A Shadow is the Tenderest Way to Hold

Above: short demo clip. Play the whole game for the full experience. Design has been iterated upon slightly since video upload.

CONTROLS: UP, DOWN, LEFT, RIGHT or W, A, S, D to move. Things you can interact with are in white. Exits and entrances are hidden, but will sometimes be marked. Explore and find your way around this short bitsy game about stillness. The first Bitsy game I've ever made so it's pretty clunky. I took heavy inspiration from 'The World Had Been Sad Since Tuesday' - a beautiful little game by Fred Bednarski, found here. Made for Bitsy Game Jam May 2022 with the theme 'duck'.

I tried to use several different techniques during its making. I played with the world's sense of scale and orientation through rotating different tiles and placing walls in the way of direct paths from one exit to another. I also used Pixsy - an image-to-room tile generator for Bitsy, found here. In terms of gameplay, the techniques offered by Bitsy are fairly limited, but I tried to experiment a little with positive and negative reinforcement within gameplay - making the player have to explore more or pick up an item(s) before they can progress further. I also included two different endings depending upon the amount of items picked up along the way. You discover more about the stillness the more items picked up.

The game's loose narrative tries to speak to the inertia that is sometimes felt nowadays with the foreclosure of possibility under capitalism. The desert often operates as an 'out-side' to this, as a place of political, social and material potential. In my artistic practice, I cover ideas proposed by Deleuze and Guattari around nomadology and the provocations that might arise out of a desert setting. The stillness of the desert could give rise to new sociopolitical realities.

For this game's music I used an old track that I threw together on Ableton. You can find it on my SoundCloud here.

Synopsis:

One day in the desert, the migrating of birds brings a stillness. You decide to follow a bird to learn where this stillness might end. Pick up items and discover more along the way. Will you subsume into the stillness or reject it?