Basic first person navigation in Bitsy

Welcome to the Third Crypt. The last light lies here.

Third Crypt is a tiny first person, 1-bit exploration game created using Bitsy, a really simple to use tile-based game editor made by Adam Ledoux. Although Bitsy is designed to create tile-based games it has a very nice sprite editor and room system so I decided to retrofit it to a tile-based first person view. You can see the early proof of concept which uses only a few tiles.

The navigation is achieved using the little minimap at the top. The flashing indicator is the player 'avatar' which moves around when the user gives arrow key input. Around the avatar I have created 'exits' which immediately go to a new room. There are four rooms for each area on the map. Every time the user gives left or right input it goes to a new room showing the new direction the player is facing as indicated by the compass in the top right.

It works surprisingly well and only took an hour or so to get working. The hard part is managing all the rooms. I have not yet added any interactive sprites with dialogue and I can't think how to do it in my current system unless they are always against a wall which might make sense anyway.

I'm looking forward to fleshing out the crypt and its inhabitants and sharing progress over the next day as I add some more to the game. If you have any initial impressions I'd love to hear them, you can find me on twitter @jctwood.