{"id":987,"date":"2022-03-07T15:31:58","date_gmt":"2022-03-07T15:31:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/scienceandnerds.com\/2022\/03\/07\/bitsy-is-the-small-video-game-engine-with-a-big-community\/"},"modified":"2022-03-07T15:31:59","modified_gmt":"2022-03-07T15:31:59","slug":"bitsy-is-the-small-video-game-engine-with-a-big-community","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/scienceandnerds.com\/2022\/03\/07\/bitsy-is-the-small-video-game-engine-with-a-big-community\/","title":{"rendered":"Bitsy is the small video game engine with a big community"},"content":{"rendered":"

Source: https:\/\/www.theverge.com\/22929485\/bitsy-tiny-video-game-engine<\/a>
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In the video game Under A Star Called Sun<\/em><\/a>, players wake up alone on a spaceship. There are only a handful of things to do: make coffee, water the plants, gaze out upon the cosmos. Walking along the ship\u2019s winding corridors, you come across a room with a machine that lets you re-create memories. Suddenly, you\u2019re transported to a pixelated sidewalk, then to brunch, and next to a quiet park. It\u2019s a snapshot of two friends hanging out together on an ordinary August day \u2014 a memory, but one that\u2019s likely to fade, to corrupt, as the protagonist says, \u201clike a JPEG saved over and over.\u201d <\/p>\n

Under A Star Called Sun<\/em> was made by Cecile Richard, a Melbourne-based graphic designer and zine maker. Richard explains over Zoom that it\u2019s a response to grief. A friend passed away in 2019; they loved sci-fi, so a year later Richard made a game set on a spaceship. She did so using a piece of free open-source software called Bitsy<\/a> which, since its release five years ago, has become one of the easiest ways to start making video games. The tool strips narrative game-making down to its fundamentals \u2014 a room, an avatar, dialogue, all rendered in 8-bit pixel art. You string a series of rooms or scenes together and a narrative begins to emerge. Some people use Bitsy to tell jokes, others to write poems<\/a>. Under A Star Called Sun<\/em> is an elegy \u2014 a meditation on loss which lands with an emotional heft that belies its five-minute playtime. <\/p>\n

Richard has made a handful of other sweet, impressionistic games; intimate yet lonely, filled with similar pangs of sadness. Endless Scroll<\/em><\/a> shimmers with the blue of staying up late on the internet in the aughts, chatting with friends over instant messaging. I Am Still Here<\/em><\/a> <\/em>bottles the weird quiet of lockdowns during the pandemic, imagining that we\u2019re all ghosts, unable to leave the places we call home. Across each of her games, Richard\u2019s writing is taut and beautiful while her visuals convey a keen sense of place. Together, these elements gesture to worlds far bigger than those Bitsy is able to render. <\/p>\n

Games made using the software, described on its site as a \u201clittle editor for little games,\u201d are a notable departure from mainstream titles preoccupied with photorealistic graphics, gigantic open worlds, and complex game mechanics. Unlike the most popular engines, Unreal and Unity, you can\u2019t create any of that in Bitsy. If you load the Bitsy editor<\/a> in your web browser, you\u2019ll see five simple windows, only three of which are used to actually make a game. The first shows the room you\u2019re working on; the second is for designing an avatar, items, and the tiles themselves; the third lets you choose colors. These limitations are a key reason why game makers such as Richard have felt liberated by the tool. \u201cI get paralyzed quite easily when I can do anything,\u201d she says. \u201cHaving Bitsy be such a little thing that doesn\u2019t let you do everything is helpful, certainly for the kind of games I want to make.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Under A Star Called Sun.<\/em><\/figcaption>Image: Cecile Richard<\/cite><\/p>\n

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Bitsy was born in the late summer of 2016 on a commuter shuttle bus from Seattle to Microsoft\u2019s Redmond campus, an hour-long journey above the glistening waters of Lake Washington. Adam Le Doux, the creator of the game-making software, was working as a programmer at Microsoft while beavering away on creative projects in his spare time. But he\u2019d hit a brick wall. In an attempt to break this stasis, he decided to try and make small, deliberately self-contained games on his way to work using his phone. The problem was no such software existed, so the programmer coded his own over a weekend, fresh for the Monday commute.<\/p>\n

This very first version of Bitsy was even more lo-fi than the tool Le Doux eventually released to the public. In order to make a game on his commute without getting his laptop out, Le Doux devised an ingenious \u201cjerry-rigged\u201d setup. While sitting on the bus, he would type the \u201cgame data\u201d (grids of letters and numbers representing the sprites and rooms, plus text for dialogue) into the notes app on his phone. These notes were synced to Dropbox, and a makeshift version of Bitsy read the Dropbox text files. This iteration of Bitsy then displayed the game on his personal website, so that while Le Doux was writing the text file on his phone, he could playtest the game seamlessly in real time. The impact was immediate. \u201cThis tiny little thing unlocked some creativity,\u201d he says. <\/p>\n

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