10 years of bitsy: announcing the bitsy archive and #bitsyjam 100!

[post originally published on blog.adamledoux.net]

bitsy will be ten years old in october!

it's a little hard to believe, much less know exactly what to say about it - 2016 feels like several lifetimes ago, and 2016-me like a different person - but i know i can say that a large part of who i am today is due to the amazing people and communities i've been lucky enough to meet and be part of via this little game engine

to celebrate bitsy's 10th anniversary, i'm doing a couple of things:

first, i'm excited to announce the bitsy archive! this is a new area of the bitsy website that collects every released version of bitsy in one easily accessible location - if you want to go back and use an older version, now you can without having to hunt it down in the git repo and spin up a local server! the archive also links to the source code for each version so you can explore how that has changed over the years as well. the archive is online now, so please check it out!

second, starting on october 15th i'll be hosting the 100th #bitsyjam over on itch.io :D this will be an extra-special, extra-long (100 days!) bitsy jam - it will also be the last one! i've been running these jams for nearly ten years (back when we used to name things after their "hashtags" on some website called "twitter dot com") and over time interest in them has been slowly declining, so rather than keep it going until it totally runs out of steam, i thought it would be better to end on a celebratory note. (that said, this is just the last one i am hosting personally: other folks are more than welcome to host their own bitsy jams if they want!)

ok, that's pretty much it! the last thing i want to mention is that i am still (slowly) working on bitsy v9 - so stay tuned for news about that at some indeterminate point in the future :P

thanks for making games with bitsy! <3