Skelective Engineering
Inspired by musems sometimes slightly misunderstanding how to put together the skeletons they were sent. A little history on it can be found here.
Created in October 2023 for the Bitsy Fest, in colloboration with the Museum of Screens. Really happy with how it turned out, and proud it made it to the Honourable Mentions!
Please try the other games that were made for the game jam, there were some beautiful games made this time.
Made using Mosi.
V1.1 18/10/2023 - Some bug fixes!
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It took me 4 attempts and one Google search of a picture of a real giraffe skeleton to complete the puzzle. And it was quite fun! I liked how the challenge progressed from a more or less straightforward human skeleton to a quite unexpectedly difficult one of a giraffe. And I also liked the sense of humor and writing! Just overall a nice game.
My only complaint would be the lack of an option to restart the puzzle completely. The "X" option was cool, but it didn't work for the inner tiles, so if you missed those, you would have to start the game over, which was frustrating. Also, the game didn't restart after finishing, as I expected, but that's just a minor nitpick.
Thank you for playing!
My initial plan was to go from human, to Giraffe and then to T-Rex, but I ran out of time. And with how long it took you and others to make the giraffe, maybe it was a good thing :)
I didn't even think about restarting the room from fresh, but that makes sense. And yes, after finishing it I did realise you would be unable to reset the ones in the middle annoyingly. For some reason I thought I needed to have the sprites where you place the bones be 'walls', but I have just turned them into regular sprites now and it seems to work fine. At some point though, I would quite like to make a 'undo' button though I think it might be quite a coding challenge.
And yeah, Mosi doesn't seem to have a 'Game Restart' option like Bitsy does, which is one of the very few complaints I have of it. I would have to code it to reset all the sprites manually, I think, which was too much of a faff to bother with at the time.
Thank you for the feedback! I was planning on just moving onto the next game, though with everyone commenting I feel like I should keep adding to it. I saw you made something for Bitsy Fest too and will play it soon!
Oh no, the giraffe is hard! But this is fantastic, an amazing use of bitsy as a puzzle game.
Thank you for the kind words!
Yes, it is quite hard. Made harder by my slightly poor artistic skills :p
It took me 4 tries but I finally got the giraffe skeleton!
Ah, awesome! It makes me happy to someone could understand my poor art and put it together. :)
I did plan on doing a T-Rex originally, though it would probably have to be even bigger and even more complicated.
This is a really great idea for a game and the ending made me laugh. I would, however, like to have the ability to be able to undo what I've done immediately. I also didn't have an re/undo function for the giraffe at all but I don't know if that was by design.
Thank you for playing!
I seem to just have forgotten to add in the line of code that places the re/undo function after the giraffe. Have added it back in now, thank you.
And yes, have thought about adding an 'undo' feature even while building the skeleton. It will be possible, though coding wise will be quite fiddly. If I add it in at all I'd want it to allow the player to undo each bone placement in turn, so will have to save them in order, where to put them back to, etc etc.
I do want the game to encourage people to make weird skeletons, and wonder if an undo button would encourage people to make it correctly and take it 'too' seriously. Though another comment said they made a weird one by accident while trying to assemble it correctly, which I realise must be annoying also!
That's the thing - I'm another player who wants to assemble correctly. The pull to make something weird is also there but the pull to make something "correct" is stronger. How about a tradeoff? A few that you can assemble correctly if you want to and then a few where the game states that there are all these leftover bones (maybe a shipping crate goes missing) so you need to assemble something with the bits that you have and it's just not possible to make anything except a weird skeleton.
my giraffe. I liked this game except sometimes I would place pieces where I didn't mean to, especially when I was trying to move a piece into the center. It would stop at the edge.
Thank you for playing!
Yes, it seems you weren't the only one to run into that problem. I may add an undo button to try and help with it, though it will take some time coding. I've added in a re-do button after the giraffe too, as I forgot to add it.
As Mosi / Bitsy doesn't really give you button presses, I don't think there's a way for me to code it where you could work from the inside-out as you need a wall to hit. I don't think there's another way to do it, so I will try and make it a bit easier to fix mistakes at least.
This is really creative and I doubt default Bitsy can do this. Is it possible for there to be a different outcome than the obvious?
As a quick aside, there's a bug I ran into where picking up a "human" bone then going over to the X basically removes the bone from play. It doesn't softlock the game or anything but I thought you should know.
Thank you for playing!
No, I don't think default Bitsy could handle it though I have been surprised by people's ingenuity using it before. There is a 'morph avatar' function by the looks of it, but I assume you'd also need to make an ending for each place you put the bone..? It could get very convoluted. You could probably do it with the Borksy hack 'edit room from dialog' function I think.
I would definitely recommend Mosi if you want to do more scripting intentsive things with Bitsy. I've tried Bipsi a few times, but I find Mosi very easy to use. It has a very good documentation too.
As for the outcomes, there is a 'good' and 'bad' outcome, depending on how anatomically correct you are. Though it's mainly only the dialogue at the end.
And yes, thank you for pointing that out about the human bones. In a rush to finish it in time I didn't playtest enough. After playing around my skeleton ended up with two pelvis' so clearly something is wrong. I will fix these issues and think updating it with the other comment's inputs too.
The other commentors also ran into problems, so just want to thank you again for playing despite the issues!
Wow!! As soon as I moved the first bone I went "OOOH SO COOL". Love that you added a redo button as well. Such a cool idea.
Thank you for playing and your kind words!
Yes, I knew I needed a redo button. I wanted people to make weird skeletons, but I did assume some would want them to be correct also :)