It's the same thing every night.

In the previous post I mentioned that my class ends with a Comedy project and an Intimacy project, both designed to be challenges for students. There are two things that are very hard to do in game design: one is to make a game funny, and the other is to believably communicate a real human feeling of love and warmth.

This final exercise is a gentle introduction to representing intimacy in games. A couple lies in bed, an alarm clock blinking on the bedside. The player is the couple's cat, who is about to climb onto the bed and presumably walk all over them. Your final task: To add dialogue to this scene. Try to communicate something about the relationships being depicted here – between the couple, between the humans and cat – through the humans' dialogue. What is their nightly routine?

• The most obvious places to add dialogue are the two humans (the sprites "human1" and "human2") and the alarm clock ("nightstand"). 
• You might also use items to add dialogue triggers to the bed itself, whether invisible (perhaps representing idle chatter as the humans watch their cat find a spot to settle) or visible (a bump under the sheet where the cat steps on a tummy or attacks a foot).
• Consider adding an ending: Maybe the spot the cat finally settles down in to sleep? How might you lead the player there?
• Yes, I tried to give these 8x8 pixel characters queer hair. You can decide for yourself what their genders are.

Some great Bitsy games to check for inspo are woolf's The Nightly Routine, hellodri's Cloudspotting, and of course Berrak's 1998. I used to play through 1998 in class with all the songs queued up on Youtube, which was maybe self-indulgent, but it's who I am.