Made a little Bitsy game

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!)