Death Row

The purpose of the project is to recreate death row in Bitsy. Granted, this is an outsider's interpretation of what it may be like, since I've never seen death row in real life. I'm only using various articles and videos as reference.

deathpenaltyinfo.org https://tinyurl.com/4uz78972

ncadp.org  https://tinyurl.com/3kn7mvyw

The Infographics Show  https://tinyurl.com/2yn327k8 & https://tinyurl.com/2p8c3rwc

nytimes.com https://tinyurl.com/yjvt983u & https://tinyurl.com/2z32rc4w

Many of the characters in the game are based on real people. The prisoner on the right is based on Joe Arridy, the middle prisoner is loosely based on John Wayne Gacy and the chef is based on Brian D. Price, using real quotes.  The characters in the game are all nameless though, to be left ambiguous. There are conditional variables like if the player goes into the kitchen, looks at the triple cheeseburger and talks to the prisoner on the left again, they'll ask if their cheeseburger looks tasty. This is hopefully to make the world feel more alive/real. The player plays as a warden/executioner, and just like a real-life executioner, they have no idea which victims are or aren't guilty, they are just doing their jobs. 

I was more limited than I expected, possibly because I don't know how to use Bitsy that well. I wasn't sure how to do conditional exits, for example. After the player executes a prisoner, I wanted it so they could go back to the cells and see that there's been a note left behind by the prisoner they just executed that they would be able to read. I wasn't able to properly implement this, so unfortunately all the executions are back-to-back with each other.

Statistically, 4.1% of incarcerated individuals are wrongfully sentenced to death: a conservative estimate, so it's always a possibility that the inmates could be genuinely innocent. The intention is that the prisoner on the left is genuinely sorry for what they've done, but they've run out of time and now know it's too late. The middle prisoner is guilty but claims innocence, once it's too late for him on the injection gurney, he admits his crimes. The prisoner on the right is innocent, which is obvious after saying they are based on Joe Arridy, someone wrongfully framed for crimes he didn't commit due to his mental incapacities. I'm not sure if players without reading this would know which prisoners are or aren't innocent. I hope the game makes people question the morality of death row.