Salomonsson.se
Apr 19 2009

Ghost4Koin - a game in less than 4 kb

A game in less than 4 kb. This image is 6 kb!

[http://games.salomonsson.se/games/ghost4koin.html](Click here to play the game) but watch your ears, the sound effects are very loud!

In 2009 I gathered a team of co-workers from Isotop to enter a competition where you were supposed to build a game with a final result of less than 4 kilobytes. Since I’m both interested in game development, optimization and low level actionscript this competition seemed even more compelling to me.

The game is released over at Wonderfl (http://wonderfl.net/c/7uqT), although it’s so optimized that it’s more or less impossible to understand anything =)

Setting the prerequisite The first thing we started with was going through what would be the easiest thing to do for making the game fit into 4k from a technical perspective. Then we did the exact opposite (its supposed to be a challenge) =D This meant that we wanted:

  • Bitmap graphics, not vectors
  • A 2D platformer with a huge world you can explore
  • Sound!

To achieve this we had to create our own image format (it even supports palette swapping) and generate all sounds at runtime. We had a great time hacking actionscript at this low level, and the game turned out pretty impressive (although its more technically impressive than it’s fun to play ;)). The game ended 4:th place in the competition.