Sandy’s Securities

Sandy’s Securities is a tiny game I developed in Bitsy in a week as a mini-project for class.

All writing, coding, and art were done by me.

The original idea was to introduce players to the idea of saving for the future while posing at least one moral choice. Where there is only one ending in the game, the players can decide for themselves if they made a “good” decision regarding the moral choice. This decision was made due to time constraints, and I do wish that I had had time to include a second ending in which the player is unable to complete their goal of depositing money in the bank.

When considering the time constraint, I’m relatively happy with the end result, though I do believe that this game needs a revisit to clean up some of the more confusing aspects. The limiting factor of the simplistic graphics mean that some players miss doors and cave entrances in some scenes. If I were to redesign these stages, I would try to make the doors more apparent through use of visual guides an signs directing the player to different areas.

Spoiler: The most difficult aspect seems to be alerting the player to the fact that they have an option regarding who should receive the knife. This is the moral option referred to above. The game text strongly hints at this object’s importance in brining one of the NPCs to justice, but some players missed this choice while playing. I think the fact that you can get the knife before you converse with either of the quest-givers leads to a situation in which you actually don’t have the choice who to give the knife to: you just give it to the first person you speak to instead. I think I could work around this by having one of the quest-givers provide a key to the cavern where the knife is found so that the player is forced to interact with at least one of the NPCs in question before interacting with the object. However, even once implemented, there’s no guarantee that the player will read the story text.

This leads to another issue: how to enforce reading of the text? If I were to revisit this game, I would include “secret” doors/entrances that can be accessed only once you speak to a character who tells you about the entrance. These entrances would then be accessible through player knowledge. Some players would certainly be irked by the need to read more, but I think that it’s important enough to this tiny game that it would be worth it to make a few players frustrated by the need to read in exchange for greater understanding of the story by the majority of the player base.