bumble_b – Memory

A normal, all-American Sunday sometime in December 2010

Password: ems2021 (Sorry, I’m not super proud of this and don’t want it to be public!)

The video that I included shows what was probably the most difficult sequence for me to get right. I really wanted my story to be about the cute and witty dialogue options, which meant I couldn’t use vanilla Bitsy’s tools. Instead, I had to download my game, copy/paste code hacks into the HTML file, do what I wanted, and run it from there. This meant a lot of making something in Bitsy, downloading it, adding my custom code, doing my own code, realizing things were wrong, going back to Bitsy, downloading it, re-pasting code, retesting it, etc. etc. to the point that I had hundreds of files on my desktop and I was going insane. So, I did something I kind of didn’t expect of myself and just figured out what the code was doing. I ended up just building a lot of my game from the HTML file so I didn’t have to keep going through that horrible sequence. Basically, by the last couple days of this project, I didn’t even use Bitsy. I just didn’t really vibe with it. But I’m super proud of myself for coding instead of using Bitsy’s click and drag features (not that the code was super hard, but still).

Anyway, this project was about my childhood and the things that I did and felt. It’s pretty light-hearted with a few kind of self-deprecating touches; I really wanted to capture what it was like being a first-generation American. Our first house was really small, so I had to add giant walls/borders to show that. I even changed the sprite colors by room so that with my family I was colored brown, outside I was colored white, and in my own room I was a mix of the two. Kind of cheap and cringe-y color theory, but I just wanted to show the effect living in a tiny, white town had on me growing up and the white-washing I experienced from it. I had a lot of watching TV/playing options, and I also sequenced them so that every time you clicked on the options it was something different.

The code got so time-consuming that I didn’t get to do everything I wanted, like sound effects; for example, if you choose to play Club Penguin on the computer, I wanted Club Penguin music to play. This was definitely achievable through the code extensions I found, but I just couldn’t bring myself to do any more work (LOL).

I’d really like some feedback on my art itself. I think I sort of killed it on the narrative/dialogue/coding fronts, but I feel really self-conscious about my actual art and design. I know for a fact that there is a lot to improve there and would really like to hear people’s suggestions.