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Overview
Breathe In. Burn Out. is an 8-bit game that puts players in the shoes of someone working in a game studio with a severe crunch culture: the toxic practice that overworks and places employees under intense stress. The game is meant to be an informational and educational one aiming to give perspective and empathy to those who have dealt with such environments.
Tools
The Process
What was my role?
What was the focus of this project?
The Problem
The Solution
Through the three weeks of development, I spent my time building out the rooms players would traverse through, and ensure each room felt rich in content and had something for players to interact with (and want to interact with). I utilized repetition and the passage of time to lead players through the world while giving them new opportunity in each instance to understand and empathize with the world around them.
Struggles
Struggle #1: Rooms on Rooms (on Rooms)
What was a huge struggle for me and my process with Bitsy was the fact that I had to recreate the each room multiple times in order to showcase the progression of time. This meant every asset, and sometimes creating entirely new assets for each room in order to service the situation.
Struggle #2: Conditions (Programming the How)
With every interaction, every encounter, and every situation, I needed to implement it all through bitsy. I needed to craft something focused, and program a fluid experience that successfully leads players, placing a helpful hint or new dialogue as players traverse the world.
Dialogue
A instrumental part of this project was creating the pieces of dialogue and various barks that are seen throughout the experience. This was not as simple as creating a script with each 'actor', but going into every scene(room) of the game and creating or assigning dialogue to each interactable element(known as sprites in bitsy).
Every character in every room has their own lines, which change across all times of day the players find themselves in. Every encounter with a sprite (like the wall of achievements or the water dispenser) have multiple new lines dependent on which part of the level(which time of day) they find themselves in. Each instance progresses the story in some form, feeding into the idea that their environment is slowly but surely showing it's cracks.
All Dialogue instances
Outcome
The final file consists of:
5 distinct rooms (four of which are repeated multiple times to represent change in time of day/development process)
Over 100 sprites.
153 unique tiles.
75 different dialogue opportunities (with a majority of them inhabiting multiple instances of new dialogue when interacted with more than once)
4 unique endings.
