# Bitsy Brood X Cicada Game
#🔧
[[Gamedev]]
I want to write a little game about the cicadas.
What is the best process for designing such a game? I am going to start brainstoming ideas for different panels, noting facts, linking to texts. Once I have some panels and their content or roughly a direction, I want to look for artistic inspiration and how to best present the message using the bitsy gamestyle.
I should also learn bitsy by starting with one of the simpler panels and implementing that.
# Cool Cicada Facts
* Every 13 or 17 years, prime numbers so that they sync less with predators that have shorter cycles.
* Females lay about 400 to 600 eggs
* Many fall prey to predators
* Ground temperature triggers the emerging (64 F), but not only. Climate change influences the period
* Edible, and people use them for salads and smoothies
* 2 big eyes and 3 small eyes in between.
# Bitsy storytelling techniques
* I can use text effects for sounds.
* repetition
* progression of time to tell story
* backtracking
* using color to show the progression of the day
# Panel ideas
Here’s some ideas for panels:
## Tell the story of Andreas Sandel May 9 1715
from [The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography - Google Books](https://books.google.com/books?id=TP47AAAAIAAJ&pg=PA448#v=onepage&q&f=false)
Location:
* church grounds
* holes in the ground and the roads
* woods
* poultry stable
* swine stable
* slits in trees
Interaction items:
* ground holes could be seen everywhere
* shells out of which they crawled
* flying cicada
* peculiar noise from the forest
* slits in the bark of trees
* worms withering the branches
* swine eating
* poultry eating
* person eating as john the baptist
Extracts from the Journal of Rev Andreas Sandel, Pastor of Gloria Dei Swedish Lutheran Church, Philadelphia
Maybe I can make the whole game about the diary of Sandel. There is enough interaction that I can space across multiple scenes. I can complement those details with additional information about cicadas.
And lyricism. Can I add some kind of story tension? Maybe add some mystery? Yes, I don’t need to mention it’s the cicadas at all at first. The Locust / Biblical connection is a potent tool.
Some list of things that can be made to be mysterious clues:
* noise in the forest
* shells on the ground
* holes in the ground
* slits in the bark of trees
* withered branches
* worms in the slits
Also I don’t need to be true to history or to nature necessarily.
### John the baptist and locusts
John the baptist ate only honey and wild locusts.
> His preaching was sweet to the multitude, but was of short continuance; and honey has sweetness, locus a swift flight but soon fall to the ground.
> - Rabanus Maurus
From: [Did John the Baptist Eat like a Former Essene? Locust-Eating in the Ancient Near East and at Qumran on JSTOR](https://www.jstor.org/stable/4193332?seq=1)
James H. Charlesworth argues that eating locusts and honey identifies John as a former Essene. Locusts and Honey were acceptable foods for the Qumranites and the Essenes.
## Rooms
## Title screen ideas