"beachcombing" update - May 2024

Hello!

I didn’t think I’d be updating this game, but here I am…

I was recently approached for an exhibition and the curator picked this game, so I figured I’ll replay it to see if it’s OK to exhibit (as in, not totally weird and embarrassing for me), and make a version of it with a self-resetting timer and all that nice, exhibition-friendly stuff baked in.

Upon replaying it I realised how very, very slow the game runs on all browsers now. This was an issue that plagued novena back in 2021 which I then promptly fixed, but this game never got that treatment, because not that many people play it, and it’s “just a jam game”. I forgor…

Also upon replaying it, I forgot how cute and charming this game is. Very different from almost everything I have on my itch page, save for works like Touch Melbourne which is also cute and charming.

Anyway, since there are still people who do play this game, I made a new and updated version of it in Bitsy v7.2 (which is still the easiest version of Bitsy for me to use, oops).

What’s new:

• Increased colour contrast. The original version was very low-contrast, which I think always sort of bothered me, but since this was a jam game I didn’t really bother fiddling with it too much. Almost 6 years later as a person who cares a lot more about accessibility, I decided to bother fiddling with it a little bit, and I’m pretty happy with how the new version looks. I also added a few splashes of colours here and there because I can.
• Added directional avatar hack. No real reason to do this, but no real reason not to either. It’s a good hack, what can I say?
• The game just runs better. No more spongey, slow controls and excruciating text rendering… this should be a lot nicer to play.

NOTE: I’ve also re-exported the original version of the game (low-contrast and all) to v7.2, and you can still download it if you’re into that sort of thing.

That’s it! This is a small jam game that I don’t really think about, so revisiting it was interesting. Sometimes I wonder if I should take these old projects offline because they’re old and don’t really reflect the trajectory of my body of work in a significant way, and maybe some day I’ll move them off itch.io and onto a personal archival website or whatever… but for now, they persist. Enjoy.

Cecile