After making a game with a file size so tiny it was dwarfed by its own PS5 background, developer of hit Metroidvania Animal Well says "I didn't do anything clever"
May. 25, 2024Animal Well takes up a tiny amount of space
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Breakout indie metroidvania Animal Well is one of the best games I’ve played so far this year. It’s also by far the smallest,clocking in at just 38MB, but its developer says they “didn’t do anything particularly clever” to get the game down to that size,
In a recent AMA onReddit, solo dev Billy Basso was asked whether he deliberately tried to keep the game’s file size as small as possible, or whether that was simply a happy accident. Animal Well is, at its heart, a relatively simple 2D platformer, but in an era where game sizes have been ballooning, I don’t remember coming across anything quite as small as this in a long time.
In response, Basso said that “I didn’t do anything particularly clever” and that the game’s tiny file size “was mostly just a side effect of using my own tools, not inheriting any of the bloat of another engine, and using actual low-resolution pixel art saves like 99 percent of the space a game would typically need.”
Check out ourAnimal Well review.
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I’m GamesRadar’s news editor, working with the team to deliver breaking news from across the industry. I started my journalistic career while getting my degree in English Literature at the University of Warwick, where I also worked as Games Editor on the student newspaper, The Boar. Since then, I’ve run the news sections at PCGamesN and Kotaku UK, and also regularly contributed to PC Gamer. As you might be able to tell, PC is my platform of choice, so you can regularly find me playing League of Legends or Steam’s latest indie hit.
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