"It's Time, Bill": An Interactive Storybook.

As a suicidal man prepares to take his own life, only his time-traveling house cat Bill Purray can save him. Based on a (mostly) true story.

I am starting now that the theme has been posted. I will be using Bitsy. I am a programmer by trade, so using Bitsy feels very limiting to me. I have played with it a bit over the last 48 hours leading up to the jam and think it really helps me focus on expressing myself.

I am using this game as a way to express and process some things I need to get through. It doesn't matter if no one else gets it. I think making it will help some.

DISCLAIMER:

This game deals with heavy themes including suicide and sexual abuse. I am receiving regular mental healthcare and am not a danger to myself.

First mock-up:

Nice colors! :D

Today I finished up the design, realized it was way too big, and scaled it back. I also did the design work for about 40% of the content. Finally I completed about 10% of the content. I am already editing the design to tighten up the content so I can get the story across and still polish this thing for the jam.

Here are a few screenshots from today's development:

I have spent most of the first half of the day getting my family to doctors. I finished up a few loose ends regarding the content I had worked on. Then I did a full QA pass of what I have so far. Finally I put up an itch.io project for the entry. You can see the in-development version here: https://qbradq.itch.io/its-time-bill?secret=0ZnOZYBHh3LODMkrTjRYzqx60

Also I settled on the name: "It's Time, Bill"

Final update for today. I've been depressed and physically tired today. Progress was slower than my goal. I got three new scenes done, but there are three more I expected to do today. I am thinking about chopping off about 1/3 of the content.

I'm not super thrilled about this color scheme. Any suggestions? I want it to convey summertime.

I have to slow down development on this game. It is very emotionally draining. But I think it is really giving me the benefit I was after. For the purposes of the jam I am going to focus on the introduction and ending sequences and one third of the initially-planned content.

This isn't too bad. I initially knew that the content I had mapped out was too much. I do eventually need to finish it all for my own reasons. But I want to try to ship something that approaches a complete state for the jam. This is very important to me because I haven't finished a game in over 10 years :)