One of my dreams is to work in video games. I’ve played a bit with Twine, adapted one of my plays and took a course with the Narrative Department a couple years back, but something always keeps me away from devoting more time to it. While I’m at my day-job at Trader Joe’s, I imagine every part of the job as a type of video game. It started with customers comparing our bagging to Tetris, and it spiraled from there. I’m working on putting all of that process together for a later date.
Today I’ve been having fun with a tool called bitsy, which lets you turn your text-based game into a very simple playable game. The simplicity is inspiring, and you stay in touch with the essential principles of gaming underneath all the (admittedly fun) bells and whistles. Really, you just have rooms, sprites, and items, with tricks you can do with a little coding. But it gave me a chance to start a demo of my Grocery Store Video Game.
The idea is you walk around this part of the store and help customers with various things. As you work to complete the tasks, you end up embroiled in other tasks, and so it creates this story in the accumulation. If I can, I want to make the choices of what you do when affect the satisfaction of the customer, but for now, even just playing in this sandbox is making sparks.
Here’s to taking first steps!
