Release Notes

Welcome to The Last Best Western in Ohio.

This is a short little game that I made in the bitsy game engine. (My first!) It's about five to ten minutes long, depending on how long you like to linger in hallways.

TLBWO is my first bitsy game ever, and certainly my first "complete" game. In the summer of 2023 I spent a night in a crummy hotel during the midst of a cross-country drive. I ate a grocery store deli sandwich in bed while reading Rise of the Videogame Zinesters by Anna Anthropy and thinking about how rough the previous year had been, and how rough the year ahead of me was shaping up to be. I heard some teenagers on a soccer team yelling from the room across the hall. I drank a beer from the gas station across the street. I missed my cat.

I read some more of Anthropy and got swept up in her call for people to make more and more personal games—"sketches" of games, maybe— through tools and engines with increasingly lower technical barriers to entry (at the time, Anthropy was writing years before Adam Le Doux created bitsy, but there's definitely a clear thread there).

Here's a little excerpt from Anthropy's book that I found very moving, despite my sad sandwich and sad beer and sad hotel bed:

"What do we gain from giving so many people the means to create games? We gain a lot more games that explore much wider ground, in terms of both design and subject matter. Many of these games will be mediocre, of course; the majority of work in any form is mediocre. But we'll see many more interesting ideas just by the sheer mathematical virtue of so many people producing so many games without the commercial obligations industry games are beholden to. Remember, I'm talking about hobbyists, people who make games in their spare time with the tools they have on hand. And even if a game isn't original, it's personal, in the way a game designed to appeal to target demographics can't be. And that's a cultural artifact our world is a little bit richer for having." (11)

TLBWO is my first finished mediocre game, and I'm looking forward to making more mediocre games.

Now it's late and I'm going to bed.

-Brendan