Fear of the Froglion

The inspiration for this game came from a discussion where someone asked if they could make Pokemon in Bitsy. It was highly discouraged. But as someone who has had experience with Bitsy, it started giving me some ideas about what a Pokemon experience is.

The core elements of the original games (which do look like they could have been made in Bitsy) are walking in a top down overworld, and of course the battling. I knew I could mimic the battling by creating similar rooms that activated when certain “exits” were gone through. This would give the illusion that a calculation was happening, but because it is a bite sized version of a game engine, it would also have to be a bite sized version of a monster battler.

Once I finished the battle scene, I wanted to give the other element of walking through a town. The sprite for the avatar was too small for my liking, so I used a similar “clone rooms” tactic to give the illusion that the player was walking with 4 tiles of pixels. At first I made it so that just the top right quadrant moved, but if I included dialogue, then the top right quadrant would move, leaving the other tiles behind. It didn’t look good, the player was being beheaded! So I changed the cursor to be the “sun” in the sky. It kind of doesn't look like the player is moving that...

Then the story. The town with no people made me think about fear. And fighting also made me think about fear. I decided to make the game kind of about that, very indirectly, but it did inspire the themes of fear-motivated violence.

Two mods were added on at the end. First was a piece of code that made it so that music didn’t stop when dialogue started. The second was a text to voice mod written by someone else. The purpose was to create a sense of uneasiness but ultimately I decided to take it out because the voice read slower than people played.