
I’m only making business card sized games now - Delgan
http://frankforce.com/?p=5826
======
jrockway
> 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?

~~~
meditate
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.

~~~
skellera
When did this opinion start taking such a hold? Out of all places, I didn’t
think HN would be so anti-games but I’ve been seeing more and more people
saying this here.

Could someone who feels this way expand on why they have such a negative view
on games? Just curious if it’s personal, cultural, or something else?

Also, is it directed at complex games with storylines, online multiplayer, or
mobile games meant to pull as much value as possible? Cause one is unlike the
others.

~~~
ubadair
My grandfather believes that video games are a "scourge" for young men today.
I used to think he was old-fashioned for believing this, but I have come
around to agreeing with him.

I wasted a large chunk of my life on Counterstrike, Arma 3, DayZ Mod, PUBG,
and countless console games. _Thousands_ of hours in total. For me, games were
more than an escape or simply a way to unwind. For me, they were a well-hidden
addiction. They were an obstacle to reaching my potential. I can't see myself
going back to games again and still being as happy as I am now.

I miss games sometimes -- I still occasionally watch them on Twitch or YouTube
-- but quitting cold turkey over a year ago has been one of the best decisions
I ever made. That I didn't give them up 10 years earlier is a source of great
regret.

I'm probably not going to ban my children from playing games they buy with
their own money, but I'll definitely have plenty of long talks with them about
the dangers of gaming.

~~~
TeMPOraL
> _I wasted a large chunk of my life on Counterstrike, Arma 3, DayZ Mod, PUBG,
> and countless console games. _Thousands_ of hours in total. For me, games
> were more than an escape or simply a way to unwind. For me, they were a
> well-hidden addiction. They were an obstacle to reaching my potential. I can
> 't see myself going back to games again and still being as happy as I am
> now._

Substitute "football" or "drinking with friends" or other outdoor activities
for the videogames here. Or "reading a book". It's all the same thing. It's
natural for young people today (at least those in more well-off places) to
spend absurd amounts of time in a way they later on may consider waste. It's
natural for adults to spend some time like this too. We call this
_entertainment_ \- stuff you do for fun.

Grass is always greener, but you'd probably burn out if you tried to spend
those thousand of hours working in your economical self-interest instead. If
you were doing something else for fun instead, you could be regretting that
today, wishing you played some videogames a bit more. And even if you
wouldn't, you would be a different person. The time you spent on videogames -
the experiences, the stories, the people - are a part of you right now. And
it's not like videogames are unique in enabling escapism; if you look around,
plenty of people are escaping from their lives into books, or sports.

~~~
rchaud
There are numerous cases of gaming addiction out there, with the most extreme
stories occurring in some cafes in China. Just because gaming has a high
utility value for you doesn't mean others can't be affected negatively.

I have yet to see anyone seeking treatment because they read too many books or
spend too much time with their friends.

~~~
pixl97
>anyone seeking treatment because they read too many books or spend too much
time with their friends.

I do find it disingenuous that you happened to leave off many of the negative
interactions that have also dropped in occurrences when people don't 'hang out
with friends'. Young men in particular, when hanging out in groups, have a
penchant to find trouble or commit crimes. People don't seek treatment for
hanging out with their friends, they seek treatment because they hang out and
drink/do drugs with their friends, etc.

Almost any behavior can become negative. People also tend to min/max.

------
stickfigure
In fairness, he's optimizing for "fun to write", not "fun to play".

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
Do you think great artists make things that are fun to make, or do you think
they really just try to make stuff that other people will enjoy?

~~~
kakarot
A great artist makes things that are exceptionally unique and thought-
provoking. A successful artist makes things that have wide enough appeal to
generate sustainable income. Whether the piece is fun is irrelevant to the
caliber of an artist, I think. Some artists toil night and day for finished
products that mean nothing to anyone but them.

------
camochameleon
How can you make a skiing game, out of ASCII characters, and not call it
Askii?

~~~
christophilus
Is it ASCII or Unicold?

~~~
beatgammit
That's irrelevant. Pretty much everyone calls text games "ASCII" regardless of
the character set used. Take Dwarf Fortress, which uses an extended ASCII
character set (code page 437).

~~~
loco5niner
cough, cough... UniCOLD

------
IvyMike
This is a blatant rip-off of my 17-line c64 basic game, Space Caverns,
published in 1986 in Run Magazine.

[http://www.gamebase64.com/game.php?id=12367&d=24&h=0](http://www.gamebase64.com/game.php?id=12367&d=24&h=0)

:)

~~~
animal531
You sure you didn't rip off 1982's Horace goes Skiing? :)

I remember the Horace games quite fondly, which usually in themselves were
usually just Horace themed remakes of other games.

------
wyattpeak
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.

------
Hackbraten
This gives me 509 Bandwidth Limit Exceeded. Here’s an archive.org link to the
website:
[https://web.archive.org/web/20190402050012/http://frankforce...](https://web.archive.org/web/20190402050012/http://frankforce.com/?p=5826)

The embedded video is on YouTube:
[https://youtu.be/PeWdBE82uLw](https://youtu.be/PeWdBE82uLw)

------
sigmaprimus
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.

~~~
ehnto
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.

------
vaidhy
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?

~~~
ilovetux
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.

~~~
MaulingMonkey
One always has constraints, if only in time/budget/imagination. And those are
some pretty boring, vanilla constraints.

Different constraints encourage or force different approaches, which gives you
different results. You're not going to have a budgeting meeting over a <1K
demo. You're not going to contract out to an artist. You're not going to use a
large engine. You're not going to make a doom clone. You're not going to hum
and haw over what middleware to use. It limits how much over-engineering you
can invent. <1K is a pretty extreme constraint... but it's not that far off
from what the demoscene does, and they discover some fascinating techniques
and tricks in the process.

~~~
emptybits
That's an excellent description of why I recall the days of _inherent_
constraint as fondly as I do. I was an 8-bit console programmer back in the
day. I've also worked in a later era of sophisticated engines, huge teams,
artists and coders often assigned narrow specialties, managed by _tiers_ of
development directors and producers and administrative staff. Pros and cons,
for sure.

So in hindsight, two more joyous aspects of constraint in game development
(whether inherent or self-imposed):

1\. Bugs, testing, quality. When you know your binary will be burned into a
cartridge with no hope of a patch or update, one tends to code and test
carefully! You fill your allocated ROM banks with as much "fun" as you can
(code and content) but you know it must be well tested for both play balance
and bugs because you can't release a version 1.1. :-)

2\. Scope creep. This is much easier to avoid when you're given (e.g.) four
16KB banks of ROM for _all_ your code and assets. So you burn midnight oil for
mere _months_ , not _years_ , before you find out if your game is a hit or a
stinker. Short feedback loops. More variety per year. Refreshing.

------
coolreader18
If you want to use this on Linux, you need to have wine installed, but it does
work!

    
    
        curl https://www.dropbox.com/s/rmagppsuhwms28k/TinySki.exe -OL
        wineconsole TinySki.exe

------
magoon
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.

~~~
Jolter
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.

------
cyberferret
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.

~~~
ndnxhs
Those games were the best for wasting time at school

------
HenryBemis
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!

------
joemi
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.

~~~
KilledByAPixel
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!

~~~
mysterydip
I think the code length restriction is a great way to distill a game concept
into the "core fun", which is what more people should be focusing on when
making them IMHO.

If you go on say /r/gamedev, you'll see all kinds of posts of people stuck
down rabbit holes of negligible design, like how to make the best hair
physics. A lone developer could spend a year's worth of free time implementing
things that don't make the game any more fun or complete.

~~~
joemi
I think you get that kind of potential to get stuck on inconsequential details
in any design. It happens in video game design of course, but also board game
design, and graphic design, and software design in general, among many other
fields. Most general design guides encourage iteration and refinement, and
when it comes to game design specifically that comes across as the push for
frequent prototypes and playtests so you can refine the mechanics. (In the
software world it often comes across as the "minimum viable product" concept.)
I think people who get stuck on details in ways like you mentioned are people
who never learned this, whether self taught or formally educated, or they're
forgetting those tenets of design.

------
deckar01
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.

[0]:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pico-8](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pico-8)

[1]:
[https://shop.pocketchip.co/collections/frontpage/products/po...](https://shop.pocketchip.co/collections/frontpage/products/pocket-
c-h-i-p-new)

[2]:
[https://pico-8.fandom.com/wiki/P8PNGFileFormat](https://pico-8.fandom.com/wiki/P8PNGFileFormat)

------
pmontra
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.

~~~
pp19dd
Can't remember the exact name, but yeah, I've seen that game before in the
80s, either on a C-64 or MSX.

------
leggomylibro
Oh, they _print_ the game on a _paper_ business card - I thought this would be
about handheld games on one of those credit-card-sized consoles.

Those are cool, but I guess the games are also much bigger at tens to hundreds
of kilobytes.

Fun project, thanks for sharing!

~~~
hinkley
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)

------
ToFab123
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.

~~~
ehnto
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.

~~~
ToFab123
yeah, me too ))

Here is how it looked like. Donkey Kong has dual screens. Most other games
only one.

[https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/d/d9/Ni...](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/d/d9/Nintendo_Donkey_Kong_Game_and_Watch.png/1920px-
Nintendo_Donkey_Kong_Game_and_Watch.png)

------
dspillett
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.

------
crooked-v
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.

------
colonelpopcorn
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.

------
dalbasal
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.

~~~
SmellyGeekBoy
The massive success of YouTube vlogs would be another great example.

------
Tepix
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.

------
alpn
Here’s a _slightly_ more readable version of the FPS one:

[https://gist.github.com/alpn/cd16f96034c5f71f053b714ad032eaf...](https://gist.github.com/alpn/cd16f96034c5f71f053b714ad032eaf3)

------
emilfihlman
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!

------
peteretep
These can be encoded as QR codes, which would make it much easier to read and
run the games

------
seba_dos1
A pity that it uses windows.h API.

~~~
coolreader18
It does work with wine using the pre-compiled version and `wineconsole`:

    
    
        curl https://www.dropbox.com/s/rmagppsuhwms28k/TinySki.exe -OL
        wineconsole TinySki.exe

------
curiousgeorge
Hilarious game. I actually like this a lot.

