Bitsy is Easy, Creativity Are Hard
Game Development as Creative and Difficult
According to Creativeskillset.org game designers will need to perform in many roles and a diversity of tasks. Among these are:
- communicating vision to artists, programmers, producers
- being imaginative and creative
- possessing some programming skills
- possessing storytelling and narrative development skills
- able to think systematically and strategically
If we take in these five sets of skills alone, we recognize the importance of game design as a process. It involves creativity, difficulty, and fulfillment. Creativeskillset.org states:
“[Game designers] plan and define all the elements of a game: its setting; structure; rules; story flow; characters; the objects, props, vehicles, and devices available to the characters; interface design; and modes of play. Once the game is devised, the Game Designer communicates this to the rest of the development team who create the art assets and computer code that allow the game to be played.”
That’s a ton to juggle, and if you are designing a game of your own it’s inevitable you’ll experience burn out during the process described above. That’s where a tool like Bitsy comes in.
What is Bitsy
Bitsy is self-described as
“a little editor for little games or worlds.”
It is a beginner-friendly game engine that allows you to create simple rooms to explore and characters to interact with. It includes a simple pixel art editor and several ways to create events and interactions. There are many game engines out there that can do immensely more than Bitsy; Game Maker Studio, Unity, Unreal Engine, Scratch. So why did Adam Le Doux, Bitsy’s creator, make this game engine at all?
“Bitsy came from my own frustrations with trying to finish a game… I wanted to stop worrying about programming details, screen resolutions, platform differences, post-processing effects. I wanted to be able to immediately work on the heart of what I was trying to create: a world with a story.”
Adam Dixon from Rock, Paper, Shotgun points out that Bitsy’s success with game developers has been due to it’s simplicity. It allows game devs to:
“make compelling games over a couple of evenings. The lowered stakes [make it] perfect for testing out ideas, making short mood pieces or expressing personal stories.”
Here’s a great example of what you can experience with Bitsy!
How Can Bitsy Impact Your Development?
Poking around with Bitsy left me excited for two main reasons.
One, the constraints Bitsy provides forces us into a creative workout. Using the editor and it’s limited tool-set requires us to boil down new game ideas to their simplest parts and communicate them to players with no more than a few 8x8 pixel sprites.
Two, Bitsy acts as a kind of game development journal. Journalins is usually a process of letting ideas and emotions flow freely from mind to paper. In this case we can allow these same ideas and emotions to flow from mind to playable game.
Moving forward, consider using Bitsy from time to time, alleviate game dev burnout and push through the difficulties of the creative process with constraints that this game engine provides.