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?
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.
Or a RPG without fetch quest
I enjoy music. I can appreciate both huge budget years-in-the-studio album recordings, as well as three young jazz players in a small bar who've not even rehearsed together bouncing ideas off standards.
I'm glad the OP has found a niche they're happy to create their art in. Good on them. (I bet I wouldn't much enjoy working at Blizzard either, in spite of the amazing games they're capable of creating.)
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.
As a general rule I think "hours of enjoyment" is about as optimal as you can get for leisure payoff, the alternative "how much I learned" is nice too, whether that's literal stuff (like trivia), strategic growth or else can vary on a title-to-title basis.
But I do understand where you're coming from.
You just described mountaineering, rock climbing, skiing, running a marathon, skydiving, surfing, scuba diving, and just about every other amateur athletic pursuit.
The far simpler, albeit non-egalitarian, explanation is some people are more productive and others will find ways to waste time.
quoting a comment from another thread "it used to be that you felt good because you were having fun. In this new era of micro transactions the games aren’t even fun anymore. There is only frustration, and then you pay to alleviate that frustration. You sometimes find yourself sitting there say, “why am I even doing this?”"
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.
But I feel you about longer games starting to feel like work. I really want to like the Witcher 3 for example, but there's just so much content in there. I've started my playthrough two years ago and still haven't gotten to the end of the game. Or, I thought I did, but turns out it wasn't yet. And then there's some DLC which also got great reviews and promises of a huge amount of content.
Currently I'm playing Mass Effect: Andromeda, which bombed because of reasons but it's a pretty good game with a ton of content, can't go wrong for €7. Its missions are episodic enough that you can play for an hour at a time if you're limited in time.
On the other hand, I am often left questioning the value exploration and creativity in virtual worlds when there are so many alternatives. This is especially true since many of those alternatives can be equally engaging and relaxing.
You'd be surprised. People still enjoyed playing Tetris, which has equally minimal mechanics, after decades...
Maybe comparing business card games to AAA is a bad comparison, but comparing 'Return of the Obra Dinn' with 'LA Noire' might be more apt.
Is it possible to get a [Parody] tag for HN to just highlight "Intelligent discussion need not happen here."
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.
Most gamers these days seem to be people who play on their smartphone. These games can be simple compared to AAA games, but they still need to be flashy and good-looking with an interesting game mechanic.
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.
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?
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.
How does that make any difference? It's not like the work is any less hard, or more fun.
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.
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.
Finding stuff at the intersection of the set of things fun to make and the things other people will enjoy is the hardest part of deciding what project to work on. It's a skill. You need to have a lot of ideas to find one landing in this sliver.
v2: AskII.
v3: AskiiFree.
Sorry, couldn't resist.
Will you be here all night? How's the fish?
http://www.gamebase64.com/game.php?id=12367&d=24&h=0
:)
I remember the Horace games quite fondly, which usually in themselves were usually just Horace themed remakes of other games.
The embedded video is on YouTube: https://youtu.be/PeWdBE82uLw
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.
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.
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.
curl https://www.dropbox.com/s/rmagppsuhwms28k/TinySki.exe -OL
wineconsole TinySki.exeI 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 do admire and respect the effort and the skill though!
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.
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!
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.
> 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...
Those are cool, but I guess the games are also much bigger at tens to hundreds of kilobytes.
Fun project, thanks for sharing!
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...
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.
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.
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.
https://gist.github.com/alpn/cd16f96034c5f71f053b714ad032eaf...
curl https://www.dropbox.com/s/rmagppsuhwms28k/TinySki.exe -OL
wineconsole TinySki.exe