Bitsy is the small video game engine with a big community

theverge.com:

In the video game Under A Star Called Sun, players wake up alone on a spaceship. There are only a handful of things to do: make coffee, water the plants, gaze out upon the cosmos. Walking along the ship’s winding corridors, you come across a room with a machine that lets you re-create memories. Suddenly, you’re transported to a pixelated sidewalk, then to brunch, and next to a quiet park. It’s a snapshot of two friends hanging out together on an ordinary August day — a memory, but one that’s likely to fade, to corrupt, as the protagonist says, “like a JPEG saved over and over.”

Under A Star Called Sun was made by Cecile Richard, a Melbourne-based graphic designer and zine maker. Richard explains over Zoom that it’s a response to grief. A friend passed away in 2019; they loved sci-fi, so a year later Richard made a game set on a spaceship. She did so using a piece of free open-source software called Bitsy which, since its release five years ago, has become one of the easiest ways to start making video games. The tool strips narrative game-making down to its fundamentals — a room, an avatar, dialogue, all rendered in 8-bit pixel art. You string a series of rooms or scenes together and a narrative begins to emerge. Some people use Bitsy to tell jokes, others to write poems. Under A Star Called Sun is an elegy — a meditation on loss which lands with an emotional heft that belies its five-minute playtime.

Richard has made a handful of other sweet, impressionistic games; intimate yet lonely, filled with similar pangs of sadness. Endless Scroll shimmers with the blue of staying up late on the internet in the aughts, chatting with friends over instant messaging. I Am Still Herebottles the weird quiet of lockdowns during the