Years before I encountered this meme today, I wondered if there are game projects that strive for maximum compatibility and minimalism. Something striving to the Doom’s fame of running everywhere, but still developed now.

I know about simple logic puzzles and their ports, I know about mods like Tamriel Rebuilt for the 20+ years old engine, Q3 rewrites even in my distro’s repository.

But do you know of someone who write new titles with that nomadic attitude to fit into pastpastpast-gen requirements and work on outdated software?

I’m thinking about getting a used notebook and I would totally install things I liked in the 90s, 00s, but I already played them and they don’t have an active community anymore. Constant battery drain requires a simple game with small system reqs too.

And having a supported game that can run on a potato PC and have it’s active forum or subreddit would be cool.

I’m looking for something between Rogue and UT99 (or even HL2). Or maybe I’m just really curious if things like that still exist and managed? IDK.

But it’s really no fit for c/gaming but for c/gamedev, because if there are projects like these, they are pure inspiration.

  • @CluckN
    15•10 months ago

    Dwarf Fortress is extremely compact (100mb). Sounds like you are thinking more in the line of .KKrieger. It’s more of a coding exercise where they used a bunch of tricks to get the games file size down to 97.000 bytes.

  • @TeaHands
    13•10 months ago

    My husband has recently got into developing for Pico-8, which has a pretty tricksy maximum size limit to work with.

    Afaik this isn’t for any real hardware-related reason, but clearly people enjoy the challenge and the creativity that naturally flows from limitation.

    Naturally there are a ton of terrible games that get shovelled out for it (same as with anything) but some people can make it do pretty wild stuff!

    • kamenLady.
      7•10 months ago

      I was reading about people using the K.O. II sampler. It has its limitations, but the portability and ability to quickly record any sound, anytime and everywhere you happen to be, seems to ignite the same kind of natural flow, awakening the urge to create.

        • kamenLady.
          2•10 months ago

          Ikr? I feel like a little kid scrolling through their stuff, a little kid whose parents said no. In this case, I’m my own parents telling me no.

  • @BeefPianoEnglish
    5•10 months ago

    I dunno, I was really bummed that I couldn’t run Doom on my 286, even with the turbo button on. Doom sold a lot of 486 DXs

  • @[email protected]
    4•10 months ago

    Not really the minimalism you’re looking for, but I have a mountain of respect for Jonathan Blow and his team. Made their own engine for The Witness so they could have full control to tweak the player experience juuuust right. And imo it still looks beautiful and plays nicely on my laptop’s apu. At the moment they’re creating a new programming language because he feels c++ is bloated, and they’re developing another puzzle game with it. He’s got a lot of gripes about the state of game/software development, and damn he’s trying to do something about it that he feels is meaningful

  • @lobo
    2•10 months ago

    Battlebit Remastered was made to run on a toaster and is recent, no singleplayer though.

  • NullPointer
    2•10 months ago

    Jill of the Jungle was a fun ass game. came with its own sound board too!

  • @VonCesaw
    -5•10 months ago

    Modern filesizes generally exist because it makes piracy difficult. In-game there’s no reason to have BMPs, WAVs, or the such, but 500 GBish downloads make transfer and storage a nightmare

    • @[email protected]English
      8•10 months ago

      It’s not like it could be the hundreds of visual and audio assets that are packed into it to keep the graphics realistic and up to date.