Whimsy

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.

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.

The roadmap splits roughly into four stages:

• The MVP stage — the current one. Fleshing out the basic tools and building the foundation to expand.
• Phase 1 — adding auxiliary tools for making Whimsy a solid Bitsy alternative while having its own spin on it.
  • Expanding the tile editor (where you draw hero, props and actors):
    • Nice predefined palettes to choose from.
    • Tile animations.
    • A couple tools for tile editor like shifting the drawing/mirroring it.
    • Additional render styles for tiles beyond the regular pixelart. Rounded, spiky sprites. Prototype for that is done, just need to integrate it into UI and runtime.
    • Multiple skins for the Hero character
  • More programming blocks:
    • More events (creation, destruction of actors)
    • Playing sounds and setting background music
    • GUI dialogue choices
    • Changing the hero's skin
  • Game player additions:
    • Universal menu, initially only for saving/loading games.
    • Customize a game's banner, which will be shown in place of the current big Whimsy one.
  • Perhaps a TTS synthesis/Yapper a la Animal Crossing for characters. Will need to research the options more because the iconic SAM is not OSS and other options are... uncanningly good.
  • SFX maker.
  • Standalone, offline desktop version of Whimsy.
  • UI translations support.
  • Music import. (Desktop version only, can't reliably fit and manage music files in browser storage.
• Phase 2 — more complex tools.
  • Further game player customization for you and your players:
    • Customize player's colors;
    • Flippable left/right layout for the player (useful for touch devices);
    • Expand the universal menu with music/sfx and motion settings.
  • Moar programming blocks:
    • Nice transitions between stages
    • Variables and conditionals
    • More dialogue options:
      • Ask a player for a numerical value
      • Ask a player for a string value
  • TTS/Yapper for sure.
  • MIDI-like music sequencer.
  • Exporting games as standalone desktop apps as an addition to the web export.
• Phase 3+ — polish and horizontal scaling.
  • Programming blocks:
    • Timers
    • Move an actor/push an actor/follow an actor with pathfinding.
    • Motion effects on actors.
  • ???