You Too Can Make These Fun Games (No Experience Necessary)

I just fulfilled a childhood dream: I made a videogame. OK, it's barely a game. It's not challenging—you can complete it in a few minutes, and the one-bit graphics make old Atari games look sophisticated by comparison. But I made a game.

If I'd been more industrious in my youth, I could have made some sort of Zork-style text adventure game in the Basic programming language. But it would have been tedious work, at least with the tools I had access to at the time. More recently, I could have used one of the various point-and-click game-making tools on the market, such as GameMaker Studio or RPG Maker. But they're a little daunting, and they cost money.

Making a videogame remained a bucket list item until I stumbled on an incredibly simple open source web app called Bitsy. I started playing around with it, just to see how it worked. Before I knew it, I had something playable. I made my game in a couple of hours.

An image from House of the Living, a Bitsy game by Fred Bednarski.