9 ms·

How to make good small games

261 points by pmarin 3y ago

pgruenbacher 3y ago
I can say my game(s): https://wdpauly.medium.com/trade-economy-and-supply-3a9eff928d7d https://wdpauly.medium.com/trade-economy-and-supply-3a9eff92... fall into the scope creep issue, but at the same time the complexity and scale is what makes it so interesting. If you enjoy tech/programming then making something addictive and fun may not be the point so much as the mental simulation you get from the project as a whole.
gallamine 3y ago
I spent hundreds of hours as a kid building small games like this with Klik n Play, then Klick and Create, which turned into The Games Factory and now lives on as Clickteam Fusion! It had a simple image editor and event based programming system that was accessible to a kid and still pretty sophisticated. Huge influence on my later programming career. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clickteam https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clickteam
koromak 3y ago
Also relevant: https://a327ex.com/posts/snkrx_log https://a327ex.com/posts/snkrx_log The developer talks specifically about choosing a small scope for a game, and clearly spends a lot of time thinking strategically about being an indie dev.
- koromak 3y ago
  ACtually this was the link I was remembering, ignore the previous one https://a327ex.com/posts/lessons_second_game https://a327ex.com/posts/lessons_second_game
- sdwr 3y ago
  The SNKRX guy is a champ. Great posts, great game, opensourced the code. Real class act and top tier game designer. I started building something from his code - https://github.com/sdwr/underlod https://github.com/sdwr/underlod
williamthyer 3y ago
I feel like this advice applies to a lot more projects than just video games.
- giraffe_lady 3y ago
  A lot of this is more or less "how to develop critical taste and apply it thoughtfully" which is no small thing and not easy to write about well for any medium. It's extra relevant in gaming too I think. Big games are very very expensive to make, and so are conservatively modeled on what works in other mediums like movies, tv, novels. Small games are where the real exploration of the dynamics and limits of the medium happens, but is held back because gamers overall have underdeveloped taste.
mrec 3y ago
"I can tell you “scope small uwu”, but if you don’t believe small games can be good in the first place, all you’ll hear is a homework assignment you have to do before you can make the games you really care about." This is both an important insight and excellent writing.
- bluefirebrand 3y ago
  The other outcome of this attitude of "make small games" is everyone just makes platformers. Don't get me wrong, a platformer is a good small game project to start with, the game can be made with a level or two in a weekend using modern tools. But even back on the NES we had way more than just platformers. Sure, a beat-em-up is a bit more technically challenging than a platformer but I think cloning a Turtles game from the NES era is probably a fairly reasonable "small game" too. Or cloning an RPG, or something like Fire Emblem, or Zelda. It's weird how everyone wants to make a metroidvania but not many Zelda-likes are out there.
  - the_af 3y ago
    > The other outcome of this attitude of "make small games" is everyone just makes platformers. I don't think so. Remember the heyday of Flash games, Kongregate (before it was spammed by MMO clones or whatnot)? Many short & sweet games that weren't platformers. Some were puzzle-solving games, some were adventure games, some were escape-the-room, some were shooters, and yes, some were platformers. I have the fondest memories from that era. I still remember the short and thoughtful "The Majesty of Colors".
    - bluefirebrand 3y ago
      That's true, a lot of simple physics games like launching turtles and visual novel style games. That era was definitely defined by enthusiast creators instead of the modern indie-studio-ification of even the simplest games.
      - the_af 3y ago
fnordpiglet 3y ago
I thought this was a good write up on why to make a small game and how to conceptualize your process, and some technical advice. I was sorta hoping it would be more “I’ve accepted I want to make a small game. How do I make a good game?” As someone who likes the idea of making small games, I don’t know the discipline and I know there must be. Writing excellent software has a variety of specific ways of thinking about software and it’s implementation, how to organize ideas, what parts to not forget to plan our carefully up front and what to discover in the doing, etc.
tmountain 3y ago
Literally every time I've set out to make a game, I've let perfectionism get in the way. Some examples: - Spending all my time thinking about how to support 10 different resolutions - Coming up with the perfect framework for managing state - Working on silly menu systems and other UI elements - Finding the perfect map builder and obsessing over data representations - Tweaking an entity component system to death - Etc Next time I set out to make something, I'm not going to worry too much about the code. If the idea has merit, I'll refactor it later if I need to. Summary--It's really easy to let details get in the way of ideas.
- slmjkdbtl 3y ago
  I have similar issues, making own game engine -> making own rendering engine -> making own scripting language -> making own OS, my desire for custom tool has grown to be a sickness, haven't actually written 1 line of gameplay code.
- dxuh 3y ago
  You should try making game jam games, if you haven't yet. It really teaches you to ignore things that are not absolutely essential. And all the stuff you have listed are good candidates for post-jam bugfix versions, so you don't ignore the more important things either.
  - tmountain 3y ago
    Good suggestion -- there's a hard constraint (time). That becomes a forcing function for decision making.
  - fodi 3y ago
    This. The best thing about game jams is that you'll better at the next one. You'll learn to focus, not to overshoot the scope, manage your time better and do quick iterations. I've done a few on Itch and the community is really friendly, which provides enough drive for me to submit before the deadline even if the result is quite wonky. If you rate other people's games, they'll probably rate you back, which is great. One particular game jam I recommend is Trijam [1]. It takes place every weekend, has a fixed theme and ideally you should only spend a total of 3 hours on a game which forces you to do something relatively simple. [1] https://trijam.itch.io/ https://trijam.itch.io/
dxuh 3y ago
I truly do believe that small games can be good. I know plenty of small games and pretty much the only games I have really loved in the last few years are small. But I don't agree with "A game's quality is independent from its scale". I actually think making a small game good is much harder. If you have fewer dials to tweak, it's harder to come up with a configuration you haven't seen a dozen times already. Especially not one that works. Most of the ideas that I want to work on are larger games, because I don't have any ideas for small games that I imagine to be good. I wish I had them. I have made a bunch of games and also many game jam games (i.e. smaller games - maybe 15+? - see here: https://theshoemaker.de/projects https://theshoemaker.de/projects), but I think none of them are actually good. Nothing like the tiny games other people have made, that I adore. That is a level of mastery I have simply not reached (yet?). Of course I am aware that I can just try more things, because the stakes are lower, but you need a critical amount of falling-in-love with an idea to even start and all the ideas I do fall in love with are for larger games.
- thrill 3y ago
  I actually think making a small game good is much harder. "I apologize for such a long letter - I didn't have time to write a short one."
Tepix 3y ago
Notch made many small games before he did Minecraft.
- hypertele-Xii 3y ago
  Minecraft itself is a small game. It has very little depth nor complexity.
  - Tepix 3y ago
    When you talk about the game as it was originally, you were right. But that was more than a decade ago.
    - hypertele-Xii 3y ago
      That was when it blew up.
      - Tepix 3y ago
        You're right, it was already a good game when it was rather simple.
Caitlynmeeks 3y ago
Very well written. I really dig this. Thanks!
vgel 3y ago
I think a lot of it is what types of games or genres you're interested in. Certain games / genres of games work better as small games than others. Like I've worked on a lot of small games (https://vgel.itch.io https://vgel.itch.io), some better, some worse, but I've never tried, e.g., an FPSRPG or a Dwarf Fortress-esque simRTS. The process of "stripping down" those genres to be feasible as a small game fundamentally transforms them into something else. When you rip the complex skill tree out of an FPSRPG to simplify it, it becomes a different kind of game! And some people just don't like that—they only want the complex game. They didn't like early Minecraft, they only like Minecraft now, after 10+ years of development gave tons of interlocking features and mechanics. And that's... what it is. It makes me a little sad, but I don't think those people will be very happy as solo indie devs (unless they have the superhuman willpower to push through years of development on a single game without enjoying the early stages or the tight feedback loop of improvement you get by releasing smaller games). I've tried to sell this vision to people before, maybe not as eloquently as OP, showed them Itch.io and some of my favorite games on there, and... they just didn't care. It didn't interest them at all. Other people got the appeal immediately. It just seems to come down to personal taste.
- aio2 3y ago
  We often revolve around the result, not the process of getting to the result. That's why many don't care.
- _c3ag 3y ago
  > They didn't like early Minecraft, they only like Minecraft now, after 10+ years of development gave tons of interlocking features and mechanics. i think you are dead wrong. there is a lot of people just using the core of the game (previous the first alpha) to build stuff and that is just fine for them. past alpha (the survival mode) up to today i do not think it changed dramatically beyond some mobs and new stuff to find… the gameplay is still the same: collect -> craft [while surviving]
  - vgel 3y ago
    Some people, yeah. But a lot of people only enjoy the game because of complex systems that were added later: redstone, slimeblock machines, building complex farms, gear progression via material and enchantment upgrades, exploring an infinite world, etc. You can go on Youtube and see people who only play those parts of the game. I think it's fair to say that they wouldn't have enjoyed, say, Indev, before those features were added. And Indev, before the infinite world, was already the culmination of 6 months of work on the game! That's pushing the definition of "small game" already, and a lot of people would still treat it as "a cool toy, but not a full game" (I played it back then and remember people talking about it as such).
the_only_law 3y ago
What makes a game “big” or “small” in this case? I’m wondering, because I was going through my steam library after reading this, just looking at the games I play and trying to fit them into “small” and “big” and while many seemed obvious, many were also hard to tell. Is it the size/scale of the development (i.e. indie vs AAA)? The mechanical complexity? the graphical complexity? The volume of content? The size on disk? maybe some combination or something else entirely.
- CBarkleyU 3y ago
  > The mechanical complexity? the graphical complexity? The volume of content? Yes, yes and yes. > The size on disk? Indirectly, sometimes. Also, how polished a game is. At the end of the day, people severely underestimate the last 10% -- which take about 3-30 times as long as the first 90% -- of creating a game. Creating a bare minimum Binding of Isaac clone can be done in 48 hours. Creating a full sized Binding of Isaac competitor will take at least a year of full time work of someone who knows what they're doing.
debacle 3y ago
If you enjoy small, self-contained games, obviously check out Vampire Survivors as a recent phenom, but SokPop collective on Itch and Steam puts out a new game each month and while many of them are barely passable, some are truly great, especially Stacklands which I think is their biggest hit, but a very short/small game overall.
aschearer 3y ago
Something I've struggled with and have seen often is engineer-types drawn to game development who lose themselves in code, tech, and getting it "just right." It's super important to be clear about _why_ you makes games. If it's just to blow steam after a long day slinging JavaScript or to dabble with new technology be honest about it -- you'll spare yourself pain later. If you really want to _make_ games remember the aphorism, "real artists ship." On the subject of scope, I think it's helpful to remember the Mythical Man Month. If the game you're cribbing took four experts two years to create, that's eight person-years. Can one person hope to make something of that scale? There are examples, but few have that level of resolve. Don't hand wave away things by saying "modern game engines." People were brilliant back then, and expectations were lower in some respects.
hnthrowaway0328 3y ago
For small games I really think it's easier to just use C++/SDL or whatever language and framework one is familiar with and go from there. A simple 2D RPG might be the most one can complete in a reasonable amount of time (say a few months) but once you have an engine you can "reproduce" quickly.
fauxpause_ 3y ago
I think the biggest trap is that people imagine their games will be fun. And then as they build them they realize it’s not. A lot of the fun was just their fantasy.
- probablypower 3y ago
  I guess the great game developers/designers are those who can convert their imagined fantasy fun into shareable real fun through games. Not easy at all.
  - marcosdumay 3y ago
    I imagine they just imagine fantasy fun in a more realistic way than other people. So they can iterate on it faster and reach the real thing. At least, this is the usual theme on people that are good on anything.
- empressplay 3y ago
  This really goes for any creative endeavour -- try writing a readable novel, or create a listenable track. Creating things other people actually want is HARD.
- reidrac 3y ago
  My experience has been quite the opposite: after a while working on a game I think "is this any fun?", and turns out people likes them (even if sometimes I don't really get it).
lagniappe 3y ago
I made a pretty cool semi-idle game recently, in the spirit of Progress Quest. It's called "Console Quest" and runs from the terminal. It's a simple RPG where your characters fights monsters and completes quest achievements without your input, but you get randomized chances to visit the merchant or medic, which largely determines your fate. It seems simple at first but it's harder than it seems as the game moves on. https://github.com/donuts-are-good/consolequest https://github.com/donuts-are-good/consolequest I made it just for fun one night, and found it strangely addictive all on my own while testing because I'd want to keep playing even after verifying the thing I was testing. P.s. my high score is 356 days in game. not sure it's possible to get higher, you get wiped out quick. It'd be my pleasure if anybody wants to play :)
- gtaylor 3y ago
  Sounds interesting! Do you have screenshots of what the TUI looks like anywhere?
  - lagniappe 3y ago
    at the top of the readme in the link there's an asciinema screencast of the gameplay edit: https://asciinema.org/a/Iu5Vu6S2j9IAPSenvH8ZU3OX2 https://asciinema.org/a/Iu5Vu6S2j9IAPSenvH8ZU3OX2
kabdib 3y ago
I had a housemate who could make a cool game in an afternoon. He was a bottomless well of interesting ideas. He works in finance now :-) Anyway, his games were horrible messes of magical Peek and Poke statements in Atari BASIC. But . . . they were FUN. And they took a couple of hours to write.
- noman-land 3y ago
  Can you remember any examples of the games?
  - kabdib 3y ago
    One that he iterated a lot on was a titled we called "Alan Turing and the Spiders from Mars". It was a multiplayer game (most of his games were, because the AI is free when you can just give another player a joystick). It was a simple 2D top-down sprite-based animation with: - A ton of robots on the screen, milling around and doing stuff. - Up to three players controlling their own robot (with the rest being computer controlled). - A "finder" player who controlled a cursor and got a limited number of guesses as to which robots were controlled by real people. - The players could win by fulfilling some simple missions ("pick up the blue blocks / visit each corner of the screen"), the finder could win by identifying the players without running out of guesses. Reminds me of a certain popular modern online game . . .
tejohnso 3y ago
I think it's useful to aim for learning. I built a small game that runs on Android, Android TV, and Linux just to get more C++ exposure. I'm not sure if it's "good", but it's definitely small. And good enough that my child actually wants to play it, and even better, suggests improvements.
murphm8 3y ago
An excellent game where the designer/programmer doesn't let things get in the way of building is Aurora 4x [1] (not really a small game anymore). Only runs on windows, doesn't even have modifiable window sizes. For users that have period separators instead of commas a bunch of the text is cut off. It's a fantastic game that is purely what the creator wants and plays and is nothing more, and it has a great community behind it. It is purely a work of passion by the creator. [1] https://aurora2.pentarch.org/ https://aurora2.pentarch.org/
- mock-possum 3y ago
  wow it's been a long time since I've seen a game that seems to go so far out of its way to make itself inaccessible to users. I do get that not everyone feels like putting the work in on this stuff, but just personally, as someone who's deep in UX/UI land... man oh man oh man. like you need a level of computer fluency to even install the game, nevermind actually playing it. props to the creator for how complicated it is, but man, just contemplating the time I would lose trying to dive into it is horrifying for me.
empressplay 3y ago
My partner and I are developing a very-high level 3D dialect of Logo. It makes 3D game development MUCH easier because you can code from the perspective of turtles in 3D space. I've had a lot of fun developing a bunch of different games in it, and as more features / keywords are added, I get to write even more games! It's been a blast. We recently added physics capabilities to the turtles, and I'm working on using those for some new games. I have a 13-year old guinea pig I've been teaching how to code in Logo, and she loves how much she can do in so few keywords. She's recently started competently debugging her own code and I'm proud of that. https://turtlespaces.org https://turtlespaces.org (website) https://turtlespaces.org/weblogo https://turtlespaces.org/weblogo (WASM IDE)
shmerl 3y ago
I wouldn't call Umineko a small game by any means. It is very good. Unless screenshots were just for conveying the satisfaction point.
opyate 3y ago
> I don’t make any money doing it, so if that’s your goal then this piece probably won’t be that useful to you. Hobbyists unite!

261 points by pmarin 3y ago

I can say my game(s): https://wdpauly.medium.com/trade-economy-and-supply-3a9eff928d7d https://wdpauly.medium.com/trade-economy-and-supply-3a9eff92... fall into the scope creep issue, but at the same time the complexity and scale is what makes it so interesting. If you enjoy tech/programming then making something addictive and fun may not be the point so much as the mental simulation you get from the project as a whole.

gallamine 3y ago

I spent hundreds of hours as a kid building small games like this with Klik n Play, then Klick and Create, which turned into The Games Factory and now lives on as Clickteam Fusion! It had a simple image editor and event based programming system that was accessible to a kid and still pretty sophisticated. Huge influence on my later programming career. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clickteam https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clickteam

koromak 3y ago

Also relevant: https://a327ex.com/posts/snkrx_log https://a327ex.com/posts/snkrx_log The developer talks specifically about choosing a small scope for a game, and clearly spends a lot of time thinking strategically about being an indie dev.

koromak 3y ago
ACtually this was the link I was remembering, ignore the previous one https://a327ex.com/posts/lessons_second_game https://a327ex.com/posts/lessons_second_game
sdwr 3y ago
The SNKRX guy is a champ. Great posts, great game, opensourced the code. Real class act and top tier game designer. I started building something from his code - https://github.com/sdwr/underlod https://github.com/sdwr/underlod

williamthyer 3y ago

I feel like this advice applies to a lot more projects than just video games.

giraffe_lady 3y ago
A lot of this is more or less "how to develop critical taste and apply it thoughtfully" which is no small thing and not easy to write about well for any medium. It's extra relevant in gaming too I think. Big games are very very expensive to make, and so are conservatively modeled on what works in other mediums like movies, tv, novels. Small games are where the real exploration of the dynamics and limits of the medium happens, but is held back because gamers overall have underdeveloped taste.

mrec 3y ago

"I can tell you “scope small uwu”, but if you don’t believe small games can be good in the first place, all you’ll hear is a homework assignment you have to do before you can make the games you really care about." This is both an important insight and excellent writing.

bluefirebrand 3y ago
The other outcome of this attitude of "make small games" is everyone just makes platformers. Don't get me wrong, a platformer is a good small game project to start with, the game can be made with a level or two in a weekend using modern tools. But even back on the NES we had way more than just platformers. Sure, a beat-em-up is a bit more technically challenging than a platformer but I think cloning a Turtles game from the NES era is probably a fairly reasonable "small game" too. Or cloning an RPG, or something like Fire Emblem, or Zelda. It's weird how everyone wants to make a metroidvania but not many Zelda-likes are out there.
- the_af 3y ago
  > The other outcome of this attitude of "make small games" is everyone just makes platformers. I don't think so. Remember the heyday of Flash games, Kongregate (before it was spammed by MMO clones or whatnot)? Many short & sweet games that weren't platformers. Some were puzzle-solving games, some were adventure games, some were escape-the-room, some were shooters, and yes, some were platformers. I have the fondest memories from that era. I still remember the short and thoughtful "The Majesty of Colors".
  - bluefirebrand 3y ago
    That's true, a lot of simple physics games like launching turtles and visual novel style games. That era was definitely defined by enthusiast creators instead of the modern indie-studio-ification of even the simplest games.
    - the_af 3y ago

fnordpiglet 3y ago

I thought this was a good write up on why to make a small game and how to conceptualize your process, and some technical advice. I was sorta hoping it would be more “I’ve accepted I want to make a small game. How do I make a good game?” As someone who likes the idea of making small games, I don’t know the discipline and I know there must be. Writing excellent software has a variety of specific ways of thinking about software and it’s implementation, how to organize ideas, what parts to not forget to plan our carefully up front and what to discover in the doing, etc.

tmountain 3y ago

Literally every time I've set out to make a game, I've let perfectionism get in the way. Some examples: - Spending all my time thinking about how to support 10 different resolutions - Coming up with the perfect framework for managing state - Working on silly menu systems and other UI elements - Finding the perfect map builder and obsessing over data representations - Tweaking an entity component system to death - Etc Next time I set out to make something, I'm not going to worry too much about the code. If the idea has merit, I'll refactor it later if I need to. Summary--It's really easy to let details get in the way of ideas.

slmjkdbtl 3y ago
I have similar issues, making own game engine -> making own rendering engine -> making own scripting language -> making own OS, my desire for custom tool has grown to be a sickness, haven't actually written 1 line of gameplay code.
dxuh 3y ago
You should try making game jam games, if you haven't yet. It really teaches you to ignore things that are not absolutely essential. And all the stuff you have listed are good candidates for post-jam bugfix versions, so you don't ignore the more important things either.
- tmountain 3y ago
  Good suggestion -- there's a hard constraint (time). That becomes a forcing function for decision making.
- fodi 3y ago
  This. The best thing about game jams is that you'll better at the next one. You'll learn to focus, not to overshoot the scope, manage your time better and do quick iterations. I've done a few on Itch and the community is really friendly, which provides enough drive for me to submit before the deadline even if the result is quite wonky. If you rate other people's games, they'll probably rate you back, which is great. One particular game jam I recommend is Trijam [1]. It takes place every weekend, has a fixed theme and ideally you should only spend a total of 3 hours on a game which forces you to do something relatively simple. [1] https://trijam.itch.io/ https://trijam.itch.io/

dxuh 3y ago

I truly do believe that small games can be good. I know plenty of small games and pretty much the only games I have really loved in the last few years are small. But I don't agree with "A game's quality is independent from its scale". I actually think making a small game good is much harder. If you have fewer dials to tweak, it's harder to come up with a configuration you haven't seen a dozen times already. Especially not one that works. Most of the ideas that I want to work on are larger games, because I don't have any ideas for small games that I imagine to be good. I wish I had them. I have made a bunch of games and also many game jam games (i.e. smaller games - maybe 15+? - see here: https://theshoemaker.de/projects https://theshoemaker.de/projects), but I think none of them are actually good. Nothing like the tiny games other people have made, that I adore. That is a level of mastery I have simply not reached (yet?). Of course I am aware that I can just try more things, because the stakes are lower, but you need a critical amount of falling-in-love with an idea to even start and all the ideas I do fall in love with are for larger games.

thrill 3y ago
I actually think making a small game good is much harder. "I apologize for such a long letter - I didn't have time to write a short one."

Tepix 3y ago

Notch made many small games before he did Minecraft.

hypertele-Xii 3y ago
Minecraft itself is a small game. It has very little depth nor complexity.
- Tepix 3y ago
  When you talk about the game as it was originally, you were right. But that was more than a decade ago.
  - hypertele-Xii 3y ago
    That was when it blew up.
    - Tepix 3y ago
      You're right, it was already a good game when it was rather simple.

Caitlynmeeks 3y ago

Very well written. I really dig this. Thanks!

vgel 3y ago

I think a lot of it is what types of games or genres you're interested in. Certain games / genres of games work better as small games than others. Like I've worked on a lot of small games (https://vgel.itch.io https://vgel.itch.io), some better, some worse, but I've never tried, e.g., an FPSRPG or a Dwarf Fortress-esque simRTS. The process of "stripping down" those genres to be feasible as a small game fundamentally transforms them into something else. When you rip the complex skill tree out of an FPSRPG to simplify it, it becomes a different kind of game! And some people just don't like that—they only want the complex game. They didn't like early Minecraft, they only like Minecraft now, after 10+ years of development gave tons of interlocking features and mechanics. And that's... what it is. It makes me a little sad, but I don't think those people will be very happy as solo indie devs (unless they have the superhuman willpower to push through years of development on a single game without enjoying the early stages or the tight feedback loop of improvement you get by releasing smaller games). I've tried to sell this vision to people before, maybe not as eloquently as OP, showed them Itch.io and some of my favorite games on there, and... they just didn't care. It didn't interest them at all. Other people got the appeal immediately. It just seems to come down to personal taste.

aio2 3y ago
We often revolve around the result, not the process of getting to the result. That's why many don't care.
_c3ag 3y ago
> They didn't like early Minecraft, they only like Minecraft now, after 10+ years of development gave tons of interlocking features and mechanics. i think you are dead wrong. there is a lot of people just using the core of the game (previous the first alpha) to build stuff and that is just fine for them. past alpha (the survival mode) up to today i do not think it changed dramatically beyond some mobs and new stuff to find… the gameplay is still the same: collect -> craft [while surviving]
- vgel 3y ago
  Some people, yeah. But a lot of people only enjoy the game because of complex systems that were added later: redstone, slimeblock machines, building complex farms, gear progression via material and enchantment upgrades, exploring an infinite world, etc. You can go on Youtube and see people who only play those parts of the game. I think it's fair to say that they wouldn't have enjoyed, say, Indev, before those features were added. And Indev, before the infinite world, was already the culmination of 6 months of work on the game! That's pushing the definition of "small game" already, and a lot of people would still treat it as "a cool toy, but not a full game" (I played it back then and remember people talking about it as such).

the_only_law 3y ago

What makes a game “big” or “small” in this case? I’m wondering, because I was going through my steam library after reading this, just looking at the games I play and trying to fit them into “small” and “big” and while many seemed obvious, many were also hard to tell. Is it the size/scale of the development (i.e. indie vs AAA)? The mechanical complexity? the graphical complexity? The volume of content? The size on disk? maybe some combination or something else entirely.

CBarkleyU 3y ago
> The mechanical complexity? the graphical complexity? The volume of content? Yes, yes and yes. > The size on disk? Indirectly, sometimes. Also, how polished a game is. At the end of the day, people severely underestimate the last 10% -- which take about 3-30 times as long as the first 90% -- of creating a game. Creating a bare minimum Binding of Isaac clone can be done in 48 hours. Creating a full sized Binding of Isaac competitor will take at least a year of full time work of someone who knows what they're doing.

debacle 3y ago

If you enjoy small, self-contained games, obviously check out Vampire Survivors as a recent phenom, but SokPop collective on Itch and Steam puts out a new game each month and while many of them are barely passable, some are truly great, especially Stacklands which I think is their biggest hit, but a very short/small game overall.

aschearer 3y ago

Something I've struggled with and have seen often is engineer-types drawn to game development who lose themselves in code, tech, and getting it "just right." It's super important to be clear about _why_ you makes games. If it's just to blow steam after a long day slinging JavaScript or to dabble with new technology be honest about it -- you'll spare yourself pain later. If you really want to _make_ games remember the aphorism, "real artists ship." On the subject of scope, I think it's helpful to remember the Mythical Man Month. If the game you're cribbing took four experts two years to create, that's eight person-years. Can one person hope to make something of that scale? There are examples, but few have that level of resolve. Don't hand wave away things by saying "modern game engines." People were brilliant back then, and expectations were lower in some respects.

hnthrowaway0328 3y ago

For small games I really think it's easier to just use C++/SDL or whatever language and framework one is familiar with and go from there. A simple 2D RPG might be the most one can complete in a reasonable amount of time (say a few months) but once you have an engine you can "reproduce" quickly.

fauxpause_ 3y ago

I think the biggest trap is that people imagine their games will be fun. And then as they build them they realize it’s not. A lot of the fun was just their fantasy.

probablypower 3y ago
I guess the great game developers/designers are those who can convert their imagined fantasy fun into shareable real fun through games. Not easy at all.
- marcosdumay 3y ago
  I imagine they just imagine fantasy fun in a more realistic way than other people. So they can iterate on it faster and reach the real thing. At least, this is the usual theme on people that are good on anything.
empressplay 3y ago
This really goes for any creative endeavour -- try writing a readable novel, or create a listenable track. Creating things other people actually want is HARD.
reidrac 3y ago
My experience has been quite the opposite: after a while working on a game I think "is this any fun?", and turns out people likes them (even if sometimes I don't really get it).

lagniappe 3y ago

I made a pretty cool semi-idle game recently, in the spirit of Progress Quest. It's called "Console Quest" and runs from the terminal. It's a simple RPG where your characters fights monsters and completes quest achievements without your input, but you get randomized chances to visit the merchant or medic, which largely determines your fate. It seems simple at first but it's harder than it seems as the game moves on. https://github.com/donuts-are-good/consolequest https://github.com/donuts-are-good/consolequest I made it just for fun one night, and found it strangely addictive all on my own while testing because I'd want to keep playing even after verifying the thing I was testing. P.s. my high score is 356 days in game. not sure it's possible to get higher, you get wiped out quick. It'd be my pleasure if anybody wants to play :)

gtaylor 3y ago
Sounds interesting! Do you have screenshots of what the TUI looks like anywhere?
- lagniappe 3y ago
  at the top of the readme in the link there's an asciinema screencast of the gameplay edit: https://asciinema.org/a/Iu5Vu6S2j9IAPSenvH8ZU3OX2 https://asciinema.org/a/Iu5Vu6S2j9IAPSenvH8ZU3OX2

kabdib 3y ago

I had a housemate who could make a cool game in an afternoon. He was a bottomless well of interesting ideas. He works in finance now :-) Anyway, his games were horrible messes of magical Peek and Poke statements in Atari BASIC. But . . . they were FUN. And they took a couple of hours to write.

noman-land 3y ago
Can you remember any examples of the games?
- kabdib 3y ago
  One that he iterated a lot on was a titled we called "Alan Turing and the Spiders from Mars". It was a multiplayer game (most of his games were, because the AI is free when you can just give another player a joystick). It was a simple 2D top-down sprite-based animation with: - A ton of robots on the screen, milling around and doing stuff. - Up to three players controlling their own robot (with the rest being computer controlled). - A "finder" player who controlled a cursor and got a limited number of guesses as to which robots were controlled by real people. - The players could win by fulfilling some simple missions ("pick up the blue blocks / visit each corner of the screen"), the finder could win by identifying the players without running out of guesses. Reminds me of a certain popular modern online game . . .

tejohnso 3y ago

I think it's useful to aim for learning. I built a small game that runs on Android, Android TV, and Linux just to get more C++ exposure. I'm not sure if it's "good", but it's definitely small. And good enough that my child actually wants to play it, and even better, suggests improvements.

murphm8 3y ago

An excellent game where the designer/programmer doesn't let things get in the way of building is Aurora 4x [1] (not really a small game anymore). Only runs on windows, doesn't even have modifiable window sizes. For users that have period separators instead of commas a bunch of the text is cut off. It's a fantastic game that is purely what the creator wants and plays and is nothing more, and it has a great community behind it. It is purely a work of passion by the creator. [1] https://aurora2.pentarch.org/ https://aurora2.pentarch.org/

mock-possum 3y ago
wow it's been a long time since I've seen a game that seems to go so far out of its way to make itself inaccessible to users. I do get that not everyone feels like putting the work in on this stuff, but just personally, as someone who's deep in UX/UI land... man oh man oh man. like you need a level of computer fluency to even install the game, nevermind actually playing it. props to the creator for how complicated it is, but man, just contemplating the time I would lose trying to dive into it is horrifying for me.

empressplay 3y ago

My partner and I are developing a very-high level 3D dialect of Logo. It makes 3D game development MUCH easier because you can code from the perspective of turtles in 3D space. I've had a lot of fun developing a bunch of different games in it, and as more features / keywords are added, I get to write even more games! It's been a blast. We recently added physics capabilities to the turtles, and I'm working on using those for some new games. I have a 13-year old guinea pig I've been teaching how to code in Logo, and she loves how much she can do in so few keywords. She's recently started competently debugging her own code and I'm proud of that. https://turtlespaces.org https://turtlespaces.org (website) https://turtlespaces.org/weblogo https://turtlespaces.org/weblogo (WASM IDE)

shmerl 3y ago

I wouldn't call Umineko a small game by any means. It is very good. Unless screenshots were just for conveying the satisfaction point.

opyate 3y ago

> I don’t make any money doing it, so if that’s your goal then this piece probably won’t be that useful to you. Hobbyists unite!