Going to the Store

Credits

• Story and Art by Max G. (yours truly)
• Bitsy engine created by Adam Le Doux: https://ledoux.itch.io/bitsy

Artist's Manifesto

• The principal goal of this project is to learn how to work with Bitsy. As such, I chose the basic premise of a character walking to the store to buy some needed item (namely, their morning glass of milk) on short notice because it’s simple to implement. This way, I was able to put more stock in learning Bitsy’s mechanics than coming up with a complex, intricate story.
• Obviously, going to the store is a pretty mundane, boring activity, so there had to be something to make it interesting enough to play. Comedy was my intended tone here, as I believe that’s the easiest way to inject some interest into this mundane premise. The character’s cartoonish design, his strange obsession with his morning glass of milk, and the subtle absurdities like the fact that the titular “store” doesn’t even have a name outside of “the store” are some of the elements I hope contribute to the humorous tone.
• I used a lot of hidden exits to secretly move the player from room to room without appearing so, this way I could move scenery around as the story progresses in a way that’s typically impossible with Bitsy. This is, for lack of a better term, a bit “hacky”, but it’s the best way I can currently think of to achieve some of the effects I wanted. This also goes to show another benefit of the simple premise. If I was constructing a more complex narrative with multiple locations, it would get very tiresome very fast to make duplicate upon duplicate of every single room, but with a smaller scale project like this with few locations, it’s manageable.
• Discounting these hidden exits, the four rooms that feature prominently in this story are: the main character’s home, the store, the back of the store, and the street between the store and the home.
• There are two special dialogue features in this project: sequence and shuffle.
• In my rough draft build, I had the clerk speak to the character in a cycle, meaning the player would see the same series of dialogue boxes over and over, but upon playtesting one of my peers’ Bitsy projects with a similar type of character, I realized sequence, in which only the last dialogue box is repeated, makes way more sense for the kind of conversation I’m trying to depict (namely, where the clerk eventually gets tired of talking to the main character).
• In my rough draft build, the main character’s TV was one of several non-interactable tiles in the living room, but for the final build I’ve decided to make it an interactable sprite and to make it talk in a shuffle, meaning the player sees a random dialogue box from a pre-determined set each time. This provides a viable excuse to shoehorn in several pop culture references that might get a chuckle out of the player, and in-universe functions as if the main character was channel-surfing.
• Finally, although the hobo character doesn’t feature prominently in the story, he does have conditional dialogue. Talking to the hobo when the player first leaves their home sets the variable “hasTalkedToHobo” to 1 (this variable was previously set to 0 at the title screen). Later, when the player encounters the hobo again upon leaving the store (this was achieved by duplicating the hobo sprite, since an individual sprite can only exist in 1 room in this engine), their dialog changes depending on whether the player has spoken to them previously. This was done because the hobo’s initial dialog is “I hear it’s going to rain later today”. If the player never talked to the hobo initially and therefore didn’t see this dialogue, it wouldn’t make sense for the hobo to then say “Told ya”, so a conditional was set up to ensure that their dialogue changes appropriately if the player hadn’t talked to them before.