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.
Consider the current version the open beta — many features are already there and Whimsy is ready for you to make your first games, yet there are more goodies coming in the nearest future!
Demo projects (with sources!)
More!
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
- v0.4.5 — various bugfixes, while bigger stuff is in the making!11 days ago
- v0.4.3 & v0.4.4 — Bugfixes and touch controls improvement40 days ago
- v0.4.2 — Bug fixes and minor improvements40 days ago
- v0.4.0 — Dialogues overhaul with prompts, new fonts, and styles!41 days ago
- v0.3.0 — Scenarios power-up: variables, conditions, string templates!50 days ago
- v0.2.0 — Animated Tiles and Sounds!76 days ago
- v0.1.1 & 0.1.2 — Hotfix86 days ago
- v0.1.0 — Foreground layer in stages, UI improvements, and bug fixes87 days ago
Comments
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Hello! This is super exciting!!! I couldn't find anywhere a mention about the license. I'd love if you gave it a permissive open-source license like MIT, or even GPL. You can still sell it btw!! It would just mean that the engine ships with its code.
Looking forward to playing around with the engine and following the progress! <3
I don’t have positive experience with open-source and don’t plan on releasing Whimsy as a FOSS for the foreseeable future. Making it open-source still allows to sell Whimsy, yes, but definitely doesn’t make it easier. Maybe in a perfect world it would be FOSS from the start, but alas—and I hope you’ll understand that.
Oh that's a shame! I'm sorry you had a bad experience with FOSS.
I'd like to understand what the pain points were, if you're keen to share. All I mean is that you include the source code on the release file and indicate its license. There'd be no need to manage a community or get people contributing to the code.
For now, I have to decline this request.
Not quite as useful a bug report as it would have been yesterday, but I crashed the editor yesterday by converting a prop to an actor where the prop was used on an existing stage.
After that the stage editor would not load.
I fixed it by deleting the stage in the JSON file and re-creating it, but it was definitely broken otherwise. Sadly I didn’t make a note of the JS error, but it was a missing reference.
On another note, do you have a way to make feature requests (if something is not on the roadmap)?
Discord server is the way to go.
Will try to upload a fix soon!
Should be fixed now 🐛🔨
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