Crafting a 13KB Game: The Story of Space Huggers | Hacker News Reader

Crafting a 13KB Game: The Story of Space Huggers

frankforce.com

228 pointslovegrenoble38 comments

Another reason to golf. It's not quite right, but it's a fun goal to fit an app within the first few TCP roundtrips.

https://endtimes.dev/why-your-website-should-be-under-14kb-i...

PinkBike (online mountain bike community) has a good tech blog post on increasing their slow start settings (2010)

https://www.pinkbike.com/u/radek/blog/pinkbike-speed.html

Impressive. A bit sad that out of 5 million visits, they have articles with 13 comments. Is all that traffic really organic?

PinkBike used to be the go-to place for uploading media for further embedding in off-site forums (SouthernDownhill, SingletrackWorld, RideMonkey, NSMTB, VitalMTB) - for example, race reports, sales (when forums had limited storage capacity for users), etc.

Your media was watermarked and made available in different resolutions (a unique feature at the time on a bike specific website!)

I would bet a large chunk of those 5M visitors were hotlinks as I don’t remember their forums being too busy —- but I do remember them being very fragmented with too many subforums.

Unfortunately Facebook Groups has killed off the almost tribal online MTB communities now :(

It actually felt weird that the site loaded so fast. I'm not used to that!

It's amazing how close to the inspiration - Broforce - it actually feels, at least from the video. I'd sacrifice floppy 41 out of 45 of Microsoft Office 97 Standard Edition to be able to play this.

It looks incredibly similar. It plays somewhat differently - the controls are quite sluggish for me, the jumping and climbing is a bit clumsier, and the grenades change the dynamic. But the influence is very clear!

That is an oddly specific reference, so I have to ask – what’s on 41/45 of Office 97 SE?

I dunno, but trading the feeling you'll get when you realize you are missing the disk after loading 40 others is quite the devil's bargain.

Incredible. I love these stories of kb games. For those interested, there's a great video for this 40 kb nes game, micro mages:

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

It's great to see this sort of stuff still goes on.

In 2000 (I think), I put 2 Java Applets into the 5k competition. One a maze game with a thousand rooms (10x10x10), the other a spelling checker that checked the contents of an input field against a word list. Both were quite poor and I didn't do well.

The general standard was really impressive. I remember that there was pretty good chess game done in Javascript.

https://www.the5k.org/about.php

That brings back memories. I entered a 2d duckhunt game in JavaScript, lots of nice comments, but no judges recognition.

LittleJS is great. I love tinkering with it. Frank is great too, nice little community in the discord and he is super responsive to questions.

Impressive,though I still think Kkrieger is the most impressive tiny game I've seen.

Farbrausch sure has put some incredible stuff on the scene in their time.

Love it, though I wouldn't have been able to resist naming it Gamehuggers From Outer Space.

You can't use the word 'craft' without me thinking an article is AI generated now

Neat game but why is it so slow? It runs smooth at the start but whenever I get near some enemies, as soon as 1 or 2 explosions happen it runs at like 10fps or less. I'm on an M1 Mac which can run some pretty high end games. I tried Safari, Firefox, and Chrome

Odd, it runs like butter even with a bunch of enemies on my screen over here.

Linux, Brave, i5-10210U, integrated GT2 GPU.

Firefox is much slower on the same machine.

The original 13k version or enhanced newgrounds version?

It is 13kb. They were optimizing for a small binary over performance.

They claim it's fast

> Super fast sprite and tile map rendering engine with WebGL

> Update and render 100,000+ sprites at a solid 60fps

brilliant.

For the record, this year's js13kGames [1] has just started days ago and will continue to run until September 13. :-)

[1] https://js13kgames.com

I love the idea of tiny games as a constraint to keep scope sensible. But I worry this is actually a code golf competition. I wonder how many entries are just auto-minified.

In some way, it is; better minification does give you some additional margin. But it would then be a terrible code golf competition because 13 KiB here is the size after zip archiving so the actual limit is anywhere from 30--40 KiB for typical entries and would be very generous. The introduction of better compression tools may have lifted the upper limit a bit but not too much. (Disclaimer: I'm the author of one of such tools that got popular later.)

It should be noted that most assets are still too large in this limit, so almost everything should be made from a code and many stuffs have to be consciously chosen to be included. For this reason, I feel that the limit is rather a very interesting threshold that allows for ordinary developers without much size optimization experience to start with, but should be plenty enough for experienced people to make difference.

Kind of tangental since it doesn't apply here but I love the compression hack used in JS competitions where HTTP wire compression or zipping the files don't count towards the size limit, so the HTML has to decompress itself. The canonical way to do it is to craft a file which browsers will parse as either a PNG or HTML, with the HTML part carrying a stub of Javascript which reads the page as a PNG, draws it into a canvas, extracts the pixel data, reinterprets it as a string containing the main JS payload and evals() it.

AFAIK js13kGames is intentionally using ZIP as a compressed container in order to avoid requiring such relatively obscure hacks to be competitive (up to some degree). Also the hack itself is now being less relevant due to the introduction of DecompressionStream and non-DEFLATE compression algorithms.

That’s horrifying; thanks, I love it.

The entire 8 bit era was full of games of this size. The game code and sprite data for Lode Runner is less than 16 KB. Machines with 48 or 64 KB of RAM don’t give mic( to work with but we still got Rescue Raiders, Bolo, Bilestoad, and so on.

Awesome, thanks. So while I might need to think about clever ways to generate/handle assets, I can generally not worry about "all the clever JavaScript hacks" and just write thoughtful TypeScript that I elide and minify.

Yeah, most microscopic JS hacks would be too cumbersome to use in this scale. But some conscious decisions to structure your code may make a big difference.

Even if minified, the file size is so constrained that it basically excludes the use of assets like images and audio files.

13kb of 44khz 16bit MONO audio is 150ms, even with compression sampled audio is more or less out of the question.

With pixel art images however you can get a fair bit in if you're comfortable with low resolutions in 8bpp or lower.

You can still do some impressive stuff:

https://js13kgames.com/games/q1k3/index.html

I've done 64kb intros since the 90s so I'm pretty familiar with sizecoding, my point was rather that non-generated audio is usually pretty much out of the picture whilst images in pixelart form is still feasible to a degree.

Still a challenge.

Actually noticed the compo in time this time (no idea good ideas for the theme though), got 2 or 3 interesting failed attempts to scrounge code from (but not sure of the approach to take yet).

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