Whimsy
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Standalone editor (works offline, too!) • Homepage & Docs
Whimsy is a small game engine and a fantasy console for making interactive stories where you can navigate the worlds you create and talk with stuff! Whilst simple in nature, the toolset allows making narrative-driven exploratory games with no prior experience in game development.
Whimsy is obviously inspired by Bitsy — and if you made games with that engine, you already know how to use Whimsy. Yet Whimsy does its craft in its own unique way, which will become more apparent with future versions.
The version presented right now is the MVP — the prototype which has the basic but required functionality and the groundwork put into it for growth. This means that you can already create cool stories with Whimsy!
Demo projects (with sources!)
Why make another Bitsy clone?
As a teacher, a player, and a game developer, I'm frustrated with the current state of Bitsy and its forks. Games have graphical glitches, can hang up, the editor is buggy as heck and has unintuitive, very limiting programming language. And when during one of my lessons on making games without code my students found 10-ish unique bugs in Bitsy instead of known 2, I decided that enough is enough.
Similar engines often have (more) complex scripting languages that can spook the young developers and designers, or are simply not that user-friendly. I think a better product can be created that will only multiply the strengths of Bitsy and will fix its issues.
And also it is a learning opportunity for me, CoMiGo. Maybe some of the tech explored while making Whimsy will be used in ct.js.
Distribution strategy
The plan is to make several versions of the app:
- Regular edition — forever free.
- HD edition — $15? A way to help the developers with a couple of benefits in
return.
- Choose between 17x17 and 9x9 sprite size.
- Hide the smoll "made with Whimsy" badge from your games.
- More UI themes for the editor.
- Ultra edition — $30 or so, to be determined.
- Everything the HD edition has, plus:
- Choose your own tile and stage dimensions.
- Probably more player customization features as the goal with the Ultra editition to be used as a more generalized game engine. Image import/export is also a needed feature for this specific version.
- Maybe a version for education — multi-seat license loaded with built-in lessons. But only if resources allow to make them.
Paid versions will appear at Phase 1 of the roadmap, which is described below 👇
🙌 In all versions, you always own your projects and can use games you create in personal, commercial, educational and other cases. Games are exported in one click and can be uploaded to itch.io and other gaming platforms, or run as is.
Roadmap
The roadmap was moved! You can find the new and up-to-date one on Whimsy's website!
Credits
- Whimsy is made with Svelte and SvelteFlow, with additional smaller libraries. The up-to-date list can be seen in the Whimsy app on the About page.
- Itch cover uses mockups from deviceframes.com website.
Got any issues? Write on Discord or in the comments!
Development log
Comments
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Hi there! I'm happy to find this, I love Bitsy but agree that it's definitely frustrating to work with at times. I look forward to watching you develop this further! :)
Are there any plans to allow importing custom palettes in the future? I'd love to be able to grab something off of lospec and import it right into Whimsy.
🤔 I’ll add it to backlog but this feature is pretty minor in its importance; you can edit any colors and add any amount of them with the palette shown in prop, actor, and stage editors, and you can copy-paste the hex-codes from lospec directly into color picker.
is there any possibility the paid versions land on steam?
The possibility is definitely there! And publishing on Steam is a good idea. Time will tell; I will definitely release them on itch.io first as it’s just simpler to do it here for me as a developer.
this is nice. But is this mainly focused around rpg? Because what if I want to make a fast paced game like a driving game or what not
Then you should use another engine!
:( but I wanna code on my Phoooooone
Try Castles or PocketCode then.
Check out Fancade. It's genuinely the best mobile "game engine" to this day imo. It has a full blown 3d voxel-based editor and a unique and fun visual scripting system
Hello! I really like the engine but there is one teeny weenie problem. I have created an actor and added it to my second room. It was visible and solid, and I had the code correct and everything was fine, but the actor wouldn't show up on my screen? I don't get why this happened but please fix asap. Thank you for all your hard work and I think this engine is amazing!! keep it up!
🤔 can’t tell much rn. Does the issue persist when you refresh the page? If so, you can send me your project (the 💾 icon) at cosmomyzrailgorynych@gmail.com (or at Discord) and I’ll see what’s happening.
I fixed one bug that caused actors to disappear; perhaps your issue was connected to the same problem.
Thank you so much! I tried to play the game again, and it worked!!! I am so happy.
loving it, cant wait to see the paid versions.
So easy to use I started making a game before I got my morning coffee! I wasn't even thinking about it! I wasn't awake yet!
Can't wait to see what I can do with this when I'm actually paying attention <3