This post is about a month overdue. As compensation, I will waive the customary subscription fee to read it.

Every month, Blake Andrews hosts a 2-hour game jam at Brooklyn indie arcade / bar / awesome place Wonderville.

I attended as my first in-person game jam on April 12th, where we were jamming on Bitsy. With Bitsy's browser-based editor, a bunch of great learning materials, and Blake's thorough live intro, it was easy to dive in!

Jam themes are chosen by asking Wikipedia for a random page. In this case, it was Town of North Fremantle, an Australian municipality that became a "town" in July of 1961, only to be amalgamated into the city of Freemantle, across the river, in November of the same year.

I kind of fixated on the idea of civic bureaucracy, going through a political process, and finding out that it was a pointless exercise. So, I decided to make a little game about collecting and filing signatures.

While Bitsy is lovingly simple, I have very little game jam experience and few skills, so I reused a lot of the default game assets, as I worked to just figure out how things are wired up. The base engine can do some pretty fun and complex stuff, but I found it confusing to find some concepts in the base editor. For example, an "if / else" block for dialog is under "Lists" because it is a "Branching List". My programming background expectations misled me several times.

In the end, I made a little thing, and even got to demo it live along with about a half-dozen other folks there.

You can find my jam entry here: Civil at Last, on itch.io. (I have my own itch.io page, now!)

You can also play it right here!

You can find more details about the jam, and links to all the entries, at the 2 Hr Game Jam Club April 2025 page at itch.io.

Let me know if you play and enjoy the game! Can you find all two endings??