Stake Out

Stake Out is an adventure game made in 72 hours in Bitsy for the SA Game Jam 2026. The theme of the jam was "People Watching".

As an agent of DOOM (the Department Of Obstreperous Monsters) you have been assigned to track down a dangerous vampire. It's been stalking a busy office building. Take your surveillance equipment and take precautions!

I experimented with a few new things for this game, including adding audio, which is still not working properly (see below), and trying a different controlling/movement interface for scanning around the building so that players wouldn't get trapped in exits.

Controls: Press the arrow keys to move, advance the dialogue boxes, and move the game forward if nothing seems to be happening.
On the building facade screens, look for the control icons: to move to different parts of the building move onto the directional arrows and to switch between vision modes move onto the "*" [sun] or "°C" [temperature] icons.

 

Known Bugs:
• Potential Game Breaking Bug: If you go back into a room you have already visited you won't be able to visit all the rooms before the game eventually auto advances because I used an incorrect variable system to monitor the player progress and didn't have time to fix it by the time I realised.
• Game Breaking Bug: If the last icon you investigate is a room you can enter you will get stuck on the screen right after and then thrown back to where you were and won't be able to progress in the game. I have an idea of how to fix this but couldn't do it before the jam ended. To circumvent it, leave a closed window or one of the upper stairwell window icons for last.
• The music doesn't play in all browsers.

 

Credits:

• Mandy J Watson (@mandyjwatson on Bluesky):
  Game design, narrative design and writing, programming, art, music, and audio.
• Additional Font:
  Munro by Ten By Twenty (SIL Open Font Licence Version 1.1)

Software Used:

• Audacity, BeepBox, Bitsy, GIMP, and Notepad.