TEMPUS

1st Room: Player goes through a space and time maze

2nd Room: Player arrives near the mine shaft and is asked to look for a cowboy’s holster

3rd Room: Player goes inside a dark mineshaft and finds the holster

4th Room: Player talks with Frank and is told where the other piece of the remote might be.

5th Room: Player meets lady who lost her necklace across a mud pit and also needs to find their way to grab the last piece of the remote: the circuit board.

6th Room: Player runs to the portal!

7th Room: Player goes through another maze of time and space.

8th Room: Player is zapped back to the present and is then chewed out by the scientist they’re shadowing; finds out he sleepwalked into the machine once again.

This game really benefited from McCloud’s concepts of abstraction, transitions and timeframe. Abstraction is exactly what Bitsy runs off of. By limiting the detail within scenes and characters, it requires the creator to get creative with what they’re trying to convey and it allows the player to sort of fill in the gaps (pg. 30). If Bitsy was too detailed, it would instantly lose it’s charm and would turn both creators and players off from it. Transitions are all about the space in between actions (or sometimes not) so when the player is going from one point to another and then back to where they started, there’s been the passage of time and growth for the avatar no matter how miniscule (pg. 165). Lastly, when it comes to timeframes, the book really made me realize that the concept of how both space and time are really interchangeable and are one in the same. If our eyes move from left to right or from one room to another, then we’re conditioned to recognize the passing of time (pg. 100). It also helps to add some sort of transition in between to really sell the fact that the player has travelled a little ways and not just walked into the next space.

The major aspect that I pulled from when it came to the theme park/video readings is that color pallet and details are everything. When we first started using Bitsy, I found it very hard to use and the design of the program felt very limiting. While I’m not amazing or anything now, I do see a big difference compared to what I first started making. I really tried to make both the Wild West color pallet and the laboratory pallets ‘pop’ while still feeling comfortable and not too overwhelming for the player. I made sure to use just enough details to convey the different areas and locations, but not too many that would stress me out or make the project more difficult than it needed to be. Everything from the dirt on the ground, water troughs or even the gadgets and gizmos in the lab were perfected until I was satisfied with how they looked and in some cases fit together. While some of these details might not be appreciated when someone is playing the game, if those details weren’t there, you would definitely notice it. I also made sure that each transition made sense and that the wavy transitions signified using the machine and that fading to black would lead to a different area.