The criticism of increasingly heavy and unstable games is completely justified, but the creativity of some programmers seems to have no limits. Take Tiny Twitch, a game developed by Alex Yoder. Basically, all you have to do is chase the X across the screen by clicking on it, but what's truly striking is that the code fits in a simple tweet.
My story with the game Frontier: Elite II has had some very strange passages, including a journey of several kilometers with a leg in a cast, a mother who wanted to strangle me (figuratively, of course), and a lot of heat. But it was worth it, no doubt. One of my first questions was how they managed to fit an entire galaxy on a single disk. The answer came to me several years later: procedural generation and lots of assembler. 250,000 lines of code, to be precise. A torture of programming and maintenance, but a marvel when it came to speed and efficiency. What do we find today? Titles with 30-gigabyte textures, patches so large they could be games on their own, and projects that shouldn't have seen the light until finished (yes, Arkham Knight, we're looking at you).
How Small Can a Video Game Be?
Alex Yoder's development might answer that question. The game is nothing more than a very compact variant of Twitch, and the objective is to click on the X as many times as possible before the time runs out. Speed and precision are the key here, along with the recommendation to play it under Chrome (for some reason, the X doesn't move in Firefox). How big is this Tiny Twitch? Let's say Yoder managed to share the entire code in a single Twitter message, that is, under 140 characters. Why did he do it? In short, because he was challenged.
No, it's not going to win any awards for its aesthetics, and chasing the X becomes boring after a few tries (the most skilled talk of 18 or 19 clicks)... but there are many things behind this game that other projects should adopt, starting with creativity and inspiration.
