Diversions

Bitsy

A pixelated store. Customers are waiting in a line and talking. Candles line the shelves. — Flicker's Fearsome Fragrances. Flicker is a little spark working in their bustling shop that caters to some... curious customers. Help Flicker find everyone's favorite spooky scented candles during the midnight rush!

Pixelated worms in an underground cavern. One of them is wiggling. — The Coagulation. Why aren't the worms wiggling anymore? Why are they talking so strangely? Save your wife, and all the other little worms before the big party!

Bitsy is a free, coding-optional game development tool that uses limited creative restrictions (such as three colors per room, two-frame animations, and eight-by-eight pixel sprites) to free yourself from decision paralysis and get creating! It's especially great for shorter narrative games. There's a robust but approachable dialogue system, and they just made an update so that you can compose your own music for your game. It has a delightful community on itch.io, and a very friendly discord community that is happy to help beginners. Here's a tutorial to get you started. Seriously, go do it now! Yes, especially you, person who's never made a game before!

Controls

Bitsy games use Arrows to move, and almost anything else to continue dialogue. I like to use Space or X. You should be able to play on mobile, too. There, the controls are Swipe to move, and Tap Anywhere to continue dialogue. It's a little awkward on mobile because you have to swipe a lot, but totally doable if you can't get to a full computer.

Button

I've made some buttons for your website to show your love for Bitsy. Please link back to me if you use them.

Source

Bitsy games are not compiled, and if you open the HTML source you can see the raw code for all of the images and dialogue and everything. It's not how they're normally generated, but it's interesting to look at!

Pico-8

Tiled Background Generators

A rainbow-striped, pixelated image with triangles and diagnoal lines. — **Flashing lights warning!** One-dimensional cellular autonoma tiled background generator.

Check out this background generator. High-contrast flashing/scrolling happens for a few seconds after pressing a button, and then the screen is still until another button is pressed.

X generates a new pattern, Right Arrow rerolls the colors, and Up/Down shift the pattern. If nothing's happening, make sure to click inside the game window.

Most of the generated images should tile pretty well. All 1-D cellular autonoma that are on a small looping screen like this will eventually turn into a repeating loop, but not all of them will fit into the screen. Even when they don't, it still looks interesting when tiled.

You have my permission to take a screenshot and use one for your personal, non-commercial website. It would be really cool if you linked back here and commented on my neocities profile so I can see!