Top games from the JS13K 2020 competition | Hacker News Reader

Top games from the JS13K 2020 competition

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254 pointstodsacerdoti34 comments

Island Not Found deserves a mention: http://js13kgames.com/entries/island-not-found

Gameplay falls a bit short, but in my opinion it's the technically most impressive entry this year.

A group of devs from the demo scene legends Farbrausch made a 3D FPS game in 96KB years ago that was seriously impressive. 3D games with procedural textures and shaders can compress very well indeed. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.kkrieger (gameplay video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2NBG-sKFaB0)

kkrieger is legend ;) I learn so much from the old demo scene techniques I feel they should be a standard part of the curriculum at this point!

Previous HN post on "Teach Yourself Demoscene in 14 Days"

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21470398

I thought "That sounds really interesting", and then noticed I made the first comment on the story so I've obviously seen that before.

If you don't mind waiting for a loading bar, there's also 404kph[1]. It's technically impressive with decent gameplay (Trackmania clone).

[1] https://js13kgames.com/entries/404kph

It looks nice but the very load, stuck audio when loading anything makes it very annoying. I'd advice turning audio down in case it also happens on your platform (Chrome/mac here).

The failure mode on that game in Safari is quite interesting: the front wheels, car body and rear wheels travel at different speeds.

Interesting that this froze my entire browser for like 10 seconds when I clicked it. Could these technologies (webgl I think?) be used as a venue for a DoS?

This is absolutely insane. A Myst clone in 13k?!

This is by far the most technically impressive entry I've seen, definitely beats the winners, IMHO...

Cool! The control design is very smooth and comfortable.

amazing

Edge Not Found is such a good idea. I love it! A full fledged unique puzzle game could probably be built around this concept if the authors wanted to expand on it - although I'm probably stating the obvious. Pretty sure Hollow Knight has its origins in a game jam and it would be nice if this competition yielded a success like that. (mostly because I want to play more of it)

The tier 3 puzzles are were it starts to really get complex!

Meanwhile the latest Call of Duty doesn't fit in a 256GB SSD.

https://www.gamespot.com/articles/cod-modern-warfare-doesnt-...

The amazing thing to me is that it doesn't even look that good. You download the game (~150GB), then the game sits there downloading and compiling shaders for ages. It's a shame because some aspects of it are actually quite good (although they need to make a competitive mode with no COD-bullshit)

I think the developers have admitted the problem, so hopefully things will improve.

game fidelty is often more about artistic choices than technical stats like texture resolution polygon count, and shader complexity. Especially today, when polygon counts and texture resolution are so high. Squeezing 10% more polygons in when you already had enough doesn't matter. But if you go for some stylistic choice that people just don't like, then it might be perceived as looking bad.

Like in the latest Warzone game, the weird blur they do when you start driving around, to me that is un-watchable. It makes everything look like miniatures to me. But I suppose some people like it. While pubg is very very simple by comparison but I like it fine.

Are you sure you’re not playing on low settings, because it looks pretty damn good considering the scale of the game (Warzone)

I have it maxed out. It doesn't look bad but it doesn't look like it's worth the space on my disk.

Given the amount of unique objects and texture maps in the game, this is not a surprise, specially thinking that graphics are the biggest selling points of today's consoles.

If Call of Duty is anything like any other AAA game, it's not because of the number of unique objects and textures, but the size is on purpose. Lots of video games are optimized by _duplicating_ the assets to where they are needed to be loaded, so since they are all in sequence in storage, it'll be faster to load. But this increases the storage requirements, as lots of assets ends up being duplicated all over the place.

I suspect they're not using techniques like procedural generation, which can pack a lot of highly detailed graphics into a tiny space. It's the difference between a vector and raster image.

You do not use realtime procedural textures in AAA games. The resolution for those needs to be quite high (2048px or 4096px) and compiling the shaders into that resolution takes ages.

They however do use procedural textures when texturing objects (Check Substance Designer), but having to compile them during playtime would make load times unacceptably high. Maybe even hours.

sometimes even non unique objects are duped for sake of fast loading times too.

I’ve heard it’s literally this. Every asset is duplicated for every map or level it appears in to speed up load times and to make it easier for development teams to work independently on different maps without stepping on each others toes. Also the assets aren’t compressed for faster load times, especially on console. Don’t know how true it is.

It's pretty much a straight trade of load times vs storage— didn't matter back when games were streamed from disk, but it sucks now that they're installed. It's just that load times are measurable and often criticized, whereas no one really talks about installation size, except maybe to remark on it when it's unexpectedly small— for example, FromSoftware's Sekiro, which clocks in at just under 13GB.

This is one of the hopes for the new generation of consoles with fast random-access storage, that much of this duplication can be eliminated, see: https://twitter.com/laurakbuzz/status/1240312373719769089

for large "open world" games, you sometimes dupe things to lay out the data in memory to be near each other when the items are near each other in the world, so you can stream data in or chunk it in efficiently. If a player drives toward a city you have to be able to load all the buildings and mailboxes in without any pause. it isn't easy

I'm absolutely blown away by some of the games they managed to make in under 13kb. This video "How we fit an NES game into 40 Kilobytes" is an interesting illustration of just how small these games are.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZWQ0591PAxM

And MicroMages (2019, featured in the video) was an excellent short game for the NES with tight controls. I bought a MicroMages cartridge in the IndieGogo campaign, gave it to a friend of mine who had an NES, and we had a blast playing the 2player mode. (also available as a standalone and emulated cartridge.)

It's wonderful to be part of the community that put together the competition and stayed dedicated to finish the trove of cool titles!

Impressive JS OS in 13KB: https://github.com/KilledByAPixel/OS13k

Gotta plug https://www.dwitter.net - JS codegolfing in under 140 characters! Quite a few JS13k participants are active on Dwitter as well.

Feel free to join us in discord: https://discord.gg/emHe6cP

There is always a distinct abundance of "trippy" games in these competitions. This list has "Track not found?!", "FourFold", "I want to Google the Game", and my favorite "CHOCH". I think it has to do with lack of resources pushing people to abstractions, but people more knowledgeable about these things can comment on that. There is a distinct lack of trippy games in the main stream, I am not a gamer but whenever I come across these small games I always wonder how it will feel like if this was a full fledged game. The last one I remember is perhaps Braid with its time travel (again, not a gamer, very out dated info) but its graphics are very normal.

This is a great point - but you have to remember the money is what dictates games that go "mainstream". Companies like Activision, Blizzard, and EA are going to push out something that has low-risk, high reward (Call of Duty, Assassins Creed etc.) rather than push the medium of games forward.

They'll leave the interesting "games as an art form" type idea to indie devs, and once some idea or concept has broken mainstream, they'll snatch it and tag it to a well known IP (see Battle Royale + Call of Duty) and call it a day

So much creativity, I got more gameplay out of these than in many 50 hour AAA epics. Great work!

I really like Edge Not Found !

Really neat concept.

I wish this competition would get more attention before it starts. The past 3 or so years I'm only ever reminded about it when they post the results.

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