Too many gamedevs and only one game: a continue-the-Bitsy minijam: the finished workshop game

This A MAZE (the one that took place the year or our lord 2025), I hosted a workshop called "Too many gamedevs and only one game: a continue-the-Bitsy minijam".

The premise, as stated on the workshop page, seemed simple...

"A tiny gamejam with a chaotic premise: Bitsy, but we all take turns building on the same game. We will form tiny teams of developers, and each team will take a turn building on the same Bitsy game. One team will have a limited time to realize their vision, then the next team will take over to do the same. Ongoing results will be displayed on a projector so we can all scheme and plan until it's our turn. Join us as we incrementally and collectively build one game!"

But there was a twist!

The workshop did something I don't think was done with Bitsy before.
We hooked up four mice to a computer, and each mouse was visible, as well as active, AT THE SAME TIME on the screen.
Imagine four cursors all visible, floating around like flies across the desktop, all able to give input AT THE SAME TIME.

This was made possible via MouseMux:

"Our goal is to make working together as intuitive and simple as possible. Just add some extra pointer devices (mice, pens, touchpads) and (optional) keyboards and MouseMux will transform your PC into a realtime multi-user system."

We had a massive multiplayer Bitsy jam!

Since Bitsy takes place all in one window in the browser, it receives input from multiple cursors fairly well.
At the same time, you can imagine how chaotic it can be to give multiple gamedevs access to the same thing, all working on it at the same time.
So much varying vision... Shouting instructions. Discussing strategies. Wildly clicking on things. Shouting to stop clicking on things. Negotiations being had that everyone please stop so someone can write text. Pixel art competitively getting made... And snake puns...
It was wonderful.

Each team was made up of volunteers from the crowd.
Each team was subsequently very different in personalities.
Each handled the typical trials and tribulations of game development very differently. Nevertheless, they all managed to finish a room, while respecting the work of past teams. The agreed on creative rules developed organically. I thought it was interesting that people didn't go delete past work, or overwrite past creative decisions. They just naturally built on it. Kind of respecting the power given.

Things where shouted, instructions where chaotically or cohesively given (depending on the group), and a game did in fact get made.
The final team even took on the role of polish, and fixed the bugs.
Somehow people just knew how to make a game together, even if they never worked with each-other, let alone knew each-other before this.

Yes, the camaraderie forged in the peaks and valleys of gamedev bring people together. This is now fact.

I would like to highlight what a strange and wonderful experience it was to watch four different cursors float around a game tool at the same time, all finding their own role in making a game. Especially when it came to making graphical assets.
I hope you can imagine four people clicking on the same Bitsy drawing interface... somehow a shape slowly starts forming as they argue with eachother where to draw, when to stop, and what it should become.
It was kinda like in those sci-fi or crime movies when they "enhance" a pixelated image, and in all the wild scrambling dancing pixels an image forms...

This also explains many of the characters in this Bitsy game. They where manually enhanced, by professional gamedevs.

The concept of the workshop is one worth exploring further. I believe this works very well in small browser based tools like Bitsy, or Pocket Platformer, where the entirety of the game engine UI is available on the same screen.

There where some "bugs" or weird flukes that would happen, like keyboard input, but teams quickly learned these flukes and worked around them (yes, gamedevs are smart, and think on their feet!).

I certainly would like to try something like this on a live stage, with a countdown that shows how much time is left to each team, with a moderator acting like a sport commentator, with the crowd being involved more.

I can't express enough how novel, and interesting it is, to give multiple cursors power to the same "art tool" and just kinda watch what develops out of that... Because this was Bitsy, it was easy for people to figure out what to do (if they didn't know the tool enough).

The game posted here is the accumulation of effort from multiple teams.

As it turns out, and much like there can never be "too many games", there can never be "too many gamedevs".

(Cover art by a presently uncredited artist that left this drawing behind in the workshop room. If you are reading this, [your credit goes here].)
Thank you again to all the participants!