Animal Well is a captivating metroidvania game that promises hours of thrilling adventures. What sets it apart in today’s world is its incredibly compact size - the PC version occupies a mere 38 megabytes on the hard drive.
In a conversation with Game File, the game’s creator, Billy Basso, shed light on how this feat was achieved. Here are the key points he highlighted:
- Basso’s focus was on efficient programming rather than deliberately aiming for a small file size. ”I simply aimed for concise and direct coding,” explained the author.
- The use of a custom engine devoid of unnecessary features played a significant role in keeping the game’s size minimal. Basso compared this to engines like Unity, emphasizing that even a basic application on Unity would take up more space than Animal Well.
- The game’s minimalist visual style, characterized by low-resolution pixel art, also contributed to its compact size.
- Interestingly, on the PlayStation 5, the game occupies 101 megabytes due to platform requirements for a 4K resolution image in the background when the game is highlighted in the console menu. This is not a fault of Animal Well itself.
It’s amusing to think that the image of Animal Well on the PS5 menu background might outweigh the game itself, as per Basso’s insights.
The compact size of Animal Well has sparked humorous discussions within the gaming community:
For $25, you get a game that’s only 40 megabytes. That’s $0.625 per megabyte! Compare this to Baldur’s Gate III, priced at $60 with a massive 150 gigabytes of content - that’s $0.0004 per megabyte. The creators of Animal Well might need to bulk up the game size to justify my SSD space!
Animal Well.
The size of Animal Well draws parallels to demoscene art, where creators strive to create impressive visuals using minimal bytes. An iconic example is .kkrieger, a shooter with graphics comparable to Doom 3 but only 96 kilobytes in size.
While demoscene technologies often influence game development, games entirely based on demoscene principles are rare due to limitations. For instance, .kkrieger had rough and unpolished gameplay despite its technical marvel.
Game File also revealed that Basso is handling the game’s porting to all platforms independently. This explains why Animal Well is available on PC, PS5, and Switch but not on Xbox – the developer simply lacked the resources. However, an Xbox release is on the horizon.
Post from stopgame.ru