Bitsy is about as barebones as a game engine as you can find and its not likely to cause Unreal Engine or Unity to lose sleep at night. That is entirely the point of Bitsy, its a small editor for making small games. It’s an entirely self contained set of tools for creating extremely simple games.
According to a recently published article by The Verge, the story of Bitsy’s creation is as follows:
Bitsy was born in the late summer of 2016 on a commuter shuttle bus from Seattle to Microsoft’s Redmond campus, an hour-long journey above the glistening waters of Lake Washington. Adam Le Doux, the creator of the game-making software, was working as a programmer at Microsoft while beavering away on creative projects in his spare time. But he’d hit a brick wall. In an attempt to break this stasis, he decided to try and make small, deliberately self-contained games on his way to work using his phone. The problem was no such software existed, so the programmer coded his own over a weekend, fresh for the Monday commute.
Bitsy is described as:
Bitsy is a little editor for games, worlds, or stories. The goal is to make it easy to make games where you can walk around and talk to people and be somewhere!
Bitsy is available free and open source and is written in JavaScript.
Key Links
You can learn more about Bitsy and see it in action in the video below.