yeah, Mosi doesn't seem to have a 'Game Restart' option like Bitsy does, which is one of the very few complaints I have of it. I would have to code it to reset all the sprites manually, I think, which was too much of a faff to bother with at the time.
Thank you for the feedback! I was planning on just moving onto the next game, though with everyone commenting I feel like I should keep adding to it. I saw you made something for Bitsy Fest too and will play it soon!
Thank you for writing this up, and thank you for the kind words about my game! There was a few rough edges to it that I didn't have time to smooth out, but overall I was really happy with it and I'm glad you enjoyed it.
I agree that it has been a great jam. It's produced an incredible showcase for what Bitsy can do. Some of the sprite work was gorgeous, lots of the writing was very touching. Thank you to everyone who produced something!
Thank you for this. I've started my own therapy recently and a lot of this resonated with me. It really is hard work sometimes, isn't it. You'd think you'd just want to be happy.
I'm glad Bitsy has matured enough to get to it's weird art game phase too. I appreciated the little 'anti-gameplay' bits and how they told their stories. Some of the text effects you managed to create are incredible.
Love the art direction for this. The colours really compliment each other and everything looks very charming. The rounded edges are a really nice touch too.
Yes, it seems you weren't the only one to run into that problem. I may add an undo button to try and help with it, though it will take some time coding. I've added in a re-do button after the giraffe too, as I forgot to add it.
As Mosi / Bitsy doesn't really give you button presses, I don't think there's a way for me to code it where you could work from the inside-out as you need a wall to hit. I don't think there's another way to do it, so I will try and make it a bit easier to fix mistakes at least.
I seem to just have forgotten to add in the line of code that places the re/undo function after the giraffe. Have added it back in now, thank you.
And yes, have thought about adding an 'undo' feature even while building the skeleton. It will be possible, though coding wise will be quite fiddly. If I add it in at all I'd want it to allow the player to undo each bone placement in turn, so will have to save them in order, where to put them back to, etc etc.
I do want the game to encourage people to make weird skeletons, and wonder if an undo button would encourage people to make it correctly and take it 'too' seriously. Though another comment said they made a weird one by accident while trying to assemble it correctly, which I realise must be annoying also!
No, I don't think default Bitsy could handle it though I have been surprised by people's ingenuity using it before. There is a 'morph avatar' function by the looks of it, but I assume you'd also need to make an ending for each place you put the bone..? It could get very convoluted. You could probably do it with the Borksy hack 'edit room from dialog' function I think.
I would definitely recommend Mosi if you want to do more scripting intentsive things with Bitsy. I've tried Bipsi a few times, but I find Mosi very easy to use. It has a very good documentation too.
As for the outcomes, there is a 'good' and 'bad' outcome, depending on how anatomically correct you are. Though it's mainly only the dialogue at the end.
And yes, thank you for pointing that out about the human bones. In a rush to finish it in time I didn't playtest enough. After playing around my skeleton ended up with two pelvis' so clearly something is wrong. I will fix these issues and think updating it with the other comment's inputs too.
The other commentors also ran into problems, so just want to thank you again for playing despite the issues!
Very cute :) The art is really nice too. The outside of the house looks great and the kitchen appliances look spot on.
For the black screens in the dialogue, is it the text glitching, or do you have empty spaces in the Dialogue bit inside of Bitsy? Sometimes those boxes appear like that for me when there is a bit of empty space. Particularly if I'm writing code for the dialogue and not using the editor.
Yes, I was happy I could get that working too. That uses an 'invisible avatar' hack from Borksy for those rooms, and then the 'Edit Room' hack to move the cat around, etc.
Will keep working on it! Glad I could get the general idea down in time to close the Jam at least.
It's always great to see people pushing Bitsy to new types of genre and gameplay. I really enjoyed this! Such a innovative idea and presented in a great way.
I really like the art as well, particularly the parts where you dropping down through the caverns alone. It felt very atomspheric.
