this post was submitted on 21 Jan 2025
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I was shocked to find out that Balatro was like 80 MB to download. You don't need million-poly models and 8k textures to make an really good game. Granted, yeah it's a 2D game, but it's a beautifully-presented one.
whatever you do, don't look into its code.
It's basically a single lua file with more if/else/switch nesting than god intended
(unless it was refactored in the last couple months)
Why not? On the same way you don't need amazing art to make a fun game, you don't need amazing code either. If the game is fun then it's a success.
agreed, but not the point I was making
balatro: oh dear, oh dear. gorgeous.
yandere simulator: you fucking donkey.
If it works it works.
Yeah a lot of games have shit code and always have. Real time strategy "ai" is especially egregious if I remember right.
Apparently Undertale works this way as well. All of its dialog is one massive switch statement.
I remember reading undertales code is nightmare fuel.
Animal Well has a 35mb install according to Steam.
Games like that have nothing to prove. The product speaks for itself.
Meanwhile, games that take up 300gb of your disk often do this purposefully. In the case of console games, they know it will monopolize your system. The game usually isn’t even enjoyable, but it’s too big to delete randomly, so you gaslight yourself into committing to it
each cod game also costs around 450 million dollars to make, so i can’t help but imagine that some of the file size bloat is caused by a need to “justify” the budget in some way. because as we all know, 300gb games have so much more game when compared to a measly 60gb game. you won’t be getting dynamically sized horse balls in a game that only takes up 60gb.
is rdr just 60gb?
Aka: CoD. I honestly still don't understand how people can justify to themselves the $70 price point for each game, or the sheer ridiculous size of the fucking thing. It's gotta be mental gymnastics, right? Are they really that good that people will overlook the bullshit like shitty launchers and Warzone bleeding into how the games play nowadays?
Their target market is young teenagers who don't care about that stuff
Animal Well is a staggering work of art on multiple fronts, not least of which is the code golf required to keep its size so small. Incredible game.
Apparently most of that file size comes from localisation requirements too.
Im surprised it's that much given how simple the graphics are.
Going against the grain here but I'd like to see a mod or DLC that changes pixel-art to vector art or something. Or maybe something like Windows 7 Solitaire?🤞
Liibraries with their dependencies can take up a fair bit of that space easily these days. I dunno how many would be used in a game like that but that'd be my guess for the space needed.
Absolutely not. Compiled code is small, really small. I'd be surprised if the engine* itself as a whole was more than a gigabyte in size. It's all about the assets that are included, how badly they're compressed and how uselessly detailed some of them are.
*The embedded one of course. The editors are unruly beasts that'll guzzle up your disk space, but then again it's probably a similar situation...
We're only talking about 80MB though, at work just the core Grape City Active Reports dlls are 32MB that's not even including the dependencies (everything seems to use extra system. Dlls on windows). A simple aspx web forms project I'm looking at with maybe 1MB images is still 120MB, granted it's not optimized or anything and 32MB is from Active Reports
Oops I'm stupid. I didn't notice this was about Balatro, I lost track of the comment indentation and thought it was a general discussion. Yeah it's probably the runtime and the other stuff then, my bad...