A while ago I tweeted about doing my own variant of NaNoWriMo, in which I would try to work on a Twine game and blog about it every day in the month of November. I have failed to do this on two accounts; firstly I’ve only just started, and secondly, I’m not even (currently) making a Twine game.
I’ve been thinking about making a Twine game for months. Possibly even years. Then I started using Bitsy instead.
Bitsy is another open source game-making tool. Unlike Twine, the emphasis isn’t on text and branching narrative, its the use of pixelated sprites to create a sense of place, space and abstract character. As creator Adam Le Doux puts it:
“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.”
Archaeology (at least in my experience) is often about really Being Somewhere for a short period of time. I want to make a game about my past experience as a commercial field archaeologist in London. It became apparent to me that Twine isn’t the best starting point for me to process that very spatially contingent experience. Clearly there are lots of ways to create a sense of place in a Twine game, but I want to prototype my idea in Bitsy first.
So this is where I’m at-animating sprite pigeons to look like they’re pecking at the ground.
I’ve decided to do this at my own pace and according to my own whims. Watch this space.
Florence Smith Nicholls 