Dawson College / Pixel Art and Game Design with Bitsy

The Skins team is back at Dawson College for another round of our Pixel Art and Game Design with Bitsy workshops! With our new cohort of excited students from Dawson’s Journey’s program, we expanded our curriculum to span across six sessions, rather than our usual four. We were thrilled to have a larger cohort this year with over 25 participants! All the students were very motivated, working hard on their games every session.
We changed up our usual workshop format by bringing the students to our lab at Concordia’s EV building for a tour and a brainstorming sessions. We split into groups and discussed the basics of narrative storytelling. Our group discussions focused on establishing the important aspects of a good story, and how interactive stories differ from novels and short stories. We challenged the students to determine the start and end of the story, without focusing on what their game looks like.
Then, for the remaining sessions we planned out lessons in small, teachable portions and allowing students to play with the engine themselves. With a gaming engine like Bitsy, it can be difficult to show all its controls at once, and teaching small portions that would be most useful for the stage of their development is the best for retaining new information. As well, with the classroom size, we were so happy to see the collaborative effort amongst the students themselves – many worked together on games, and helped each other out on their own time.
Check out some of the incredible games the students made – we love a longer Bitsy workshop because participants can truly build out their worlds in detail!