Postmortem

Design Process

The Curious Case of Professor Limestone began with a joke and evolved into a quaint little game featuring a main character named Detective Shale. I wanted to tell a straightforward story without anything like multiple endings and decided to stick with simple room layouts to conserve time and energy. The first and most important step was altering the primary avatar to better suit the aesthetic I was going for, and the construction of a small development room allowed me to put together an assortment of sprites, tiles, and items with a similar style. Despite my lack of artistic abilities, everything came together to create a game with some visually interesting components.

For the color, I decided to create a special palette titled “parchment” which I felt gave it a vintage or dated appearance. Most sprites of importance are animated to give the player an understanding of what is interactable and what is not, and the game boils down to what is essentially a quick fest quest before reaching the punchline.

Properties and Affordances

Bitsy is simple but also occasionally difficult to work with. I utilized Bitsy’s Paint (sprite editor), Dialogue, Colors (palette editor), and “Exits & Endings” tools to create most of the game and mostly shied away from the Blip (sound) and Tune (music) tools. With these tools, Bitsy afforded me the ability to convey the joke through customizable gameplay and dialogue. I created all of the sprites necessary, created all of the rooms, animated everything I required, and was able to carefully use its dialogue trees to set up conditional text. Bitsy’s dialogue editor was especially useful in allowing me to transition to different rooms using exits while staying in the same dialogue tree.

Variables

Variables are directly integrated into the story as a means to progress. Detective Shale must collect three pieces of evidence before he is allowed to proceed to the final segment of the game. This is a standard mystery where he attempts to deduce the correct murder weapon, commenting on each weapon and storing them away in his inventory. One weapon, however, is not as it appears—which contributes to the joke at the end as Shale’s incompetence gets the better of him.

Accomplishments & Obstacles

Above all else, I’m most proud of the sprite work for this game. The way the characters and background animate help breathe life into this game, and the strategic placement of animated doorways helps the player find points to transition to other rooms. Every sprite looks like the object it tries to mirror from the real world, and I’m especially proud of the yard tiles which emulate a dirt or stone pathway.

I had a difficult time working with Bitsy’s dialogue editor, however. While Bitsy is great for making small projects and short games, it is atrocious when it comes to maneuvering complicated dialogue trees. Even developing simple games like this can be filled with tedium due to its overly-simplified simple tool, and some ideas I would like to have expanded ended up being scrapped or simplified.

Closing Thoughts

I would put more effort into using sound and music next time I make a Bitsy game to add another layer of complexity. Sound bytes can be used in dialogue trees to give sprites the ability to convey emotions over audio and not just by text—a feature that I can see being essential in fully expressing characters.