4 ms·

Joys of small game development

194 points by ingve 3y ago

ckmiller 3y ago
This appears to be by Kenta Cho, a.k.a. ABA games, who has a long history of writing wonderful small games in D. His work is well worth checking out. https://www.asahi-net.or.jp/~cs8k-cyu/ https://www.asahi-net.or.jp/~cs8k-cyu/
- jncfhnb 3y ago
  I feel like HN is on a kick right now with this concept of “small games”. But folks are tripping over the definition of small. There’s the small as defined in the link you have, small as in low mechanic and low content like “Gone Home”, small as in asset flips, small as in just not AAA, small as in really intricate but not large, small as in procedurally huge but limited visuals and simple mechanics, small as in just a dating sim or porn, and then small as in old school “small games” like Doom Guy’s Commander Keen which is cute and good at the time but laughably unpolished for todays standards.
  - bobthepanda 3y ago
    Since the beginning of the industrial era, people have been looking for side artisan-gigs to distract from how droll their day job is. This isn’t particularly different than woodworking, gardening, knitting and the legion of other hobbies used for this purpose.
    - mejutoco 3y ago
      I do not think at the early industrial revolution people looked for artisan-gigs, considering the hours, child labour, and general lack of safety. Happy to be proved wrong, I find that period very interesting.
      - bobthepanda 3y ago
        I suppose it’s more of a Victorian thing but it’s also primarily the domain of the white collar class. Someone who does carpentry as their day job is probably not going to do woodshop in the garage at home even today, but they just pick other things, like grilling.
  - TulliusCicero 3y ago
    I assumed small was referring to how much time/effort it takes to make them.
    - jncfhnb 3y ago
      That’s surely part of it. But people’s senses are warped. They’ll often point to games that are small in content but clearly non trivial dev tasks.
  - johnnyanmac 3y ago
    It'll depend on who you ask and what lens you look in. "small" for a dev is very different from a consumer And when you split into disciplines it gets even more murky. VN's are "small" for a programmer (you may not even need to program for many of them) but can be hundreds of art assets for an artist to work on. Likewise, something like Dwarf Fortress didn't even have a GUI at first but is filled to the brim with simulation state for a programmer to manage. And if course that definition is relative. Final Fantasy VII was top of the line in 1997 and took 5+years, but it'd be at best a beefy 2-3 man project over a few years today.
- silenced_trope 3y ago
  Yes! I know this guy's work. I haven't visited this site in years though. I wonder if mobile games are the reason why. I stopped playing a lot of web/flash/html5 games a long time ago when gaming (for me) moved to the app store. But I recognized the name and remember playing a lot of these games back in the day. I always thought they were delightful. Building off a single game mechanic or two and then moving on to the next concept. The dev has a good system in place for shipping :)
- memalign 3y ago
  Does anyone know a way to subscribe to find when he adds a new game? I checked out his blog and Twitter and they don’t seem to be a great way to follow just the games. Can’t find an RSS feed either.
justinlloyd 3y ago
Read it. I cannot say whether the concept of a manifesto for small games is a worthwhile endeavour. It sounds like an ideology, a stricture on creative thought, and then you start the endless debates as to what qualifies, and audiences bifurcate into "but what does it _mean_?" That said, I like to make what I have often referred to as "$10K games." If I was being paid a realistic hourly rate to implement an idea, what could I do for $10,000 USD? $10K is one month of household burn rate (for me), and so I can aptly weigh the decision of "outsource this or do it myself?" It gives a very clear budgetary limitation. And sure, you could "work for free" or "get a friend to help out for a pizza" or "well if someone in a LCOL country could do it, that's like two years worth of income." But we would be arguing pointless nuances at that point. The question is "could _I_ implement this idea for $10K, if I were being paid the $10K? Would _I_ be willing to set aside all other possible endeavours to work on this, if _I_ were being paid $10K for it?" And so we get in to how to make a game that has a definite end, that somewhat fulfills the ideal of the small games manifesto, but still gives you enough creative freedom to achieve your goals whilst still shooting yourself in the foot by spending too many hours tweaking the individual pixels in a piece of artwork. A $10K game, for me, could be a day's worth of work writing code and $9000 worth of outsourced artwork to make it beautiful. Or it could be two or three weeks of intense labour, flying solo, creating the art, music and code because you simply need that itch scratched. The game then becomes secondary to the importance of the creative endeavour itself.
- meheleventyone 3y ago
  TBH this sounds like exactly the same thing it’s just you’ve put an economic lens on it. Has all the associated problems with bike shedding and ‘what does it mean’.
  - justinlloyd 3y ago
    _I_ think you skimmed over the part where _I_ emphasized _I_. As in, this budget applies to me. Not anyone else. Not what does it. Not whether this nuance qualifies. Merely, can I do it for $N? I think what many people seem to do is taken a quite subjective statement such as _I_ made about an arbitrary budget and apply it universally to other people, and then try to argue the merit of meaning. Meanwhile, the creators are getting on creating. I do think manifesto of small games is good for one thing: it separates the makers from the bikeshedders.
raytopia 3y ago
What the medium of games really needs right is to start borrowing length terms from written work. Why? Because the term short/small game is meaningless. Flappy Bird and Pong are short games but so is A Short Hike which takes 2 hours to complete (feature film length) but there are also RPG games that are described as being short but take 10+ hours to beat. Writers usually divide their works based on word count into flash fiction, short stories, novelettes, novellas, novels, and epics. Now these aren't one to ones when it comes to game developement but it's a much better tool to describe games then what we're using now. For an example many of author's games are better described as flash games (not that Flash just flash as in very short), while something like A Short Hike and many would be a novellet (gamellet?). Many arcade 8 bit, and 16 but games would fall somewhere in between flash and short. Many AAA games and many RPGs would be Epics. Etc. Of course this isn't a perfect way to categorize games but it's certainly better then the term small/short being used for anything that's less then a 100+ hour AAA game and it could help developers too. You can ask yourself "Do I really want to make a Epic? Or maybe this would be better as a short or a Gamellet?" or if you just want to make something very small you can just say "I'm going to make a flash game." Different names are needed but I still think the point stands. We need a different to talk about game length then just the words short, small, or long.
- garba_dlm 3y ago
  games are a new medium you're right that software engineer and programmer types (of persons) would do well to learn form other older media formats that precede games. but let's not pretend that games are anything like what came before. interactivity is a new element to put into the storytelling toolkit. but the point is how games can do a much more than tell stories; it's like puzzles are part of the story somehow... but answering how exactly goes quite deep.
  - bobsmooth 3y ago
    Video games are about half as old as film as a medium. I wouldn't call that new.
    - 3y ago
LarsDu88 3y ago
I made a small game this week! https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/54/cap-sized https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/54/cap-sized
hayrhotoca 3y ago
Nowadays, the competition and the cost to make a stood-out game is too high. But still hoping one day I'll make another Flappy Birds.

194 points by ingve 3y ago

This appears to be by Kenta Cho, a.k.a. ABA games, who has a long history of writing wonderful small games in D. His work is well worth checking out. https://www.asahi-net.or.jp/~cs8k-cyu/ https://www.asahi-net.or.jp/~cs8k-cyu/

jncfhnb 3y ago
I feel like HN is on a kick right now with this concept of “small games”. But folks are tripping over the definition of small. There’s the small as defined in the link you have, small as in low mechanic and low content like “Gone Home”, small as in asset flips, small as in just not AAA, small as in really intricate but not large, small as in procedurally huge but limited visuals and simple mechanics, small as in just a dating sim or porn, and then small as in old school “small games” like Doom Guy’s Commander Keen which is cute and good at the time but laughably unpolished for todays standards.
- bobthepanda 3y ago
  Since the beginning of the industrial era, people have been looking for side artisan-gigs to distract from how droll their day job is. This isn’t particularly different than woodworking, gardening, knitting and the legion of other hobbies used for this purpose.
  - mejutoco 3y ago
    I do not think at the early industrial revolution people looked for artisan-gigs, considering the hours, child labour, and general lack of safety. Happy to be proved wrong, I find that period very interesting.
    - bobthepanda 3y ago
      I suppose it’s more of a Victorian thing but it’s also primarily the domain of the white collar class. Someone who does carpentry as their day job is probably not going to do woodshop in the garage at home even today, but they just pick other things, like grilling.
- TulliusCicero 3y ago
  I assumed small was referring to how much time/effort it takes to make them.
  - jncfhnb 3y ago
    That’s surely part of it. But people’s senses are warped. They’ll often point to games that are small in content but clearly non trivial dev tasks.
- johnnyanmac 3y ago
  It'll depend on who you ask and what lens you look in. "small" for a dev is very different from a consumer And when you split into disciplines it gets even more murky. VN's are "small" for a programmer (you may not even need to program for many of them) but can be hundreds of art assets for an artist to work on. Likewise, something like Dwarf Fortress didn't even have a GUI at first but is filled to the brim with simulation state for a programmer to manage. And if course that definition is relative. Final Fantasy VII was top of the line in 1997 and took 5+years, but it'd be at best a beefy 2-3 man project over a few years today.
silenced_trope 3y ago
Yes! I know this guy's work. I haven't visited this site in years though. I wonder if mobile games are the reason why. I stopped playing a lot of web/flash/html5 games a long time ago when gaming (for me) moved to the app store. But I recognized the name and remember playing a lot of these games back in the day. I always thought they were delightful. Building off a single game mechanic or two and then moving on to the next concept. The dev has a good system in place for shipping :)
memalign 3y ago
Does anyone know a way to subscribe to find when he adds a new game? I checked out his blog and Twitter and they don’t seem to be a great way to follow just the games. Can’t find an RSS feed either.

justinlloyd 3y ago

Read it. I cannot say whether the concept of a manifesto for small games is a worthwhile endeavour. It sounds like an ideology, a stricture on creative thought, and then you start the endless debates as to what qualifies, and audiences bifurcate into "but what does it _mean_?" That said, I like to make what I have often referred to as "$10K games." If I was being paid a realistic hourly rate to implement an idea, what could I do for $10,000 USD? $10K is one month of household burn rate (for me), and so I can aptly weigh the decision of "outsource this or do it myself?" It gives a very clear budgetary limitation. And sure, you could "work for free" or "get a friend to help out for a pizza" or "well if someone in a LCOL country could do it, that's like two years worth of income." But we would be arguing pointless nuances at that point. The question is "could _I_ implement this idea for $10K, if I were being paid the $10K? Would _I_ be willing to set aside all other possible endeavours to work on this, if _I_ were being paid $10K for it?" And so we get in to how to make a game that has a definite end, that somewhat fulfills the ideal of the small games manifesto, but still gives you enough creative freedom to achieve your goals whilst still shooting yourself in the foot by spending too many hours tweaking the individual pixels in a piece of artwork. A $10K game, for me, could be a day's worth of work writing code and $9000 worth of outsourced artwork to make it beautiful. Or it could be two or three weeks of intense labour, flying solo, creating the art, music and code because you simply need that itch scratched. The game then becomes secondary to the importance of the creative endeavour itself.

meheleventyone 3y ago
TBH this sounds like exactly the same thing it’s just you’ve put an economic lens on it. Has all the associated problems with bike shedding and ‘what does it mean’.
- justinlloyd 3y ago
  _I_ think you skimmed over the part where _I_ emphasized _I_. As in, this budget applies to me. Not anyone else. Not what does it. Not whether this nuance qualifies. Merely, can I do it for $N? I think what many people seem to do is taken a quite subjective statement such as _I_ made about an arbitrary budget and apply it universally to other people, and then try to argue the merit of meaning. Meanwhile, the creators are getting on creating. I do think manifesto of small games is good for one thing: it separates the makers from the bikeshedders.

raytopia 3y ago

What the medium of games really needs right is to start borrowing length terms from written work. Why? Because the term short/small game is meaningless. Flappy Bird and Pong are short games but so is A Short Hike which takes 2 hours to complete (feature film length) but there are also RPG games that are described as being short but take 10+ hours to beat. Writers usually divide their works based on word count into flash fiction, short stories, novelettes, novellas, novels, and epics. Now these aren't one to ones when it comes to game developement but it's a much better tool to describe games then what we're using now. For an example many of author's games are better described as flash games (not that Flash just flash as in very short), while something like A Short Hike and many would be a novellet (gamellet?). Many arcade 8 bit, and 16 but games would fall somewhere in between flash and short. Many AAA games and many RPGs would be Epics. Etc. Of course this isn't a perfect way to categorize games but it's certainly better then the term small/short being used for anything that's less then a 100+ hour AAA game and it could help developers too. You can ask yourself "Do I really want to make a Epic? Or maybe this would be better as a short or a Gamellet?" or if you just want to make something very small you can just say "I'm going to make a flash game." Different names are needed but I still think the point stands. We need a different to talk about game length then just the words short, small, or long.

garba_dlm 3y ago
games are a new medium you're right that software engineer and programmer types (of persons) would do well to learn form other older media formats that precede games. but let's not pretend that games are anything like what came before. interactivity is a new element to put into the storytelling toolkit. but the point is how games can do a much more than tell stories; it's like puzzles are part of the story somehow... but answering how exactly goes quite deep.
- bobsmooth 3y ago
  Video games are about half as old as film as a medium. I wouldn't call that new.
  - 3y ago

LarsDu88 3y ago

I made a small game this week! https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/54/cap-sized https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/54/cap-sized

hayrhotoca 3y ago

Nowadays, the competition and the cost to make a stood-out game is too high. But still hoping one day I'll make another Flappy Birds.