Posted September 22, 2023 by President of Space
This is my third entry into the alphabet superset challenge by Struthless. The theme for this entry was "Curiosity", and I wanted to somehow use bitsy's quirk of restarting the game immediately after it ends as a mechanic. So I thought of a multi-planet star system where the game ends after you visit a planet, and re-starts back in the starbase so that you can go somewhere else. It's nothing fancy, but it's cute. You can play it here: Time for the next expedition.
This is more of a game than my previous entries in the challenge. Yes, you could fail and get the bad ending in Aftermath, but it was generally a traditional bitsy affair of bumping into everything you see. Here, there is a light puzzle to solve before you get to the true ending. I'm pretty happy about this one, although let me know if you liked the ending - I'm not so sure about that.
One interesting thing with this project was that I developed it partially on my phone. Bitsy editor app is responsive and it works pretty well on mobile, even though it's horribly unoptimized. So there were a couple of days when I picked my son after kindergarten, let him loose on a playground with his crazy friends, and hacked away on my phone. It was, honestly, not so bad. Typing was a bit obnoxious, but other than that it was okay - and making 8x8 sprites by punching chunky pixels with your finger was genuinely fun.
Another win for bitsy. I don't know of any other gamedev tool that works half-decent on a phone (well, except for some bitsy derivatives, but you get my point). So if you are like me, and free time is at a premium, it can be a life saver.