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I’m only making business card sized games now

frankforce.com

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Re: I’m only making business card sized games now

#3
> 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?

Re: I’m only making business card sized games now

#4
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!

Re: I’m only making business card sized games now

#5
post #3

> 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…

I think he’s making an argument that you can make games with much less code than we do now, not a serious argument that we should only make games that fit on a business card.

Re: I’m only making business card sized games now

#6
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?

Re: I’m only making business card sized games now

#7
post #5
post #3

> 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…

I think he’s making an argument that you can make games with much less code than we do now, not a serious argument that we should only make games that fit on a business card.

Yes. The same would apply to other areas as well. For example, a colleague of mine set up this weird elaborate web based data processing thing so that we could automate processing of files. I did the same thing he was trying to achieve with a couple of perl one-liners.

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.

Re: I’m only making business card sized games now

#8
post #3

> 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…

I think the lesson to take away is not to take the author too literally.

Re: I’m only making business card sized games now

#9
post #6

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?

Why play videogames at all? What does that accomplish?
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