How do I...

How do I have a locked door that opens once the player finds the key?

You can place an exit on the same tile as the key. The exit takes the player to an identical room where the door is unlocked.

You can also use the exit from dialogue hack, and have conditional dialogue on the door which will exit the player to the next room if they have met certain conditions (found the key, have enough coins to pay for entry, have spoken to the right NPC etc).

(See the ‘Tools and resources’ section for more information about hacks).

How do I have more than three colours in the palette?

This is done by editing the game data. You add the extra colours to the palette by putting each RGB value on a new line, like so:

to

Then you can assign a different colour to each of your tiles, sprites or items by adding 'COL [N]' to it in the game data. The colours are assigned using 0 based indexing, so the first colour in the palette is COL 0, the second is COL 1 etc. The first colour you add will be COL 3, the second COL 4.

How do I have more than two colours per tile?

By using the transparent sprites hack, you can layer sprites and items over tiles and have the art for the tile and the art for the sprite/item show.

(See the ‘Tools and resources’ section for more information about hacks).

How do I add extra frames of animation?

This is done by editing the game data. Two frame animations created in the Bitsy editor will look like this in the game data:

Extra frames can be added like so:

Each number in the 8x8 grid represents a square in the Bitsy drawing window, where 0 is a square of the background colour and 1 is the tile/sprite colour.

How do I change the background colour of the text box?

This is done by editing the Bitsy code. Replace the 0 at the end of each line with the R,G and B value for your desired colour.

to

How do I change my game’s title in the game data (without using the Bitsy editor)?

The game’s title (the text that appears in the opening text box) is declared on the first line under the opening script tag in your game's HTML file.

If you don’t have a title, this line will be blank.

This may be useful if you’ve downloaded your game, added hacks or made other changes, and don’t want to reupload your game to the editor to change the title.

How do I read out items and variables (and drawings) as part of the dialogue?

You can print the number of items the player has collected in dialogue like this:

Where apples is the name given to the item in the drawing panel:

You can print a variable in dialogue like this:

Variables are declared in the inventory tab:

Andrew Yolland has written a tutorial on Bitsy variables: https://ayolland.itch.io/trevor/devlog/29520/bitsy-variables-a-tutorial

You can also print tiles, sprites and items as part of dialogue. This can be useful for custom characters or symbols.

Troubleshooting

What do I do if the Bitsy editor isn’t working?

If the Bitsy editor isn’t behaving as expected, refreshing your browser is the first step.

If you’re still having issues, check that you haven’t deleted room 0 (the first room created when you started the game). If you have deleted room 0, add a new room to your game and edit the game data to number it 0. It doesn’t matter where in the game room 0 is, so long as one exists. The number for each room is above it in the game data:

What do I do if my game looks blurry?

The blurriness is caused by the default upscaling your browser applies to canvas elements. The best ways to fix this are to:

A) make sure to set itch.io embed sizes to 512x512,

B) include some 'image-rendering' CSS.

Add this to the CSS for #game and you should be covered for most browsers:

/* https://caniuse.com/#search=image-render */

-ms-interpolation-mode: nearest-neighbor; /* IE */

image-rendering: -moz-crisp-edges; /* FF 6.0+ */

image-rendering: pixelated; /* Chrome, Safari */

What do I do if the title of my game keeps disappearing?

Write your game’s title in a text editor, copy it and paste it back into the title field.

Alternately, you can edit the title in the game data. (See ‘How do I change my game’s title in the game data (without using the Bitsy editor)?’).

Tools and resources

Bitsy hacks: https://github.com/seleb/bitsy-hacks

Hacks are resuable scripts you can add to your game file to extend the functionality of Bitsy.

Borksy: https://ayolland.itch.io/borksy

Borksy is a hacking tool! Use it to customize your games and add hacks without needing a web server or any manual cut-and-paste work.

Image to Bitsy: https://ruin.itch.io/image-to-bitsy

Image to Bitsy is a tool to convert any image into a room for your game.

This document was compiled with help from the Bitsy community on Discord.

Please contact @andimlenny on Twitter with any questions or suggestions.