Chinook Bliss Demo
This is the first game I've ever made, a demo game for the one-week "Chinook Jargon Game Jam"! You can fight, collect items, and talk to people.
The game is made in Bitsy, both coded and drawn by myself. The sprites are all real words from "Blissymbolics" (either old or new style), which is an international language mostly gaining popularity in schools for the people with learning disabilities, although many of the symbols are in common use at airports, movie theaters and on the internet these days as well.
Originally I was trying to make a game based on a certain legend about a monster that kills and eats an old lady's brains and then lives in a cave, and the villagers go in to fight the monster. But that's too difficult for me to make right now, so you really only have the monster. Also the game doesn't have an official ending yet, but once you beat the monster you've unofficially won.
Comments
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I love how this looks. The colors and sprite style remind me of an old LCD handheld game, and using Blissymbols for environments and characters is a really neat idea. Like ASCII art, but more informative!
The gameplay was tough and a little grindy. At first I didn't understand how the combat worked, so I weakened myself by waiting until I died to heal at the doctor. But I eventually worked my way back up and defeated la-motay skukoom,
I'm not a Chinook Jargon speaker, but one of the neat things about pidgin languages is that they're made so you can pick up bits and pieces on the fly. Pairing it with some characters who spoke English, and the symbolic sprites and terrain, I was able to pick things up by context clues, and navigate the game well!
As a side note, between the cooking mechanic and my experience reverse engineering parts of the language... another interesting take on a game in this style might be a survival or crafting game, where the player is challenged to pick up a new language (or a constructed language) from context in order to survive. With the blissymbolics and a bit of teaching, it could be a really neat experience!
Congrats on making your first game, and thank you for making it. I really liked it!
Thanks for playing, and for your nice comment! Congrats for beating it as well!! And I'm really glad to hear you were able to pick some words up.
Yeah the battling is definitely a bit of a grind and too boring. I was intending on having a few more rooms and at least one more quest to make it easier but then the deadline neared and I got tired of making rooms lol. Hopefully I can slowly expand this to a full-fledged game as time goes on.
I've thought of exactly that idea of yours before, but I just haven't had the game-making experience to be able to put it into action! I can do the language side of things but not the coding. So hopefully after a few years I can also do the coding T_T Unless someone wants to pair up with me ;D