Donut county... so mixed feelings about that one. I really enjoyed it, up until the final fight against the big flying robot cat thingie. I felt super betrayed about a game without stress suddenly flipping on all its principles. Suddenly it was a stressful action game. Super hard. Tried a dozen times. Failed. Became angry with it, put it down, never started it again, and now when you mention it my feelings about that game are like 30% niceness of the initial part and 70% bitterness about the crap ending. Or was it even the ending? I will not know.
To game makers out there: know your category, and don't break it.
There was an old space quest game that was like this too. Final mecha fight that turned a thinking game into an action game and with it turned friends of the game into enemies.
For those who like Monument Valley, i highly recommend Mekorama. Very different visual style, and it doesn't have the optical illusion element of Monument Valley, but it has plenty of other interesting things to make up for it.
Polytopia and Bad North are very cute, quickly comprehensible, and playable-in-small-slices-of-time 4X-ish games.
Yiotro is a developer who makes visually simple but engaging strategy games on mobile [1] [2]. Antiyoy is a conquer-the-world game, in Vodobanka you control a SWAT team, etc.
Thanks for the recommendation. I adored Monument Valley and would love more of it. It looks as if Mekorama doesn't quite capture the overwhelming charm that boosts MV above what is, at core, a very easy puzzle game. But it does look like it would be fun, and I'll give it a try.
I dislike the mere concept of Super Mario Run; from what I know of it it's one of the most cynical examples of mobile games; minimal gameplay, maximal monetization. I mean I get that some games you have to dumb down a bit for mobile but that one takes the cake.
Anyway, my personal recommendation for a short but fun game would be the original Pico-8 version of Celeste; it's relatively small but uses the maximum capacity of the Pico-8 platform. A first playthrough can take a few tries and up to an hour, but it can be done within two minutes; I think me and a colleague of mine got below the two minute mark:
> I dislike the mere concept of Super Mario Run; from what I know of it it's one of the most cynical examples of mobile games; minimal gameplay, maximal monetization
That is completely untrue and completely misrepresenting the game. It's basically the opposite of the truth.
On its monetization model - which has been praised for being consumer friendly (and harming profitability for Nintendo). You can play some of it for free and there’s a one-off $10 payment to unlock the rest.
https://venturebeat.com/2016/12/23/how-super-mario-run-screw...
My favorite small game is probably Golf On Mars[0], the sequel to Desert Golfing. The game could almost not be simpler: you hit a golf ball into a hole, then the view shifts to show you the next hole. Repeat. Forever.
There's no interface, no objectives or awards, and no story. Shot power and ball spin are the only controls. The landscape is randomly generated and has enough features (water, sand, cacti, etc.) to keep things interesting.
Calling it a "small" game seems like an exaggeration. "Micro" might be a better word. It sounds like it would get boring after a bit, but honestly that might be the best part? You can kind of zone out and play for bit. It's almost meditative.
Is it just me or do the new generation of HTML5 based games fail to match the feel and engaging attributes of old Flash games. Maybe it’s just nostalgia blinding me.
I think Flash's editor and scripting abilities had a more accessible "on-ramp" for creating interactive content. I think the technical knowhow and discipline is a little higher with JavaScript compared to Flash.
I was thinking the opposite - there are so many tutorials out there that people are whipping out simple games as their first attempt at coding. So we're seeing people's first projects they have ever done, which are naturally more simplistic.
Most of the games I see now are more technically impressive, sure. Hell I remember years ago trying to find a decent client side first person shooter without much success. But a lot of what I find ends up feeling very generic and uninspired. Compared with a classic flash titled I can remember which were extremely primitive but were engaging, had fun characters, novel and comical stories, etc.
I think flash was something you could kind of stumble forward and gradually figure out whereas html5 (along with the level of documentation available today) makes people far more aware of where they're going wrong. A lot of the vibrancy of old flash games that would doubtlessly have had horrifically messy code has been killed off by a greater awareness of best practices throughout the coding process.
Very easy to destroy the fun of a novelty side project once you start focusing on making it maintainable or extensible
I think the fact that Flash was an one-stop shop for graphics, animation and coding made it very accessible to creatives/artists, who might not have had a strong technical background who I suspect were behind most of these games.
The perfect example of small games that took over the world so fast was 2024. I've never played a more addicting game than this. People talk about FlappyBird, but I was never hooked to it as much as 2024.
I feel like saying 2048 "ripped off" Threes is like saying Celeste ripped off Super Meat Boy. There's absolutely an inspirational connection between, but the games appeal to different people. Threes is less popular because it's drastically harder.
It is amazing, but games are just one more of the things that compete for my attention, and sometimes playing games feels like a burden ("I got all those games in a bundle si I should at least try them!" "I should complete the Last of Us campaign at some point...", etc)
And as a sort of counterexample: Unfinished Swan. It's totally worth playing for the first few levels, but gets steadily less polished and less fun as it goes along.
Superliminal was also really good right until the very last bit where it got preachy.
I recently bought a Nintendo Switch. It's the first new console I bought since the Playstation 2. I only bought it after seeing a friend's indie games library, and seeing that the Switch actually has a pretty decent library of reasonably sized games. This is after a year or two of having written this console off, too, based more or less entirely on people I know talking about Breath of the Wild's epic size.
(The first games I bought for it were Untitled Goose Game and Curse of the Obra Dinn. I was not disappointed.)
It's not to say that there's anything inherently wrong with games being big. But it's always seemed to me that most big games end up being big because the game designers didn't (or weren't allowed to) stop when they were done. And I'm sort of "once bitten, twice shy" about it. Since games tend to front load all their best ideas, you've got to invest many hours into a game before you find out if it's going to sag out. Games reviewers certainly won't tell you, except in cases where it's really bad. I assume because the only people who could stand to review AAA games for a living nowadays are people who don't mind this sort of thing.
I played more bowling on the Wii with friends than I have almost any other game. It's fun, fast, and enjoyable for a large demographic. Hell, I know people who bought the Wii just to play the starter disk. I think there is a huge market for small games that are easy to learn and fun to play in a living room or in a small discord lobby.
I believe the key benefit of small games is not the minimalism or short duration, but the forced condensing of core gameplay. Essentially bundling the fun without the excess fluff. I've heard developers constantly note that features will be dropped and your favorite implementation will hit the chopping block when making games. In the case of small games, you're turning this idea into a feature. Finding what can be stripped away to focus on engagement. Not what massive world can I develop to creature a robust experience, but what bits of the world can I shave to make a fulling experience.
I feel the same applies to short stories -- with the constraint a lot of fluff is removed. It's been a while, but I used to subscribe to a few sci-fi magazines and loved it:
I enjoyed the long running "Asimov's Science Fiction" and "Analog Science Fiction and Fact" the most, but the newer "Clarkesworld" was also quite good. If you'd prefer a large tome, go for "The Year's Best Science Fiction" by Gardner Dozois. Ooh, and can't forget http://escapepod.org/
The Year's Best Science Fiction and really all the collections edited by Gardner Dozois are fantastic. Sadly he died but there are years and years and years of great selections.
This is one of the reasons I personally enjoy retro games. Plenty of old games go for volume of features, but IMHO it's a lot easier to find games with a more condensed, focused in older generations. By the same token I think you're right, and small games like Pikuniku and Minit have re-kindled my interest in modern games after almost a half decade of not really keeping up with the scene, thanks to their condensed focus on fun and gameplay.
The indie game Battle of Polytopia (iOS/Android/Steam) feels like that. It masterfully extracts the core gameplay of games like Civilization. It also has a matching graphics style.
I love short games. They fit into life better. When they tell a story, I appreciate them for much the same reason that I enjoy short stories and novellas: the author gets their point across.
I am not a fan of long games. They consume my time like the cookie monster consumes cookies. The worse games are full of filler. The best games are hard to set aside for a while without loosing track of where I am.
Yet the long games are usually more memorable on the sole merit of the time spent with them. If that is true for most players, I admire the developers for their ability to persist in a market where the odds are stacked against them.
My small game obsession is XONIX, a DOS classic, endlessly playable in-browser via js-dos emulation. It's perfection incarnate. It's soul: the painter's algorithm. No localization, no cultural context required. It transcends the ludic. And enters into the meditative. My personal high score is just over 30,000 ;)
Author here, glad you like it! I'm still making small games [1], though my personal website is woefully outdated now. If you like small strategy titles, Slipways would probably be a good fit.
As a solo indie, making my games small is usually not a choice - but working in the small has its advantages. I actually wrote a whole article on how restrictions breed deeper, tighter designs [2].
I launched my first small mobile game this year! [1]
I recently started my next game which is a story-based platformer. It will be tiny/small and it's hard not to think it will not be enough, but this post has confirmed for me that small is ok, if not better. Thanks!
You know, this is something I can get behind. I thoroughly enjoyed Firewatch which had a (relatively) short story and just provided a simple enough story. It didn't try to do a ton more than what it advertised and it left a lot unanswered (which was fine)
I also found a ton of value in Stardew Valley which I sank hours into but the condensed time of a single "day" made gameplay much more bite sized and short. It is a MUCH longer game though compared to Firewatch but both scratch a good itch.
I played Firewatch in a single sitting with my fiancée a few years ago. It was a really nice shared experience and it's what made me realise that these days I much prefer games I can finish in a few hours.
For a long time I had the tendency to stubbornly force myself to finish any game I started, which meant I was spending a lot of my gaming time not actually having fun.
Similar to that forcing a finish habit, I've started to avoid trying to "min/max" games in an effort to just slow down and discover. I definitely had way more fun in Stardew Valley with my partner doing this.
Another great 'short' game is Journey, which me and my family all played individually and really enjoyed. IIRC it only takes up to 4 hours to get through it entirely; it's definitely worth sitting down and doing a full playthrough of in one go.
I love short to medium games. I enjoy story progression and the accomplishment of finishing. I find longer games to much of a time commitment. The last AAA game I quit was Mass Effect Andromeda. I loved the first two games. I love the world building of the series. But the game loop was so repetitive with very little story progression as I went from planet to planet not really discovering anything new. A good story is told succinctly in just the amount of time needed. This is why Breaking Bad is a better story than Lost. Because Breaking Bad had a beginning, middle, and end and each part had purpose that aligned with the others.
I started building simple, 2D clones last month but have been losing steam in the face of how much work goes into even a simple game. Who knew so much goes into 80s arcade hits!?
You aren’t kidding. I really enjoy SFML, so I made simplified versions of a couple of early 80s arcade classics to play around with that library a bit. Even with so much given to you with a library like SFML, it’s still hard work to make even simple games. I can’t imagine doing all this in assembly! Those were some truly impressive folks back in the day.
I highly recommend R-Cade for Racket for starting up on small games especially if you want to learn some scheme/racket. It took me a while to get it running under windows, it requires SFML and CSFML but under ubuntu it's very easy to get it running.
At my age (mid-30s), I cannot commit myself to hours of gaming. These days, I try to avoid new games esp RPG.
But I keep buying "old" games (esp remakes or sequels) for nostalgia purpose (I don't even install many of them), bcoz when I was a child, I owned pirated copy.
A lot of small games are done by indies who pretty much only does it out of pure passion(am one can confirm) but with just how laborious gamedev is, indies can only really do small but polished games.
I'm working on a small game right now (probably 3 or 4 hours in length) and the amount of work to do to get it to an acceptable state for release is gigantic. And that's after some serious downsizing in content.
That said, some indies start out with a 'prototype' or 'hackathon' version, then take it to Kickstarter to flesh it out to a full version; Celeste (which I mentioned elsewhere) started off as a Pico-8 game built in 4 days and was then built as a full title. Didn't actually see a Kickstarter campaign for that one.
Another game I'm playing and enjoying right now is Hollow Knight, which started off as a poorly received game jam entry , then a Kickstarter which raised a modest sum (less than 50K), and now it's a highly acclaimed title with nearly 3 million units sold (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollow_Knight).
Yeah, game jams are an awesome way to brute-force the ideas to come out and many a great titles have started out from jams. The project I'm working first came into being as an entry for a 48-hour jam back in March. I've continually worked on it since, with pauses here and there due to life stuff.
Celeste probably didn't have a Kickstarter because the studio behind it (Matt Makes Games) was already pretty mature, having already shipped hits like Towerfall. Contrast that to Hollow Knight's Team Cherry who basically had to bootstrap themselves throughout the development process with literally only 3 people.
I released a small game a couple of years ago -- a challenging puzzle game called Omnicube [1].
It was inspired by my time playing competitive chess. I loved the experience of sitting down and solving a book of tactics puzzles. I found it fascinating that the individual movements of each chess piece are quite simple, yet they combine to create really challenging puzzles. With Omnicube I wanted to create a game that had a similar feeling of challenging puzzles derived from simple mechanics. I think it would appeal to a lot of the HN audience!
93 comments
[ 4.3 ms ] story [ 120 ms ] threadIf anyone is looking for games like this here are a few single player games I'd recommend:
Monument Valley
Mini Metro
A Good Snowman is Hard to Build
Gunpoint
Snakebird
Braid
Sayonara Wildhearts
Super Mario Run
Untitled Goose Game
Race the Sun
To game makers out there: know your category, and don't break it.
There was an old space quest game that was like this too. Final mecha fight that turned a thinking game into an action game and with it turned friends of the game into enemies.
Polytopia and Bad North are very cute, quickly comprehensible, and playable-in-small-slices-of-time 4X-ish games.
Yiotro is a developer who makes visually simple but engaging strategy games on mobile [1] [2]. Antiyoy is a conquer-the-world game, in Vodobanka you control a SWAT team, etc.
[1] https://play.google.com/store/apps/developer?id=Yiotro&hl=en...
[2] https://apps.apple.com/us/developer/ivan-yakovliev/id1415296...
Anyway, my personal recommendation for a short but fun game would be the original Pico-8 version of Celeste; it's relatively small but uses the maximum capacity of the Pico-8 platform. A first playthrough can take a few tries and up to an hour, but it can be done within two minutes; I think me and a colleague of mine got below the two minute mark:
Game: https://www.lexaloffle.com/bbs/?tid=2145
1:43 speedrun: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=98y2UciWCqY
That is completely untrue and completely misrepresenting the game. It's basically the opposite of the truth.
On the gameplay - which has been mostly fairly highly praised https://www.ign.com/articles/2016/12/15/super-mario-run-revi...
On its monetization model - which has been praised for being consumer friendly (and harming profitability for Nintendo). You can play some of it for free and there’s a one-off $10 payment to unlock the rest. https://venturebeat.com/2016/12/23/how-super-mario-run-screw...
There's no interface, no objectives or awards, and no story. Shot power and ball spin are the only controls. The landscape is randomly generated and has enough features (water, sand, cacti, etc.) to keep things interesting.
Calling it a "small" game seems like an exaggeration. "Micro" might be a better word. It sounds like it would get boring after a bit, but honestly that might be the best part? You can kind of zone out and play for bit. It's almost meditative.
[0] https://captaingames.itch.io/golf-on-mars
To the Moon
VA-11 HALL-A
Emily Is Away
They can possibly get more money out of that.
Very easy to destroy the fun of a novelty side project once you start focusing on making it maintainable or extensible
It's the perfect game for that format.
Paratopic
Kentucky Route Zero: Limits and Demonstrations
Minit
Cloud Gardens (more of a sandbox at this point in development but very chill and enjoyable)
Necrobarista (~5 hours for one playthrough)
Superliminal was also really good right until the very last bit where it got preachy.
I recently bought a Nintendo Switch. It's the first new console I bought since the Playstation 2. I only bought it after seeing a friend's indie games library, and seeing that the Switch actually has a pretty decent library of reasonably sized games. This is after a year or two of having written this console off, too, based more or less entirely on people I know talking about Breath of the Wild's epic size.
(The first games I bought for it were Untitled Goose Game and Curse of the Obra Dinn. I was not disappointed.)
It's not to say that there's anything inherently wrong with games being big. But it's always seemed to me that most big games end up being big because the game designers didn't (or weren't allowed to) stop when they were done. And I'm sort of "once bitten, twice shy" about it. Since games tend to front load all their best ideas, you've got to invest many hours into a game before you find out if it's going to sag out. Games reviewers certainly won't tell you, except in cases where it's really bad. I assume because the only people who could stand to review AAA games for a living nowadays are people who don't mind this sort of thing.
Not sure how long it is though because you always have to start from the beginning so we’ve never completed it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science_fiction_magazine#Curre...
Also Ted Chiang (Your Life and Other Stories, Exhalation, ...)
I am not a fan of long games. They consume my time like the cookie monster consumes cookies. The worse games are full of filler. The best games are hard to set aside for a while without loosing track of where I am.
Yet the long games are usually more memorable on the sole merit of the time spent with them. If that is true for most players, I admire the developers for their ability to persist in a market where the odds are stacked against them.
https://js-dos.com/games/xonix.exe.html
https://wasyl.eu/games/compact-conflict.html
As a solo indie, making my games small is usually not a choice - but working in the small has its advantages. I actually wrote a whole article on how restrictions breed deeper, tighter designs [2].
[1] http://itch.io/krajzeg
[2] https://medium.com/@krajzeg/depth-in-games-an-in-depth-look-...
Chills down my spine every time.
Haven’t gotten the chance to play their new game Hades yet but I imagine it’s on the same tier.
I recently started my next game which is a story-based platformer. It will be tiny/small and it's hard not to think it will not be enough, but this post has confirmed for me that small is ok, if not better. Thanks!
1: - https://apps.apple.com/au/app/swoopy-boi/id1494073988 - https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.RotubGames...
(I used Unity)
I also found a ton of value in Stardew Valley which I sank hours into but the condensed time of a single "day" made gameplay much more bite sized and short. It is a MUCH longer game though compared to Firewatch but both scratch a good itch.
For a long time I had the tendency to stubbornly force myself to finish any game I started, which meant I was spending a lot of my gaming time not actually having fun.
I started building simple, 2D clones last month but have been losing steam in the face of how much work goes into even a simple game. Who knew so much goes into 80s arcade hits!?
But I keep buying "old" games (esp remakes or sequels) for nostalgia purpose (I don't even install many of them), bcoz when I was a child, I owned pirated copy.
I'm working on a small game right now (probably 3 or 4 hours in length) and the amount of work to do to get it to an acceptable state for release is gigantic. And that's after some serious downsizing in content.
Another game I'm playing and enjoying right now is Hollow Knight, which started off as a poorly received game jam entry , then a Kickstarter which raised a modest sum (less than 50K), and now it's a highly acclaimed title with nearly 3 million units sold (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollow_Knight).
Celeste probably didn't have a Kickstarter because the studio behind it (Matt Makes Games) was already pretty mature, having already shipped hits like Towerfall. Contrast that to Hollow Knight's Team Cherry who basically had to bootstrap themselves throughout the development process with literally only 3 people.
It was inspired by my time playing competitive chess. I loved the experience of sitting down and solving a book of tactics puzzles. I found it fascinating that the individual movements of each chess piece are quite simple, yet they combine to create really challenging puzzles. With Omnicube I wanted to create a game that had a similar feeling of challenging puzzles derived from simple mechanics. I think it would appeal to a lot of the HN audience!
[1] https://trykon.itch.io/omnicube