Dr. Sponner's Spontaneous Spawning Machine

Rooms and Occurances:

1. You are brought through the time machine from some random date and location, and you meet Dr. Sponner. He gives you your mission, you go back into the machine. 
2. You meet young Dr. Sponner, ten years prior, and retrieve the toolbox. 
3. Once you go back in the machine, there is a malfunction and you are dropped into a future timeline where Dr. Sponner never received the items you promised to get him. You find his grave. 
4. This room is connected to room 3 and you find a huge statue built in Dr. Sponner’s honor. 
5. You are zapped to a whole different future timeline where aliens have taken over the planet, you retrieve a sandwich which you learn about in room 3. 
6. You are finally returned to the Dr. Sponner’s lab where you give him the toolbox and the sandwich. He makes you his assistant, saying that you will have to go on more missions like this, making room for possible sequels. 

I have always been interested in time travel stories, even though I feel like they are the most complicated to tell, but maybe that is why I enjoy them. It is a challenge, but at least there is always an interesting path you can create. I used dialogue to primarily give the story life by adding humor and a bit of ridiculousness to the scenarios, I did this because I always feel like writing for these types of things is the most fun part of creating the story. I used familiar scenes to create a sense of transition, especially in instances where you are in Dr. Sponner’s lab. In room 1 the machine is fully built and when you travel ten years in the past to room 2 you can see the layout of his lab is the same, but the time machine is partially assembled and Dr. Sponner’s character design looks a tad bit different as well. I didn’t really discuss what time period this is in, besides the fact that I stated that Dr. Sponner was born in 2034. I felt like if I didn’t talk about a specific year and just gave the impression of traveling to the future and past, it would maybe make the “timeline” easier for the player to follow. The vagueness lent to the abstraction, with little to no specificity the player can just focus on what they’re looking at while they play.  

I feel like all the videos and activities we have used to practice with bitsy have made it way easier to create more complex stories with more abstract art. Twine felt a little dull and too complicated to really let loose and create whatever I wanted, but with Bitsy it’s all laid out really simply so I feel much more comfortable with it. Creating dialogue and exits/endings was super easy after doing the Harry Potter activity, and the aquarium activity taught me how to design rooms and characters quickly and creatively. I just feel like I have a lot of fun when creating in Bitsy, it is easy to start with one room and turn the entire game into a world of characters and activities. I understand much more of how to show and not just keep telling the player what is happening, but that is mostly because with Bitsy there are so much more visual elements to use. I use transitions between exits and animate characters with the animation and transition tools. Overall I think Bitsy is wonderful and I have thoroughly enjoyed it.