Post by danwinters in Museum of everything comments

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Beautiful art work, again! I'm always jealous playing your games as everything fits together so neatly.

I read through the posts with Mandy and agree with you in regards to randomisation vs the plots in the game. I was very intrigued by the refugees quest, and particularly the concept of people suffering right next to art inspired by that suffering (and critics still being more interested in the art), and to be honest I was a little disappointed there wasn't a 'bigger' thematic resolution to it.

HOWEVER, the randomisation aspect did feel the main aspect of this game and it's superb. The fact that this game works so smoothly with how much is in it incredibly impressive. You definitely nailed that feeling of walking around an endless, confusing art space. All while still in vanilla Bitsy!? Great work.

Valeriy Petrov192 days ago

Thank you for your kind words, this means a lot!

Interesting thoughts on the subject of the refugees' quest. It was actually partially inspired by my real-life experience at the beginning of the war in Ukraine (we were hiding in an underground art gallery for several days while the city was bombed). Luckily, there were no evil critics and security guards to shy us away :)

I feel like I understand what you saying regarding the resolution of the quest. Truly, the scope of my project at some point has become its curse (it never happened before, and now it happened again, haha). Creating the museum and art objects took a lot of time and effort, and when it was time to make the quests, I was already a bit jaded. Also quest creation process itself was a bit junky, due to how much code the game already had (it is worth noting, that very long scripts may make Bitsy lag and even crash from time to time). Dealing with all those technical problems made me somewhat lose the bigger picture, and this is probably why the refugees' quest resolution may feel less thematically resonant than the one of the living statue.

In any case, thank you very much for playing the game and providing your feedback!

danwinters191 days ago(+1)

I was interested in how it all worked, so I copied the code from the HTML into Bitsy and saw the sheer size of some of those dialogue options. It was lagging for me as well just opening it, so have no idea how you managed to keep it all together and working smoothly :)

In hindsight, I think I was focused on the refugee quest due to them sadly coming in the news so often recently. I have a Ukrainian friend here in the UK who brought her family over last year, and I've been watching the news about Palestine recently also. It's been on my mind a lot, and the idea of those kind of people just trying to survive in a peace-time space for art, with art pieces depicting people just like them, was a powerful one to me.

Ultimately though, it was a game jam with limited time and think you should be really proud of the randomisation aspects. I think the quests are more of an 'icing on the top' really. I had been wondering if the game was related to how you experienced the war, as I had played your other games set in Ukraine around then. Thank you for sharing that.

Valeriy Petrov190 days ago(+1)

Oh wow, I never thought somebody would look into my shitty code. I appreciate you going the extra mile to look into it. To make it work I actually copied and pasted it into the notepad, then edited it, then copied and pasted it back in the hope that it would work fine. It was a hell of a job and quite a stressful one too.

That 'icing on the top' metaphor is spot on. Looking back, I really feel like these quests were more of an afterthought, which, considering their heavy subjects, probably have not reflected well on their quality. But I'm glad that some people played them and find them interesting still.

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