Trans Gal Jam 3 Post-Mortem

The Trans Gal Jam was a success, despite some surprising shortcomings. I had thought that, after the Ace Game Jam, I’d have some significant troubles with the game. While I had to work around the engine engines limitations, I can say that this game was a resounding success. While I don’t think I’d ever use Bitsy again, I’d be hard pressed to say never. It was a good tool for quick protoyping and had it been more robust, adequate for our purposes. Plus, this starts the first jam were we introduced a couple tools into our tool chain. Suffice to say, this was indeed quite the jam and the proof-of-concept ideas will be taken into account.

Let me first address the star of the show: Bitsy. It’s a free, 2D engine released on itch.io as a web app. The application allows you to create ¾ view games with an emphasis with dialogue to interact with the world around you. The tool itself is limited with three color palettes, meaning that you have to be creative with your sprites. Granted, you get access to as many of these palettes as you wish, so it’s not as limiting as it could be. There’s an active community with hacks, tutorials and more that await you. For such a toy application, there seems to be a rabid following. I suppose if you’re new to game design, this isn’t so bad to sink your teeth in.

However, the real problems start from here. For whatever daft reason, the developer, Adam Le Doux, decided that the inventory system didn’t need to be implemented correctly. There’s no way to manipulate inventory with dialogue. Why it’s even in Bitsy is a mystery for the ages. I’d have waited until a proper feature set was introduced to use these variables effectively. At this point, that’s all these are; variables with no value. We only used them for items not given to you by NPCs. Which was few. If this was implemented and just simply not documentated, then that leads into the next problem.

Lack of documentation. The developer clearly didn’t think this part through. I should not have to go seeking this information anywhere else from the developers mouth. I had to search through tutorials to find out that “*” were used as the equivalent of “and”. For a software that’s proported to have a large fan following, the developer themselves doesn’t seem to have this same enthusiasm. There’s just no excuse for this; if you’re going to bother updating the app to include inventory, you can spend a few paragraphs explaining how your software works. And that’s not even the only issues I ran into.

We had to end up using a hack because there simply wasn’t a lot ways to manipulate things through dialogue. If dialogues where the way to influence the world around you, there should’ve been more ways to work with it. Not to mention a ton of boolean operators not included or documented correctly means that if you want to do anything fancy, good luck. I really think the developer should take the code that exists out there and make a big massive update incorporating it. For now, the workflow was sluggish and annoying.

This jam marked the first time I’ve used Twine to document and track diverging paths. The idea came to me from the Yuri Jam many moons ago and I’m happy about the decision. I may replace Twine with a homebrew tool specifically for this task, but for now, this is incredible. I liked every single second of using it to track information. One thing I will gripe is a lack of search functions but I think that’s just me not knowing the tool well enough to find one. Twine seems very capable in this sense. I just wish it was more capable in the ability to program functional games besides Interactive Fiction. Regardless, good work Twine.

I also used Atom for the first time. It was a bit finicky, getting it to work again, but I am glad I did. It works like a dream. I’ve changed and fiddled with a couple things to get it to look the way I like. I’ve added the infamous Dracula UI (fitting, for the next jam I’ll be participating in) with the syntax theme being Moonlight. I’ll be using this more for other jams, so we’ll see it’s effectiveness, but for the time being it was a good way to copy and paste bitsy game data into the browser before using the itch app.

Ah yes, the itch app. At first, I didn’t get the merit of it. It’s just Steam but worse? Actually, one of the nifty things about the itch app was being able to load bitsy offline. Not to mention that it gave us access to the jam pages and libraries and tools. Quite nifty, if I do say so myself. I was able to get a lot of work done, since Wi-fi isn’t the most consistent here. Hopefully we’ll get more use out of it; perhaps we can find a bitsy alternative.

Now onto the entry itself. It was a cake walk, for sure. There was a couple redesign tweaks to work with the engine, but I was satisfied with the workflow here. There wasn’t much documented due to Bitsy’s simplicity. Once I got to the more difficult part of following variables and flow from one screen to another, I had used Twine to help keep me at task. It was invaluable here. The game originally was set in some unnamed apocalyptic setting, but I chose Mongolia as a location not typically shown in media besides Attila, of course. I decided to make the main character Mongolian, after being inspired by a friend’s stream who was playing a game set in that location. The main character, Bataar, was supposed to be a girl. I changed them to agender at the last second, because it felt right. I don’t really have a better explanation. The Outland may not resemble Mongolia as I remember it, but I figured that if the original Aladdin could claim it was set in China, then I could claim the Outland was located in Mongolia. I’ll see how that works out for me. Probably not well. It’s worth a shot, at least.

I’m not satisfied with this game. I’m planning on converting my code to LOVE2D if all things go according to plan. I liked my time with Bitsy, but the limitations were bothering me. Plus, the lag and slowdown between movement really started to bother me. I’m planning on simplifying the code, and making the movement speed much faster. I’m also going to utilize my Lua prowess that I’ve honed for years to get it done. I’ll also have a proper inventory, instead of fiddling around with variables like I was expected to do. I don’t know if I’ll release it, but I most certainly will make it. I don’t like leaving stones unturned. Hopefully, the next jam, will allow me more freedom to do as I please. That being said, no more simple engines. Just an editor, a library and my own wit. That’s how it should be. That’s how it should’ve been, from the very beginning.

The Koala Lampoon,

Team Koala Lampoon