Spelunking Assessment

Mikey Ehms, Spring 2022

For my final project, I decided to go with something I'm less experienced with and make a game in Bitsy. It was a daunting task at first but overall I'm very happy with the outcome as I felt I was able to exercise my artistic and resourcing capabilities through this.

The game mostly takes inspiration from Pokemon and Earthbound, at least in terms of environmental structure. You move from your bedroom to your town, then immediately set off on the real adventure. It's short and linear, not much exploration is involved, but there is a true narrative that you are walking through. And that narrative is heightened by the pixel art of the game. It's all relatively simple and many assets are reused or re-tooled in some fashion, but there's a strong emphasis on artistic progression. Environments build on each other and the further you delve into a specific area the more it'll change. Again, it's simple, but I'm still excited by the work I've done and feel encouraged to explore pixel art more because of it.

In terms all the different programs we learned throughout the semester that went into this, here's a quick breakdown:

• CharNG - Both the opening and closing exposition dialogues for the game were altered using the program (5 or 6-gram).
• Botnik/N+7 - All 3 NPCs have dialogue created through Botnik and then that dialogue is altered with N+7 (Bjork lyrics and N+5 for "Little Sister", Amy Winehouse and N=8 for "Mother", and Tom Waits and N+14 for "King")
• Anagram - All names written on each sign were altered using Anagram Generator
• Otter.ai and Crowdsourcing - Every piece of wall writing in the cave was originally recorded by random friends of mine, transcribed to otter.ai, and then edited for the game.
• Oblique Strategies - While being a major source of work ethic inspiration (described below), the OS cards make a cameo appearance in the game in the form of a book of rules (located in the kitchen).

• "Once the search is in progress, something will be found." - I didn't know what exactly how my game was going to come together when I initially started it. But that's where a lot of the fun and creativity came from.
• "You can only make one dot at a time." - With pixel art,you have to be very deliberate with each sprite; literally making "one dot (or bit) at a time".
• "Simply a matter of work." - The hours became longer as I delved deeper into the game, but I needed to keep my head up and march on.
• "Left channel, right channel, centre channel" - In audio terms, this applies to an all-encompassing sound. Similarly, I tried to make my game feel full and rich in its surrounding environments.
• "Emphasize the flaws" - With making a low-bit pixel game, it's practically necessary to reuse assets in a way that may seem strange or "flawed" (but that's where much of the charm comes from.

Reflection

This was one of the most interesting classes I have ever taken in my 18ish years of being in school. I learned so much in terms of coding, AI, web design, game development, and all the different ways I could use those to exercise my artistic and narrative sensibilities. I could've tried harder, and been more on-top of assignments (especially the writing heavy ones); but I'm still very happy with what I did produce. Overall, I believe I deserve a strong B or low A.