StatusReleased
PlatformsHTML5
AuthorCatherine
Made withbitsy

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Prompt 5:

The core verb of a the player's disposal is movement. This is because of the nature of the Bitsy engine, but with the use of sprites and walls, the game steered the use of this verb towards the ultimate objective--hiking-- quite well. The starting room only allowed you to move in two directions, one of which leads to your bed to the right, ending the game immediately. Restarting the game with that piece of wisdom, you're left with the other option of going left. Since you must move through the immediate item in you're path on the left, the verb indirectly forces the player to interact with the item, detailing explicitly the subtasks needed for the player to begin their hike. After this point, though, most of the exits which connects the games rooms are two-way. This rule in turn plays off the movement verb allowing for the player to achieve the subtasks of the game in any order, allowing for replayability to a good degree. Similarly textured sprites can be found along the paths throughout the rooms in the game that can be revisited to remind oneself of the game's tasks. Most of the movement in rooms is restricted, with the verb being constrained to the bottom of the room, whereas the rest of the room is inaccessible pixel art. This makes intuitive sense given the portrayal of the rooms as top-down, 2-D, though out of sheer curiosity I would try to walk up all over the place since the placement of exits and items if typically 1 tile higher than where the player typically can walk, I found myself exploring where I could and could not walk up to, often walking in and out of the same room into the hallway more times than I would like to admit. Nearer to the end of the game when you embark on your hike, I had expected to explore the 3 different terrains more vigorously than walking straight across the bottom of the final room, which was the same across all 3 hikes. Nonetheless, considering the effort in designing 3 different hikes in the Bitsy engine, I was content with using my imagination for each hike, since the focal point of the game was more about preparing for the hike rather than actually doing it.

This hiking game that the designer created focused on the experience of the preparations for hiking. The main stage of the game is at home, so the organization of those rooms became an important aspect. The game has two-way exits between the rooms and corridor, so that will make the game less linear and more open-formatted. The player can explore a room, go out, come back later and finish the exploration. To put multiple two-way exit in one corridor, the exits were located in the center of the doors, which did cause a bit trouble with going back in the exits again for multiple times. This kind of structure of the maps helps create a realistic view of a house, which has multiple rooms by the corridor, and a big living room at the end.

These transitions between rooms is within the house, so their are no big movements across space. The big movement comes in the final scene when the player gets out of the house and actually went hiking. The space suddenly went from inside the house to the view of the mountain. The real hiking part was rather simple, but that made the preparations part in the house more special. The designer has added many choices in the game to make this process more lively. For example, the player can go back to bed, and "sleep five more minutes", while restarting the game. There are also choices for the places you are going to hike, which is an item to take which will technically change the destination of the final scene.