You Too Can Make These Fun Games (No Experience Necessary)

Games built with the open source tool Bitsy are often more like stories. Our writer created one in two hours.
retro video game accessories plugged into TV
Photograph: Getty Images

I just fulfilled a childhood dream: I made a videogame. OK, it's barely a game. It's not challenging—you can complete it in a few minutes, and the one-bit graphics make old Atari games look sophisticated by comparison. But I made a game.

If I'd been more industrious in my youth, I could have made some sort of Zork-style text adventure game in the Basic programming language. But it would have been tedious work, at least with the tools I had access to at the time. More recently, I could have used one of the various point-and-click game-making tools on the market, such as GameMaker Studio or RPG Maker. But they're a little daunting, and they cost money.

Making a videogame remained a bucket list item until I stumbled on an incredibly simple open source web app called Bitsy. I started playing around with it, just to see how it worked. Before I knew it, I had something playable. I made my game in a couple of hours.

An image from House of the Living, a Bitsy game by Fred Bednarski.

Screenshot: Klint Finley via Fred Bednarski

Bitsy is designed for making little pixel-art games where you walk around and talk to people. You can use it in your browser without downloading anything. You draw the graphics on an 8 x 8 grid. Despite, or rather because of, its simplicity, the platform is enticing. "The lo-fi aesthetic was a big selling point," says Fred Bednarski, designer of the Bitsy games House of the Living and The World Has Been Sad Since Tuesday. "I thought that I could make some 8 x 8 sprites look decent."

Seattle-based software developer Adam Le Doux created Bitsy for himself. "I was trying to work on this other game project that I was blocked on," Le Doux says. "I was spending a lot of time on complex systems like skeleton animation systems. I was procrastinating." So Le Doux created a simple engine designed to keep him focused on his core interest: "walking around and talking to people and exploring a space."

"I grew up playing Game Boy games and wanted something like Pokémon games, where the townfolk tell you rumors," he says. The Zelda family of games was another big influence, as was the 2013 videogame Gone Home.

The original version of Bitsy didn't have a graphical interface: Le Doux just edited text files to create graphics. But after he showed his early work to his wife, she wanted to use the tool too. "The original interface was meant with her as the primary user," he says.

Le Doux released Bitsy in 2017. Since then, more than 2,000 games made with the tool have been published on the game hosting site Itch.io. A burgeoning community crafts tutorials, "game jams" where designers create games on particular themes on short deadlines, and tools that add features to the core platform. Last year, dozens of Bitsy game designers exhibited their works at the Babycastles art gallery in New York City.

In Cat's Out of the Bag, a character eavesdrops on conversations at a high school and other teenage hangouts.

Screenshot: Klint Finley via Claire Morley

The games tend toward the quirky and the story-driven. They resemble lo-fi versions of the Zelda family of action-adventure games. But action is outside the scope of Bitsy. Many of the games could be aptly labeled as "interactive fiction." In Claire Morley’s Cat's Out of the Bag, a compelling story unfolds as your character walks around and eavesdrops on conversations at a high school and other teenage hangouts. But that's not to say you can't make a fairly traditional adventure game. Realm of the Dread Queen, by Ben Bruce, is one of the most sophisticated Bitsy games and presents several challenging puzzles.

Bitsy's appeal doesn't lie entirely in its ease of use. The games themselves, and the community of designers who make them, draw in developers. "It really felt like I'd opened a door to a new world where magical things were being created," says Morley, a self-taught programmer. "There was something so different about Bitsy games from other games that I'd seen from the last few years."

Seattle software developer Adam Le Doux created Bitsy, and the game When I Get Home.

Screenshot: Klint Finley via Adam Le Doux

The Bitsy community has produced a wealth of tiny games that test the limits of what can be considered a game. Le Doux’s first Bitsy game, When I Get Home, is the barest sketch of a scene. Bruce's Zen Garden, Portland, The Day Before My Wedding is a single location with a collection of memories from a particular day. The simplicity and experimentation of these games provide designers with a sense of permission to create and share their own work.

"Bitsy makes it easy, so you get a lot of unique perspectives you wouldn’t normally get from game dev," says Ebeth Norvell, who helps moderate the Bitsy community on the chat platform Discord and cocurated the Babycastles exhibit. "There are a lot of personal and weird and silly and heartbreaking games that come out of it that you can’t get anywhere else."

In that regard, Bitsy's closest relative is Twine, a simple tool for making interactive stories that has spawned a staggering number of experimental works, including Zoë Quinn's Depression Quest, which is designed to help players understand what it's like to live with clinical depression, or the surreal works of game designer Porpentine.

You can include images in a Twine story, but Bitsy is inherently more graphical and provides a different experience, both for players and for designers. Using Twine feels more like writing a story. Using Bitsy feels more like making a game.


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