On Small Games

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 love small and medium sized games. I'm nearly done working on one now actually (although I can't release it at the moment).

If 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

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.

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.

It's nice to see this getting more attention.

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.

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.

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.

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 ;)

https://js-dos.com/games/xonix.exe.html

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)

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!

1: - https://apps.apple.com/au/app/swoopy-boi/id1494073988 - https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.RotubGames...

My favorite is Compact Conflict, a minimal version of Risk that you can play in a few minutes:

https://wasyl.eu/games/compact-conflict.html

Healthy Breakfast

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)

Some games are small games on one aspect yet take a long time to master or completely explore.

A recent game i liked a lot in this category has been Lonely Mountains: Downhill. You can play a single race in just a few minutes or you can try to shave off fractions of a second for a particular checkpoint for hours.

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.

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.

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.

Thank you for this. Great motivational reading!

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!?

I spent >5years solo building a game that you can probably complete within an hour. Based on the reviews though, 95% of people still really enjoy it, which was a relief. It also feels very validating to read the opinions in here.

the game: https://apps.apple.com/gb/app/adventures-of-kidd/id111277721...

Actually many old games are short - from ping pong, miner, solitude ... the digger and the follow them to their death kind of game is very long

Interesting take on the matter. In my case, looking at my past behaviour, I tend to prefer veeeeery long games apparently. I've "finished" Elder Scrolls 3 Morrowind only recently (and I still have to go through one last DLC). I enjoy games such as Railroad Tycoon, the Anno series, Sim City, etc. decades after their release...

Pilgrims by Amanita Design

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.

Is there a website hosting small web games for children (say, 5 to 8 yo)?

I thought small games are small in size, not short in gameplay.

Bastion is my favourite small game.

Chills down my spine every time.

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!

[1] https://trykon.itch.io/omnicube

pako car chase simulator. If i survive more the 45 seconds its a minor miracle. Oddly fun to try try again. Works well on phone.

play every single increpare games, thecatamites games, Michael Brough games