How NES Games Are STILL Made in 40KB - Inkbox [14:32]
How NES Games Are STILL Made in 40KB - Inkbox [14:32]
Technical video, and interesting if you've ever wondered about some of the constraints game developers used to work with with some older hardware.
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The fuck do they mean STILL made like it's somehow impossible to code
They mean it in the sense of new, hombrew NES games as I understand it, instead of new games that mimic the NES style
Why would those homebrew game developers be unable to do what programmers did back then? It is not even as if games back then had huge teams like they do today.
Certainly not unable, but lots of factors seem like they would add to difficulty particularly if emulators didn't exist (because cartridge-based storage, aging/costly hardware). Then there's the idea of having a target on your back (or any tools that make it more viable) due to extremely litigious/malicious entities and to me it just seems like a niche that isn't worth the extra time.
I'm grateful for PC games under 100MiB. Closer to 10MiB is worthy of praise and below that may be half amazing. There is .kkrieger at only 95KiB for a 3D game (and that is another mealtime topic), but I think that is more interesting visually than it is for gameplay.
Or to be clear, I see the "STILL" more for creating games for old proprietary hardware than for optimization itself.
But making games in hardware and being sued don't change if your games are larger in size.
Correct. The last line of my comment is most relevant to this chain.
More specifically I could say that while many optimizations might be general-use or discoverable, others may be specific to said old system (or maybe getting around limitations). That and this level of optimization would be diminishing returns for even the lowest of modern systems (but obviously nearly required for the target hardware).
Making a minimalist and well-optimized game for desktop PC is going to be significantly easier and with more of an audience than trying to target most other hardware. There are also fantasy consoles like TIC-80 or WASM-4 for more modern/open targets that likely have better documentation/communities (or the community for whatever language you are using instead).
No reason really, and the video doesn't suggest they'd be unable to. Its title is doing that regular clickbaity style of YouTube, but the content itself is interesting if you wondered what went into making these small games, and how some grew in size later in the NES' existence as more was added to cartridges to enable more involved games.