A Short and Joyful Development Period

As a creator, there are few joys more exquisite than coming up with an idea and immediately bringing it into existence. I believe the first kernel of thought with regards to A Vast and Lonely Desert came while I was watching the Jacob Geller video essay Artificial Loneliness, and within a couple of hours I was already working away in Bitsy. 

The video is mostly about Red Dead Redemption 2, and watching it was the first time I found myself wanting to play RDR2. He discusses the feeling of loneliness sometimes invoked by video games, at least when they're not trying so hard to overstimulate. I like that feeling, and I found myself wondering if it were possible to have and also share with another character. So, I took the desert wandering I saw in RDR2 and had you wander the desert with someone by your side. The rest of it came to me while I developed it, and the first draft of the game was done in a few days.

I had a couple friends over for board games, and I asked them to playtest for me while they were here. One of them had more gaming experience than the other, but neither had played a Bitsy game before. One of the things that I realized during testing is that most gamers will assume that you can do more in a game than Bitsy lets you. Both tried to do things they couldn't do; one got the idea pretty quickly and the other got frustrated. I realized that there was more I could do to guide players into doing what I wanted, and to remove suggestions of other possibilities. That was the biggest thing I got out of playtesting.

There were also some suggestions I chose to ignore. In particular, anything about adding more (more cactus varieties, a tent at the end) felt like it was going against the spirit of Bitsy.

This tweet thread from Anna Anthropy came at the perfect time. It is about text placement in dialogue boxes in Bitsy and games in general. I went over AVALD a few times to make sure all of my line breaks were intentional.

Overall, AVALD was a joy to develop, and very different from the years-long process that was Undone. It rarely seems like a good idea to act on my inspiration immediately. Sometimes those hot new ideas turn out to be stinkers when you give them a little thought, and often your time is better spent finishing the things you're already working on rather than starting something new. But I knew I could finish this quickly and get back to my other projects--at least, that was the plan before COVID-19 and isolation derailed all of my work and stole my motivation. Still, it's a lesson to keep in mind. I need to remind myself every once in a while why I like making things, or else I won't want to make things anymore.