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Comment by Digikid13 | Hacker News Reader

It's very confusing that y'all are calling this a "game". There's nothing to play, it's just a simulation to watch.

"Simulation" doesn't necessarily entail stimulating interactivity and a pleasing aesthetic. As of writing, I don't know if there's a better term than "game" for what this is. (Maybe we can coin a new term, like "game-lite" -- somewhat akin to what "rogue-lite" is to the "rogue" genre).

See "walking simulators":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Remains_of_Edith_Finch

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Stanley_Parable

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thirty_Flights_of_Loving

Plenty argue that these aren't games either (usual complaints involve lack of problem(s) to resolve, and no win-lose dynamic); but, then, what are these? The closest category I can think of would be "computer-animated film", but... these are interactive, and you can navigate and look in any direction you want, which yields a very different experience than watching a film like "Toy Story".

I think "demo" or "toy" or "exhibit" would be a better term than "game", since there's not really any story, or rules, or objectives, or anything resembling a normal gameplay loop. The level of interactivity is well below what you would typically expect from a game, and there's effectively no agency in affecting the outcome of what happens. Even walking simulators have at least some of those things.

I remember reading an article which talks about the difference between games and these interactive demos: games have objectives and goals, and for the demos without such, they're better to be called as "toys".

"Walking simulator" is a little tricky to extrapolate from since it was originally a perjorative.

There are tools in the upper right corner. You can pick one and use it on a beetle. ;) This introduces various faults in the simulation that the database has to recover from.

Minor spoiler: there's another tiny game hidden at the end of the third level.

That adds some interactivity, but I still wouldn't call this a game yet. Games generally have some sort of challenge you must overcome. This is more like a highly polished interactive simulation of a distributed db. Still really cool and well done.

Out of curiosity what did you use to write the graphical part of this game?

I used my Zig port of NanoVG: https://github.com/fabioarnold/nanovg-zig which ultimately uses WebGL for rendering in the browser.

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