Tiny Games

Tiny Games is a set of complete browser games small enough to load instantly anywhere, even inside a social media post. The largest is about 17 KB compressed, smaller than most photos on a typical web page.

The games

• Pocket Farm: a 2.5D farm. Plant, water, and harvest crops, raise chickens, fill orders, and sell at the market. It saves as you play, and you can share your farm with a link. About 17 KB.
• Crate Shift: a crate-pushing puzzle in six levels. Clear them all to unlock a level maker and share your own levels by link. About 14 KB.
• Solitaire: Klondike with the classic Windows rules and scoring. About 8 KB.
• Shardbound: a three-level keyboard platformer, and the first of these games. About 6.5 KB.

Every game plays with a mouse, touch, or keyboard. Each also has an embed version that can play directly inside a post on X.

How they stay so small

The games are written in a tiny game language I made for this. Its choices all serve size:

• Graphics are triangles. Almost everything on screen is a list of triangles, each defined by three points and a color from a small palette. No image files are needed, and the same data can be exported as an SVG for screenshots and animated previews.
• Simple game logic. A small set of bindings connects the game to the browser, with no engine or framework underneath.
• The compiler picks the smallest output. It builds each game as plain JavaScript and as WebAssembly, compresses both, and keeps whichever is smaller. For games with little data, JavaScript usually wins, because WebAssembly has fixed overhead to make up first.

Sound is still the weak spot. Simple, NES-style beeps cost very little, but anything richer grows the file quickly.

Background

The project started from js13kGames, a competition where a whole web game must fit in a 13 KB zip file. My larger games, built with Stasis Lang, are around 100 KB before images and audio. That's small, but I wanted to see how much smaller a playable game could get. Tiny JS games has the full story.