> We all know that modern games have become bloated, weighed down by useless features, achievements, anti piracy measures, piles of assets, and other junk. Not only that but developers are constantly taken advantage of, made to crunch for no pay, mass layoffs, etc. Lives have been ruined, and for what? So you could watch your horse poop or play dominoes in an open world game?
I am not sure that it's fair to compare a business card game to AAA games. The depth and complexity just isn't there. It's a randomly generated ski slope that you press left or right to navigate. Fun for a few minutes? Sure. But fun for multiple sessions? Not really.
I've played something like 1500 hours of Overwatch that I bought for $30. The depth of the game is just spectacular, and it keeps you coming back to play more. They add new heroes and new maps regularly. The core game itself is fun. I've made many friends. I met my girlfriend in that game.
The polish and complexity is just not comparable to a business card game. Yeah, they had to pay developers to make matchmaking servers and automatic update processes and add new heroes and code "events" and make a storefront to buy lootboxes. I don't think there's anything wrong with that. Blizzard made money. The engineers on the project made money. I enjoyed my time playing the game. It's just a totally different universe from a 30-second throwaway game.
The lesson to take away, is that anything can be simple. The question is: is the simplest possible thing even worth it? Games like Overwatch changes people's lives and become apart of them. Random skiing... good blog post I guess, but where is the impact? What would the world be like without this game?
Hi, I'm the author of the post. Thank you for your thoughts!
I certainly don't want everyone to make business card games. I do however want games that are tighter and more focused. Like imagine RDR2 without the mini games, shorter story, and just much better core mechanics. That's the game I want to play.
I will say though that philosophically a deep and complex game can already exist on a business card. Take the classic board game go for example. Someone could probably code that (minus the AI) on a business card, and it's one of the most complex games known to man that people have been playing for thousands of years.
The lesson I was going for is not anything can be simple, we already know that.
The lesson is more about how developers are so focused on making games fun that we sometimes forget that making games should be fun too. I really do believe that for any kind of artist, to create great art, it's more important to have fun creating something then what the actual end product is.
Also that there is value in simplicity, it is sometimes worth creating something that seems pointless just because it's fun. The journey towards it may yield unexpected rewards.
I don't think OP is actually suggesting that everyone should play business card skiing games instead of Overwatch. This argument is overkill. It's like critiquing a hobbyist woodworker because the Burj Khalifa exists.
I personally reject "hours of enjoyment" as a metric for value and depth of a purchased game. It's good to hear that you've had positive experiences, but the dark side is that for many it drifts towards being an addictive time-suck that eats money for nothing in return.
To each their own. I don't like Overwatch or games like Fallout simply because of the 1500 hours. I like to complete a game within a month or so. Much longer and it feels like work (work is fun too and if I'm going to get good at something, it should at least pay the bills).
My sweet spot would actually be games like Rimworld or Kittens. Something that you can find closure in about 20 hours of gameplay.
I feel like games have become so unwinnable, that there's a whole new market to pay people to win games.
>I am not sure that it's fair to compare a business card game to AAA games. The depth and complexity just isn't there. It's a randomly generated ski slope that you press left or right to navigate. Fun for a few minutes? Sure. But fun for multiple sessions? Not really.
You'd be surprised. People still enjoyed playing Tetris, which has equally minimal mechanics, after decades...
I think he’s making an argument that you can make games with much less code than we do now, not a serious argument that we should only make games that fit on a business card.
That's literally what the author is saying, in the very passage you quoted. The idea of a game isn't inherently complicated, and even simple games can be most entertaining. You sound like a connoisseur of the modern PC experience, but most people in this world are not and would still like to enjoy something that's delightfully thoughtful, intriguing, and simple enough to pick up for a short time, but not so addicting that you can't drop it immediately for a real world responsibility.
> I've played something like 1500 hours of Overwatch that I bought for $30. The depth of the game is just spectacular, and it keeps you coming back to play more. They add new heroes and new maps regularly. The core game itself is fun. I've made many friends. I met my girlfriend in that game.
A lot of people could say many of the same things about Nethack -- or MUDs. Neither of which are business-card-sized, but they're closer to that extreme than to the AAA extreme.
And I should say that some games have fine tuned the experience of playing itself to absolutely frictionless level. For eg: Clash Royale, no ads, instantaneous match making(Considering how many games have agonizing lobby waits), 1v1 gameplay, so you need not have any friends available to team up, short games 3mins, varied gameplay(there are a number of cards, news ones introduced quite frequently).
What's the binary size of Overwatch? What about SLOC?
Yes there probably isn't the complexity in a business card game. But there are plenty of < 1MB games that have depth and complexity. What do the many extra orders of magnitude in the size of overwatch actually get you?
>developers are constantly taken advantage of, made to crunch for no pay, mass layoffs, etc. Lives have been ruined, and for what? So you could watch your horse poop or play dominoes in an open world game?
Hard to feel too bad about people working on leisure products.
I'm sure if you swapped out Golf/NASCAR, people here would be less sympathetic.
I'm not sure AAA games have more depth and complexity. Usually, modern AAA games are just optimized for more polygons, yes there are minor outliers but I do believe business card games can have a fight in terms of complexity with a significant number of AAA games.
Well, 1500 hours, or 2 months in a row, thats a bit of a sad story. Not everybody here wants to waste their lives like this, there is much more to life. It may not feel like it, but once you discover properly amazing things you can do in your life (exotic travelling, adrenaline sports, whatever makes you tick), this behavior will look pretty bland and boring.
I have a colleague like this, and boy does he regrets wasting his life with online games of his era. Time that you can't bring back and spend in a better way.
So imagine, for those of us willing to spend maybe 10-20 minutes per day max at some simple fun (if at all), at our time, this kind of game is a blessing. Because you know, life out there, in analog world, can be pretty great and better than anything digital can bring.
People are taking this awfully seriously for what is pretty clearly a tongue-in-cheek writeup. An article doesn't have to be an April Fools joke to be fun, nobody's obliged to be literal in all they say.
Less bloated software is always a good idea, I am a bit concerned with the idea that smaller source equals better programs. It seems to me that by sacrificing source size he has lost some readability, his example may be <1K but it's at the cost of increased difficulty debugging, porting and modding. IMHO removing formatting just to reduce source size and or line count is as bad as loading a huge library only to use one of said library's functions.
I agree. Code is ultimately for human consumption, so optimize for human readability and good organization.
That is of course very different to bloat. Bringing in hundreds of dependencies, tracking, analytics and using engineering patterns that are over-complex for the use case are probably habits we coule get better at in the industry.
It looks like a fun programming project..However, I am getting lost as to the purpose. Why write something so hard to comprehend just to get it into ~< 1K unless the only purpose is to get it small? Why not a larger game that is more fun to play? Why not a larger game that is still tight code, but good to teach game mechanics?
Hi, I'm the author of the post. The reason I made it is because I've already worked on a ton of other games and I wanted to try something different!
I've worked in the AAA industry for years on many games. Just recently on Doom, I remember that code was so bloated you could open "hands.cpp" and just hold page down for days. I've also released many games on my blog, like close to 40 games on there.
So the main point is just try creating something different. Maybe for you it's not writing tiny code, maybe it's something else that seems pointless but you know you will have fun doing it and at least create something in the end. Trust me, it will be worth it.
IMO art is all about working within constraints. i think this might be some of the most beautiful (if not maintainable) code out there. No body needs to maintain a picasso, just preservation.
I think the concept here is like Code Golf. It can be fun to just write code that meets certain odd requirements, even if the end product is nothing super special.
This reminds me of early BASIC games that would run on IBM PC, compatibles, and other early computers with BASIC interpreters. I remember one such game that was almost exactly this.
I recall typing this exact game into the old Amiga, in the AMOS Professional interpreter, from a code listing in some magazine. It was not a very long code listing, but significantly more than 960 bytes! It had sound effects, too, and I think it scrolled the opposite direction. I guess that made it a racing game, not a skiing game.
That ski game reminds me so much of the Olympic Games Pack that Microsoft sold as an add on to the original games (Solitaire, Minesweeper etc.) that can installed with Windows back in the day.
I must say that those little mini games were some of the most enjoyable ones I've ever played. Useful to burn a few minutes while waiting for compile to finish or a call to be returned. I've never really gone for any really immersive games in my time.
Nowadays, my favourite game to kill a few minutes at a doctor's surgery or something is F-Sim. It doesn't classify as a simple game, but just 2 minutes as a test of skill to shoot a random approach and landing in the Space Shuttle and I am happy.
I remember metrics such as how long can you keep playing it, e.g. people still play Kong or PacMan or WoW, different styles, different depth, but each has its own crowd. Another metric is 'how long does it take to finish' and we know that for games like WoW or Fortnite, it is 'eternity'. I find this more as an interesting notion, get people to appreciate the format and then develop it to something else, but for some reason (most) people have rejected those pixels and are on-board to far larger widths and heights, and in colour. I do not want another WAP when I have 4G though.
I do admire and respect the effort and the skill though!
I'm assuming that the business card size restriction is an April Fool's joke. There's already a pretty big movement of people dissatisfied with the big AAA games: the indie video game scene. I can't believe someone in the video game world wouldn't know about that.
Actually, now I wonder if the whole post was actually supposed to be taking the piss out of indie game developers? If so, that's pretty damned elitist, as there are many many many good indie games that I'd happily play over most AAA titles. Plus there are great AAA titles that started life in the indie game scene, like Portal.
Hi, I'm the author of the post. I actually am an indie dev myself and have many smallish games as well as worked in AAA for years.
I think indie developers tend to get it right more often, but anyone can fall into the wrong approach of over-complicating their games with needless features that actually detract from the fun.
Like take for example RDR2. Imagine if instead of having all those silly mini-games, they just polished the core combat and movement mechanics more. That's the game I want to play.
I guess I was trying to say a few things with this post, but one big part is that removing stuff from a game and making it simpler is often better then adding more stuff. I talk much more about that in my epic js1k post coming soon!
This reminds me of the PICO-8 [0] environment used on the PocketCHIP [1]. It supports encoding the full game data into a picture that looks like a cartridge [2].
> Pico-8 games and the program's interface are limited both to a 128x128 pixel, sixteen-color display, with a 4-channel audio output.
> The .p8.png format is a binary format based on the PNG image format. A .p8.png file is an image that can be viewed in any image viewer (such as a web browser). The image appears as the picture of a game cartridge.
> The cart data is stored using a stegonographic process. Each Pico-8 byte is stored as the two least significant bits of each of the four color channels, ordered ARGB. The image is 160 pixels wide and 205 pixels high, for a possible storage of 32,800 bytes.
I had 1 kB to write my games in BASIC on my Sinclair ZX18 at the beginning of the 80s. One of those games looked like that Tiny Ski in the post. I don't know how many people would have enjoyed playing it (but there weren't many great games back then for the ZX81) however I definitely enjoyed programming, playing and fixing those games.
I thought it was a card game printed by a business card company (which probably doesn't make sense anyway. I'm sure they charge more per card than other printers, and the cards would have to be sorted)
When I was a kid in the 1970's games came in a credit card sized form factor. Pacman, donkey Kong, (MAME types of games). We all had a bunch of these games with us in our bags. Each device could play one specific game.
I remember the orange coloured casing for the donkey kong game we had in the house. It was my mothers, and I eventually grew up with the original Game Boy. But it was my first game device and I played it religiously.
Brings back memories of the little "ten liner" games and other toys in Electron User magazines and similar.
Sometimes one-liner examples (it was surprising how much you could squeeze out of 253 bytes of BBC Basic).
Anyone with back-issues of that bread of magazine from back then has a little trove of inspiration for this sort of thing.
You can do a lot with small amounts of code, especially if you allow the use of complex libraries and only count the include() & calls in the byte-/character-count rather than including the whole size of the library.
This makes me think of Kairosoft (the company that makes all those relaxed, bite-sized simulation games) as one of the examples of a company sustainably making a huge number of small, inexpensive, but engaging games. I think part of their secret sauce is in how they take some of the same basic gameplay concepts and adapt them to different themes with just enough new stuff to change the gameplay loop, so the conceptual development overhead is minimized to just the new stuff.
I like the idea of business card sized pieces of useful or potentially useful code. However, it's not useful for much beyond putting it on a business card.
It's interesting that a "business card sized game" is still interesting in 2019. IE, there will be people who want to play it... a game that would have been at home in 1978.
I think there's a parallel here to film/tv. You can make a billion dollar "avatar." People like those, but there's always room for a "blair witch project" or a "clerks" that someone can decide and make.
I like small games. They force an emphasis on game design.
How about restricting yourself to QR code sized games?
The maximum size of a QR code is 2,953 bytes. You may want to use "H" error correction level instead which can recover 30% of errors.
In the post the author mentions the fps game. Anyone have insight into the mvaddnwstr function used? I can't seem to find the library it's included in yet it works, just complains about implicit declaration!
jrockway|7 years ago
I am not sure that it's fair to compare a business card game to AAA games. The depth and complexity just isn't there. It's a randomly generated ski slope that you press left or right to navigate. Fun for a few minutes? Sure. But fun for multiple sessions? Not really.
I've played something like 1500 hours of Overwatch that I bought for $30. The depth of the game is just spectacular, and it keeps you coming back to play more. They add new heroes and new maps regularly. The core game itself is fun. I've made many friends. I met my girlfriend in that game.
The polish and complexity is just not comparable to a business card game. Yeah, they had to pay developers to make matchmaking servers and automatic update processes and add new heroes and code "events" and make a storefront to buy lootboxes. I don't think there's anything wrong with that. Blizzard made money. The engineers on the project made money. I enjoyed my time playing the game. It's just a totally different universe from a 30-second throwaway game.
The lesson to take away, is that anything can be simple. The question is: is the simplest possible thing even worth it? Games like Overwatch changes people's lives and become apart of them. Random skiing... good blog post I guess, but where is the impact? What would the world be like without this game?
KilledByAPixel|7 years ago
I certainly don't want everyone to make business card games. I do however want games that are tighter and more focused. Like imagine RDR2 without the mini games, shorter story, and just much better core mechanics. That's the game I want to play.
I will say though that philosophically a deep and complex game can already exist on a business card. Take the classic board game go for example. Someone could probably code that (minus the AI) on a business card, and it's one of the most complex games known to man that people have been playing for thousands of years.
The lesson I was going for is not anything can be simple, we already know that.
The lesson is more about how developers are so focused on making games fun that we sometimes forget that making games should be fun too. I really do believe that for any kind of artist, to create great art, it's more important to have fun creating something then what the actual end product is.
Also that there is value in simplicity, it is sometimes worth creating something that seems pointless just because it's fun. The journey towards it may yield unexpected rewards.
goldenchrome|7 years ago
meditate|7 years ago
muzani|7 years ago
My sweet spot would actually be games like Rimworld or Kittens. Something that you can find closure in about 20 hours of gameplay.
I feel like games have become so unwinnable, that there's a whole new market to pay people to win games.
coldtea|7 years ago
You'd be surprised. People still enjoyed playing Tetris, which has equally minimal mechanics, after decades...
empath75|7 years ago
munificent|7 years ago
dgzl|7 years ago
That's literally what the author is saying, in the very passage you quoted. The idea of a game isn't inherently complicated, and even simple games can be most entertaining. You sound like a connoisseur of the modern PC experience, but most people in this world are not and would still like to enjoy something that's delightfully thoughtful, intriguing, and simple enough to pick up for a short time, but not so addicting that you can't drop it immediately for a real world responsibility.
bitwize|7 years ago
A lot of people could say many of the same things about Nethack -- or MUDs. Neither of which are business-card-sized, but they're closer to that extreme than to the AAA extreme.
billfruit|7 years ago
ComSubVie|7 years ago
benj111|7 years ago
Yes there probably isn't the complexity in a business card game. But there are plenty of < 1MB games that have depth and complexity. What do the many extra orders of magnitude in the size of overwatch actually get you?
toomuchequate|7 years ago
Hard to feel too bad about people working on leisure products.
I'm sure if you swapped out Golf/NASCAR, people here would be less sympathetic.
xuejie|7 years ago
saiya-jin|7 years ago
I have a colleague like this, and boy does he regrets wasting his life with online games of his era. Time that you can't bring back and spend in a better way.
So imagine, for those of us willing to spend maybe 10-20 minutes per day max at some simple fun (if at all), at our time, this kind of game is a blessing. Because you know, life out there, in analog world, can be pretty great and better than anything digital can bring.
stickfigure|7 years ago
It reminds me of a cartoon I saw 25 years ago, "the perfect airplane" drawn from various perspectives:
* The perfect airplane (pilot's perspective): Super sleek jet fighter.
* The perfect airplane (mechanic's perspective): A giant pile of access hatches in vaguely airplane shape.
* The perfect airplane (builder's perspective): A 2x4 with another 2x4 nailed across it as a wing, a smaller 2x4 nailed across it as a tail.
KilledByAPixel|7 years ago
camochameleon|7 years ago
christophilus|7 years ago
contingencies|7 years ago
v2: AskII.
v3: AskiiFree.
Sorry, couldn't resist.
MisterTea|7 years ago
Will you be here all night? How's the fish?
irfanka|7 years ago
IvyMike|7 years ago
http://www.gamebase64.com/game.php?id=12367&d=24&h=0
:)
animal531|7 years ago
I remember the Horace games quite fondly, which usually in themselves were usually just Horace themed remakes of other games.
wyattpeak|7 years ago
Hackbraten|7 years ago
The embedded video is on YouTube: https://youtu.be/PeWdBE82uLw
sigmaprimus|7 years ago
ehnto|7 years ago
That is of course very different to bloat. Bringing in hundreds of dependencies, tracking, analytics and using engineering patterns that are over-complex for the use case are probably habits we coule get better at in the industry.
vaidhy|7 years ago
KilledByAPixel|7 years ago
I've worked in the AAA industry for years on many games. Just recently on Doom, I remember that code was so bloated you could open "hands.cpp" and just hold page down for days. I've also released many games on my blog, like close to 40 games on there.
So the main point is just try creating something different. Maybe for you it's not writing tiny code, maybe it's something else that seems pointless but you know you will have fun doing it and at least create something in the end. Trust me, it will be worth it.
ilovetux|7 years ago
rococode|7 years ago
https://codegolf.stackexchange.com/
munificent|7 years ago
coolreader18|7 years ago
magoon|7 years ago
Jolter|7 years ago
cyberferret|7 years ago
I must say that those little mini games were some of the most enjoyable ones I've ever played. Useful to burn a few minutes while waiting for compile to finish or a call to be returned. I've never really gone for any really immersive games in my time.
Nowadays, my favourite game to kill a few minutes at a doctor's surgery or something is F-Sim. It doesn't classify as a simple game, but just 2 minutes as a test of skill to shoot a random approach and landing in the Space Shuttle and I am happy.
ndnxhs|7 years ago
HenryBemis|7 years ago
I do admire and respect the effort and the skill though!
joemi|7 years ago
Actually, now I wonder if the whole post was actually supposed to be taking the piss out of indie game developers? If so, that's pretty damned elitist, as there are many many many good indie games that I'd happily play over most AAA titles. Plus there are great AAA titles that started life in the indie game scene, like Portal.
KilledByAPixel|7 years ago
I think indie developers tend to get it right more often, but anyone can fall into the wrong approach of over-complicating their games with needless features that actually detract from the fun.
Like take for example RDR2. Imagine if instead of having all those silly mini-games, they just polished the core combat and movement mechanics more. That's the game I want to play.
I guess I was trying to say a few things with this post, but one big part is that removing stuff from a game and making it simpler is often better then adding more stuff. I talk much more about that in my epic js1k post coming soon!
deckar01|7 years ago
> Pico-8 games and the program's interface are limited both to a 128x128 pixel, sixteen-color display, with a 4-channel audio output.
> The .p8.png format is a binary format based on the PNG image format. A .p8.png file is an image that can be viewed in any image viewer (such as a web browser). The image appears as the picture of a game cartridge.
> The cart data is stored using a stegonographic process. Each Pico-8 byte is stored as the two least significant bits of each of the four color channels, ordered ARGB. The image is 160 pixels wide and 205 pixels high, for a possible storage of 32,800 bytes.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pico-8
[1]: https://shop.pocketchip.co/collections/frontpage/products/po...
[2]: https://pico-8.fandom.com/wiki/P8PNGFileFormat
pmontra|7 years ago
_smqs|7 years ago
leggomylibro|7 years ago
Those are cool, but I guess the games are also much bigger at tens to hundreds of kilobytes.
Fun project, thanks for sharing!
hinkley|7 years ago
ToFab123|7 years ago
ehnto|7 years ago
dspillett|7 years ago
Sometimes one-liner examples (it was surprising how much you could squeeze out of 253 bytes of BBC Basic).
Anyone with back-issues of that bread of magazine from back then has a little trove of inspiration for this sort of thing.
You can do a lot with small amounts of code, especially if you allow the use of complex libraries and only count the include() & calls in the byte-/character-count rather than including the whole size of the library.
crooked-v|7 years ago
colonelpopcorn|7 years ago
dalbasal|7 years ago
I think there's a parallel here to film/tv. You can make a billion dollar "avatar." People like those, but there's always room for a "blair witch project" or a "clerks" that someone can decide and make.
SmellyGeekBoy|7 years ago
Tepix|7 years ago
How about restricting yourself to QR code sized games? The maximum size of a QR code is 2,953 bytes. You may want to use "H" error correction level instead which can recover 30% of errors.
alpn|7 years ago
https://gist.github.com/alpn/cd16f96034c5f71f053b714ad032eaf...
emilfihlman|7 years ago
peteretep|7 years ago
seba_dos1|7 years ago
coolreader18|7 years ago
munk-a|7 years ago
curiousgeorge|7 years ago