Bitsy is a wonderfully constrained little game maker for making tiny story-driven game-like experiences. Like, picture a Zelda game, but with a minimal color palette and the only thing you can do is walk around and talk to other characters. Thanks to this simplicity there’s a huge community around Bitsy and many many Bitsy-made games. Another simple thing is Bitsy’s game file format, which is just plain text. This makes it easy to have Bitsy as a “compilation target” and write programs that create Bitsy games. This is exactly what I’ve done!

Over the summer I put together a simple one-page web app that generates random mazes and code for the Bitsy game maker so that these mazes can be directly copy-n-pasted to Bitsy. Why? Maybe you want to have a maze as part of your game, then this gives you a place to start! Or maybe you just like to play autogenerated maze games. But mostly I was just fascinated with Bitsy and wanted to try something out. You can try out the maze generator here:

The maze generator allows you to create everything from a small one-room maze to an impossible 9x9 room maze. Here is an example of a reasonable 2x2 maze game generated by the maze generator (click to play!):

The source code for the Bitsy maze generator can be found here. The maze generator uses a modified version of the Growing Tree algorithm which you can read more about on Jamis Buck’s blog where you’ll also find a wonderful series of posts explaining different maze generation algorithms.