Posted October 30, 2022 by Cora Reyes Calens
Beginner's Maze is the first game I developed and published on my own. It is a tiny adventure puzzle made with the Bitsy engine.
In the present devlog I'll share some insights about my creative process and learnings I got from this experience.
I chose Bitsy on purpose, to limit my options and keep everything (concept, storytelling, design) as simple as possible in order to quickly deliver the game. I gave myself a week to complete it and submit it to a game jam. But, as expected, I struggled with the simplicity rule.
My original intention was to build an interactive fiction. I wrote some dialogs, sketched some scenes but I didn't storyboard the whole thing. I quickly jumped to Bitsy and got lost designing rooms, adding animations and conditional dialogs. The lack of core definitions soon got me stuck. I did a couple of prototypes but none convinced me. I lost some momentum there and stopped working on the game for 1 or 2 days. The interactive fiction was too complex for that moment so I decided to throw it away and start all over.
Making a maze puzzle was in my backlog of future game ideas. A puzzle would allow me to be less strict with the storytelling and less attached to details.
I started sketching maze patterns and soon realized it would be trickier than expected. I wanted the maze to be real, with a solution path and correct room transitions when exploring it. A quick Internet search lead me to a handy online tool called Maze Generator. It provides many configuration parameters to create a maze of various shapes, sizes and complexity.
I used one of the generated designs as the base of my game. I split it into 4 sections, each representing one room in Bitsy. I used placeholders to mark the connections between rooms and the final exit. From that moment on, everything went smoothly. In just one day I built the whole game, which included two prototypes and the final version.
Below is a summary of the iterations the game went through.
Prototypes 1 & 2
Final version 1
Final version 2
What worked
What didn't work
Lessons learned