Postmortem

When it came to the design process for this game, I tried to give it a more grounded feel as opposed to my prior game. What the player undergoes in the game is something that is not a particularly unique experience: playing games at home. That being said, I wanted to create a sense of routine and familiarity, hence why you undergo the process of selecting games and placing them into the console repeatedly. Through an act of repetition, you gain a greater sense of comfort with what is happening.

Once again departing from my prior game, I wanted to experiment with playing the game from a bit of a different perspective. Knowing that Bitsy lets you change the avatar between rooms, I wanted to give the impression that the game was being played from a first-person perspective in certain scenes, like when picking the games and placing them into the console. There were two reasons for me doing this. For one, I wanted to create a contrast between the rooms of the game. The shot of the room that the player lives in is supposed to frame it as being small, almost cozy. The first-person rooms by comparison take full use of the screen to really sell how close you are to the objects. The second reason I used the first-person perspective is because it helps the person playing the game better identify as the player. Again, I wasn’t aiming for the core idea of the game to necessarily be unique, but I wanted it to be involved.

The variables used in the game are all of the different games that you can choose from. Even in this regard, I wanted to experiment with variable storytelling, and let the player pick what games they played. This helps to reinforce the idea I mentioned earlier: that the person playing can better identify with the player character, because their choices are reflected in the game. Purely from a technical perspective, I also just wanted to experiment with having multiple dialogue trees. Every game has multiple lines of dialogue, and the games can be switched between sessions.

I am particularly proud of the technical implementations of the game. Being able to choose how you go through everything as well as making sure the dialogue was working properly between selecting different games was a new experience for me. The experimentation present is also something that I am proud of. I really felt like I tried out a lot of different ways of leveraging the features of Bitsy. Even if the implementation could have been better, I am still satisfied that I at least tried something new. As far as things that didn’t turn out as expected, I wanted to have palettes switch every time you played a game, to signify the passage of time, but I did not have enough time to figure out a proper implementation of it. The palettes kept switching in the rooms I did not want them to.

If I were to do things differently next time, I would change the main premise of the game slightly. Although I mentioned that I liked having player choice play a role in the outcome of the game, I would say that this caused the game to lose focus. I would shift the premise to feature one single game, and provide an exploration of that. I feel like I tried to emphasize the connection with the PS2 too much. That is a much more abstract concept than if someone has a connection to a particular game, like when someone says they have a favorite movie or book. Think about it from this perspective: when someone has fond memories of a game console, are they remembering the console itself, or the games that they played on the console? I think more people would say it is the latter, and that is what I should have focused on. I would make the game more linear, but give greater emphasis on a single game, and why that game in particular is important to the player.