Joys of small game development
abagames.github.io
abagames.github.io
Writers usually divide their works based on word count into flash fiction, short stories, novelettes, novellas, novels, and epics. Now these aren't one to ones when it comes to game developement but it's a much better tool to describe games then what we're using now.
For an example many of author's games are better described as flash games (not that Flash just flash as in very short), while something like A Short Hike and many would be a novellet (gamellet?). Many arcade 8 bit, and 16 but games would fall somewhere in between flash and short. Many AAA games and many RPGs would be Epics. Etc.
Of course this isn't a perfect way to categorize games but it's certainly better then the term small/short being used for anything that's less then a 100+ hour AAA game and it could help developers too. You can ask yourself "Do I really want to make a Epic? Or maybe this would be better as a short or a Gamellet?" or if you just want to make something very small you can just say "I'm going to make a flash game."
Different names are needed but I still think the point stands. We need a different to talk about game length then just the words short, small, or long.
you're right that software engineer and programmer types (of persons) would do well to learn form other older media formats that precede games.
but let's not pretend that games are anything like what came before.
interactivity is a new element to put into the storytelling toolkit. but the point is how games can do a much more than tell stories; it's like puzzles are part of the story somehow... but answering how exactly goes quite deep.
I believe games fall into some spectrum between movie and sport, the experiences are very different.
As a player, I'd love such a classification. Increasingly I just don't have the time to slog through an entire Elden Ring or Starfield. Give me a way to easily find more Rocket Leagues and Cocoons.
The issue is that you know exactly what percentage of the game you haven't experienced and exactly how good the game is and it makes it next to impossible to stop playing.
'The Last of Us' is incredibly long and among the best linear non open-world games ever made. That said, it's entirely linear and the thought of sinking such a massive amount of time into a game that's effectively a very long movie give it a very low replayability factor.
Likewise, Skyrim is a massive open world game that's incredibly linear and repetitive, giving it a low replayability factor.
Rockstar has several very long open world games that have massive replay value and don't get stale with repeat playthroughs. On the flip side, if you haven't played through 2 or 3 times you've generally missed a decent amount of content. GTA San Andreas, RDR2 and GTA V all fall into this rare category of long games that are highly replayable.
With open world games the key to high replayability seems to be NPC AI quality and providing different outcomes for different actions and the order in which you do things in-game. Allowing you to do lots of missions in whatever order you choose goes a long way to breaking up any feeling that you're watching a movie.
You might spend 20 hours playing through a main story, and another 200 running around doing other stuff without ever actually starting over in a new game.
Skyrim is a game that, shockingly, people still play today. There's players with 1500 hours. It's not my cup of tea either, but putting it as an example of a non-replayable game is more than a little dubious. Especially when GTA V and RDR2 have basically the same practical problem, yet you find them highly replayable somehow.
What a game needs to be replayable is a fun gameplay loop that is enjoyable when the novelty of story has worn out. Even simple gameplay loops like the one of Hades can make the gave very replayable. If you like, say, the gameplay of Spiderman for the PS4(another game longer than Last Of Us), playing it again will still be fun anyway. If you are going in it for the story only, it will not. Very few games spend the effort on making all the little decisions have relevant story consequences: Basically all you ever get is illusion of choice. It's the fighting, driving, shooting, or strategizing that has to be so fun that doing it for 100+ hours can be rewarding to some people.
I may not be the biggest Skyrim fan in the world but this is just patently false from my experience. I know tons of people who've played through Skyrim multiple different times with different playstyles and allegiances.
> GTA San Andreas, RDR2 and GTA V all fall into this rare category of long games that are highly replayable.
I can't say I've ever felt the need to reply any Rockstar games so much as continue playing them. The story missions are tedious compared to just messing around exploring the open world.
For example, an online PvP game has discrete games (e.g. a worst case of 2n minutes to play chess with a time limit of n minutes), one often plays a few games in a row depending on fatigue and available time, and replayability is infinite.
I remember going back as far as the 00s, RPG games that didn’t have at least 40 hours of gameplay were criticized as being too short.
Is there enough room between Flappy Bird, “coffee break” games, and epic (J)RPGs for a lot of terms about how long a game takes? And what do you mean, like a session? A run-through? There are games where you don’t have access to a save point all the time, and others where you can just turn it off and walk away and later it’s exactly as you left it. There’s that game Desert Bus that takes ~8h but you can’t even really stop to use the bathroom.
There’s games that have more or less replayability, or dozens of hours of depth that you can explore but only if you like.
There’s so much more to the medium than there is to books. I don’t see how it’s necessary or useful to use a length metric to describe games. It feels like asking “how many pages long is this game?”.
'A Short Hike' may be a short game but it's not a small game/experience. The mechanical complexity alone far outweighs that of the "small games" by this article's author. Consider telling your friend that 'A Short Hike' is a short game and they should/shouldn't play it. It's a perfectly reasonable and intelligible thing to say (probably -- you wouldn't say it to your friend unqualified if you expect they would get a seriously different meaning from it).
... I don't think this is a problem that needs to be solved.
Also, "time to beat" is just not something you can reasonably measure. But even if you think it is, it's not analogous to word count. A novel's "time to beat" would be "time to read", surely.
That said, I like to make what I have often referred to as "$10K games." If I was being paid a realistic hourly rate to implement an idea, what could I do for $10,000 USD? $10K is one month of household burn rate (for me), and so I can aptly weigh the decision of "outsource this or do it myself?" It gives a very clear budgetary limitation.
And sure, you could "work for free" or "get a friend to help out for a pizza" or "well if someone in a LCOL country could do it, that's like two years worth of income."
But we would be arguing pointless nuances at that point.
The question is "could _I_ implement this idea for $10K, if I were being paid the $10K? Would _I_ be willing to set aside all other possible endeavours to work on this, if _I_ were being paid $10K for it?"
And so we get in to how to make a game that has a definite end, that somewhat fulfills the ideal of the small games manifesto, but still gives you enough creative freedom to achieve your goals whilst still shooting yourself in the foot by spending too many hours tweaking the individual pixels in a piece of artwork.
A $10K game, for me, could be a day's worth of work writing code and $9000 worth of outsourced artwork to make it beautiful. Or it could be two or three weeks of intense labour, flying solo, creating the art, music and code because you simply need that itch scratched. The game then becomes secondary to the importance of the creative endeavour itself.
Do you want to compare notes? I’m really curious to ask for details on where your burn rate adds up. Mine is half mortgage at around $2700/mo, but I’ve been surprised and a bit dismayed that an additional $3k per month seems inevitable. I’ve been trying to trim it as much as possible while still living life, but a lot of it is just… life things.
It’s ok if you don’t want to go into details.
In descending order of expense: Insurances > food > mortage > utilities > rent > hobbies > travel > cleaning > maintenance > takeout.
If you're going to categorize in explicit budgets it's very important to understand what that money means to each individual. Especially if considering individual skill. It'd be best to normalize it or simply use time span instead of budget as a metric.
So, What I could do in, say, 1000 hours (so, ~6 months of full time work) and is that worth the opportunity cost? Be it giving up my job and pouring 80 hours a week for 3 months (in your case, giving up 30k in wages), or working 10 hours on the weekend for 2.5 years (which has zero loss financially)? If you have a team or commissions you can split that time up further (so, in this case maybe 10 hours of code and 300 hours of labor from art (including finding an artists and giving feedback). It's a similar angle to your argument but 1000 hours is an universal measurement, one that is improved by one's own skills, and less influenced by cost of living.
But folks are tripping over the definition of small. There’s the small as defined in the link you have, small as in low mechanic and low content like “Gone Home”, small as in asset flips, small as in just not AAA, small as in really intricate but not large, small as in procedurally huge but limited visuals and simple mechanics, small as in just a dating sim or porn, and then small as in old school “small games” like Doom Guy’s Commander Keen which is cute and good at the time but laughably unpolished for todays standards.
Happy to be proved wrong, I find that period very interesting.
Someone who does carpentry as their day job is probably not going to do woodshop in the garage at home even today, but they just pick other things, like grilling.
And when you split into disciplines it gets even more murky. VN's are "small" for a programmer (you may not even need to program for many of them) but can be hundreds of art assets for an artist to work on. Likewise, something like Dwarf Fortress didn't even have a GUI at first but is filled to the brim with simulation state for a programmer to manage.
And if course that definition is relative. Final Fantasy VII was top of the line in 1997 and took 5+years, but it'd be at best a beefy 2-3 man project over a few years today.
I haven't visited this site in years though. I wonder if mobile games are the reason why. I stopped playing a lot of web/flash/html5 games a long time ago when gaming (for me) moved to the app store.
But I recognized the name and remember playing a lot of these games back in the day.
I always thought they were delightful. Building off a single game mechanic or two and then moving on to the next concept. The dev has a good system in place for shipping :)
But still hoping one day I'll make another Flappy Birds.