@Bitsy games are, by default, a kind of top-down move-about visual novel. You can break (or circumvent) these conventions, but this combination of factors is what bitsy does best at its core; a small sequence of rooms where you can interact with 8-bit elements by moving to/over them, where the result of interacting is a small series of textboxes. But, by the creative application of
- moving to different rooms,
- manipulating the "overhead" perspective to represent other things (like a map on the bottom half of the screen that shows where you are, for each room that you go to),
- or added scripts,
you can really go far! Bitsy 3D adds an illusory dimension to what the player sees, allowing for a novel shorthand in the connection of interrelated rooms; I used it two years ago to make let's go back, my twilight mirage visual novel. Like most bitsy games, let's go back's power came from its words and story; from the emotional connection as you proceed along its six dioramas filled with dialogue, moving backwards through the history of The Divine Universe with ghostlike narrators, borrowing liberally from @austin's writing, to tell a story with words. This is why I call bitsy by default a visual novel engine, even though it's quite different from Ren'py; poignancy is so often point.
So, having made very wordy games in the form of let's go back and Princéton, for this year's @secretsamol I wanted to make something new to me, and less prolix. My budget was 100 hours to make the game, and 100 words to try and tell a story about Pickman and trains, through the action of the game rather than through dialogue.
Two things in my favor going in—bitsy3D's flexible set of camera constraints, and Pickman's idiosyncratic iconic weapon: her barbed espingole; a gun which fires only at melee range. This meant I could make a "first person shooter" POV by stretching and rotating the 5-pixel avatar and camera-placement until they approximated our FPS expectations—you and the camera united, and your gun outstretched, aimed in front of you.
The enemies are bitsy "items"; moving onto their square picks them up, eliminating them from the game-world. By shaping the enemy design and making them float above the ground, when you walk into their square, you are pressing the barrel of the gun into their center. Then a single word—"bang", animated to shake—made the illusion of the player's violence work well enough that the game design could begin!