b r 1 Press Kit

Play b r 1

The basics

Developer: Pippin Barr
Release: 23rd May 2018
Platform: Browser (mobile- and tablet-friendly)
Code repository: https://www.github.com/pippinbarr/b-r-1/
Price: $0.00

Who is this Pippin Barr guy?

Pippin is an experimental game developer who has made games about everything from Eurovision to performance art to dystopian post-work futures. He’s an Assistant Professor in the Department of Design and Computation Arts at Concordia University in Montréal. He is also the associate director of the Technoculture, Art, and Games (TAG) Research Centre, which is part of the Milieux Institute for Arts, Culture, and Technology.

Description

A room! A trunk! A tube! A bed! A radiator! A light! A landscape! A darkness! A separation! A floating in air! A doubling! An intersection! And more! And more!

b r 1 (Bitsy Realty 1) is a remake of my earlier game v r 1 which was itself an attempt to “remake” Gregor Schneider’s u r 1 from his The Haus u r project. Where v r 1 was created in Unity, b r 1 is created in Bitsy, leading to important differences between the two games, including moving from 3D to 2D, physic-simulation to none, high resolution to 8x8 tile-based graphics, sounds versus silence, a first-person experience to a third-person experience, real-time versus turn-based, and on and on. It’s in these differences that I’m trying to explore how Unity and Bitsy and both different and, in important ways, the same. What does it mean to try to create the ‘same’ experience in two radically different engines? What are the two engines good at? Bad at? Ignorant of? Emphatic about? This ‘translation’ throws these ideas into relief.

Where v r 1 grapples with Schneider’s u r 1 by creating digital/virtual variations on the same space in different configurations made possible by a 3D game engine, b r 1 grapples with both v r 1 and u r 1 by seeking to recreate v r 1’s strange spaces in Bitsy’s 2D tile-based world, and also seeking to keep the spirit of u r 1 alive in its representations. Naturally, there are spaces from v r 1 that simply couldn’t be replicated, and in those cases I focused on creating Bitsy-specific replacements that used Bitsy’s affordances (such as room-specific palettes and animated tiled). The result is an exploration of Bitsy’s ability to reproduce v r 1’s spaces, and also its own possibilities for creating variations on the original u r 1 room.

History

I started b r 1 as a way to make something in Bitsy, which I was very interested in as a simple but powerful game-creation environment. After started out with Bitsy trying to make something “weird” but having no direction, I realised it could be interesting (to me at least) to try to recreate some of my own work as a way to grapple with the environment’s possibilities. Originally I was going to remake my games v r 1, v r 2, and v r 3 as a package I would call v r 4. I liked the idea that Bitsy, too, creates virtual realities. While working on the v r 1 translation, though, it became apparent that it would be a big enough project to be self-sustaining. Calling it b r 1 at that point seemed funny and appropriate.

b r 1 was also made to some extent as a model example of my current understanding of the game development documentation approach I’m working on with my colleagues Rilla Khaled and Jonathan Lessard. We’ve come to call this approach the MDMA (for me it stands for Method for Design Materialisation and Analysis) and it forms a fundamental part of our Games as Research project. By making a small and nicely self-contained project, I figured it would be a good way to demonstrate the documentation process.

If you’re interested in the top-level ideas engaged with in this project you can read its [[Closing Statement]], an essay that explores its key themes. If you want to, you can also read a blow-by-blow history of the game’s development by reading its process documentation wiki and by going through its commit history.