Knocking
Game built in Bitsy and Bitsy Color +. Use the arrow keys to navigate the game and text. Please play with sound on! The music and audio cues are part of the experience. I’ll chat about the process of creating the game below!
Spoilers below!
This idea came to me years ago, but I wasn’t sure how to tell the story. I wanted to create a story with an eerie atmosphere in a single location. What happens when you can’t leave a place you felt safe in? Honestly, it shouldn’t be surprising that the idea happened around the time everything went into lockdown for COVID. Being intimately aware of every nook and cranny of my apartment created a feeling of unease. I was also fully diving into horror fiction, especially short stories. In the end, the fear of a knocking that shouldn’t be happening formed. As I tried to make it work as a short story or a series of journal entries, it never felt right. So I shelved it.
I have always loved video games and the way they tell stories, so when a narrative designer introduced me to Bitsy, I realized a game was the perfect way to create this interactive story. It allows the player to feel the same tension as the character. You even get the experience of choosing when to go to the door to consider confronting the knocking.
Over the course of weeks, I plotted out the elements of the game. First, designing a flowchart of the story. Then building the apartment piece by piece, tile by tile. Since Bitsy uses (mostly) static images built in two-color squares, it was a slow process of testing how they looked together and worked as the story continued to unfold. This even became more challenging as I had to return back and revise some of the floorplan and furniture later, adjusting dimensions of multiple tiles.
Then came attaching each stage of the story. If you’re not familiar with Bitsy, to change elements of the setting, you have to essentially teleport the character to a new scene. So having the player shift to a modified layout but remain in the same location required creating multiple iterations of the apartment: day, night, undisturbed, steadily getting cluttered, shrinking just a smidge in total space due to either fraying nerves or something supernatural.
The audio is made in Bitsy as well. I wanted to make a simple background tune that steadily became more and more dissonant. I began playing with adding additional notes at points, extending pauses between notes, and shifting notes up or down a pitch. I also experimented with how the knocking noise should sound. To have players encounter it, I had some visible dots that trigger it and text, but other areas where the knock noise is completely invisible, emulating a “jump scare” in maybe an unscary, but still unexpected, way. In the end, I’m extremely happy with the sound design and how unsettling the background music is.
It was also a fun challenge figuring out how to include a few branching paths in these entrance/exit permutations that came back together and to have two possible endings. Do you go to confront the knocking at the end, pushing through your barricades? Or do you curl up, safe and sound, back in bed?
This wasn’t without a significant challenge. At one point, I took a two day break, and when I returned the transitions between some of the rooms were no longer working. Players no longer could move on after shutting the blinds or jump between some of the days. I tried to delete and re-add these transitions and rules, but nothing seemed to work or connect. I explored the Bitsy community and found others having the same issue and not knowing what to do.
At the same time I found out about Bitsy Color+, a modification of the platform that allows more colors. On a whim, I imported my game data into Bitsy Color+ and everything worked immediately. I was able to add the final finishing touches, but had to sacrifice forcing players to close the blinds before moving onwards. While some of you may now have missed this element of the protagonist’s growing paranoia, I felt it was a fair cost for me to be able to complete the story.
I’m really proud of what I was able to create and that this story found its home. I might return to the story some day when I have more skill at other game design platforms. I wonder what it would feel like in first-person?
