“I played a few other games from the Bitsy Moth Jam,” she says.
She was drawn in by Bitsy’s distinctive art style, created as a byproduct of the engines constraints. The lowered stakes meant it was perfect for testing out ideas, making short mood pieces or expressing personal stories.Ĭlaire Morley was one of these designers. Game makers found that the editor's simplicity meant that they could make compelling games over a couple of evenings. “Normally, tweeting about a side project is like shouting into the void.”īitsy took off. He put it online, posted it on Twitter and figured that would be the end of it. It used an early version of Bitsy, which required everything to be typed into a text file that was then loaded into the engine.Īdam created the web app version of the editor when Mary-Margaret and a few friends said they wanted to make their own games using it. “I made my first game about coming home to my apartment after work and finding my wife, Mary-Margaret, already napping on the couch and our cat begging for a snack,” says Adam. It’s an engine built on constraint, restricting you to 8x8 pixel tiles and a three colour palette. He created Bitsy as a simple engine that doesn’t require coding knowledge to create something within it. Games like that gave me confidence that those ingredients - a place and its inhabitants - were enough to make something interesting.” “I've always loved walking around and talking to everyone to learn about their personal problems or the history of the town. He was inspired by his favourite spaces in games - towns in 2D RPGs like Zelda, Pokemon and Final Fantasy, and walking simulators like Gone Home.
I wanted to be able to immediately work on the heart of what I was trying to create: a world with a story.” “Naturally, the solution was to build a new game engine from scratch! I wanted to stop worrying about programming details, screen resolutions, platform differences, post-processing effects. “Bitsy came from my own frustrations with trying to finish a game,” says Adam Le Doux, Bitsy’s creator.
Its simplicity hides a surprising depth, one that has drawn in a community of game makers. It lets you create small pixel-art rooms that players can explore by interacting with the people and objects within them. On the surface Bitsy is an unassuming engine. Since its release, more than 600 games have been made using the tool by 300 different authors. A year ago Bitsy released on itch.io - a humble game making tool described by its creator as a "little editor for little games or worlds".