Words for Passing On: A Bitsy Dialogue
For this assignment, I was definitely struggling with ideation. I don't really like making games exactly, although I'm down for the occasional puzzle. I think I like the idea of the user trying to solve something, rather then win vs. lose. Initially, I was going to do something like a maze where the user has to follow a path on one side of the room based on a design in the other half of the room in order to get to the exit. This would utilize the wall-aspect of tiles, and the rooms would get more and more difficult as they player went on. However, I didn't like the process of making this and decided to scrap it altogether.
At this point, I was talking to Sana and she reminded me of the Zen Garden, Portland example. Sana said I could reformat my twine journey into a Bitsy game. I didn't end up doing exactly that, but this is when I got excited. Specifically Sana said something about "the graves of old loves" and I was like DING DING DING. So, I decided to make mourning "game" or, rather, a dialogue of things I'd never get to say to a person who is no longer in my life. There are four total areas of the cemetery: three areas of dialogue and one area for moving on. The player is a ghost in the graveyard, and goes to other ghosts to hear different sentiments.
What I really like about the game, and the dialogue, is that the player is sort of unsure as to who they are in the context of the relationship. Are they "you" or "I", or a different third thing? Are the sprites all the same ghost, are they the speaker? Or are they vessels for something else? At the end, it's the avatar who physically moves on, but the speaker is the one who says they're moving on. I want it to be left unclear, because I want the player to have a semi-identity crisis. In truth, the player, the sprites, and the speaker are all the same person. The speaker is basically having a conversation with themself, with their own ghosts. Until the conversation is had, until the messages are sent (even if they aren't received), they can't move on.
Initially, I felt limited by bitsy, namely the simple color palette & the small dialogue boxes. On the other hand, those limitations ended up serving my final piece quite well. The inability to make sprites a different color than the avatar made them difficult to differentiate. That lends to the identity crisis I want the audience to have. The smale dialogue boxes allowed for a more poetic line by line presentation of the written content, after I messed with the format. Overall, I'm pretty happy with what I made, mostly because the process was therapeutic.