BITCH HELL has been me and evie's on-again-off-again pet project since it was first conceived in March and April 2022. i always loved evie's way of describing our development process: "created during chaos". we originally made the game for the TRANS FUCKING RAGE JAM hosted on itch.io, and they were a big influence in shaping the kind of angry, grimy, aggressively transgender game we wanted to make.
the first version of BITCH HELL (v0.1) was created during a very strange time in me and evie's life. we had been living together for a little over 6 months and we were still trying to figure out how our creative processes could work together. we essentially put ourselves through a gauntlet to get the first prototype done in an extremely short timeframe. i don't know if i could ever do that again... but it was very illuminating and taught me a lot about creating art under time pressure.
the name and original vision of the game were all evie's doing, and i think it's still her baby at heart. i've provided the programming and "game design" aspects of the development, but the art and ideas were all her. i love it for that.
right about now you might be wondering why it took over 2 years to go from the original jam version to BITCH HELL v1.0, and the reason is simple: game development is hard and it takes a long time. but if you're reading this, you probably knew that, so let me go into some detail. immediately after the jam prototype was published, we knew we had to revamp it. we quickly published v0.2 in late April 2022 which had a few minor bugfixes, but after that it was largely radio silence from us. that's because we had bigger plans.
in comes ULTRA BITCH HELL, our plans for a much longer remake of BITCH HELL that never really came together. it had fully modeled 3D weapons, new enemies and a bunch of new levels planned. unfortunately it was just too big for us, and i basically got cold feet and didn't put in enough time and effort to make it a reality. these things happen.
throughout the end of 2022 and into 2023 our ideas for a BITCH HELL sequel or remake languished. i was not yet medicated for my ADHD so any motivation i had to work on stuff usually fizzled out within hours. it wasn't until January 2024 that i was finally able to go back and release the v0.3 update, which contained fixes and quality-of-life improvements that were simply long overdue. that version took so long that i felt kinda embarassed releasing it, but in the end it was just self-deprecating thoughts taking hold.
after me and evie released v0.3 and we were drawing up plans for v0.4, we started having a lot of ideas for how to combine the ULTRA BITCH HELL assets with the original game to finally push the game to "finished" status. it wasn't until June 10th 2024 that i finally sat down and created a brand new engine template for BITCH HELL, with a whole new codebase and original assets copied over. over the next two months i slowly recreated the functionality from the original game with new code, and new assets from evie. it was a slow but very rewarding process.
it must have been sometime in September that evie decided she wanted to release the game on Halloween, so we set the deadline. thanks to my new ADHD medication and a lot of coffee, i was able to get the game to where it is now. and i've never been more proud of BITCH HELL than i am now. it's really my favorite project i've ever worked on. it's queer, it's angry, it's loud, and it's even got music by katie dey! what more could i ever ask for?
thank you for playing our game. and remember, LIFE IS BITCH HELL.