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"

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 on Reddit, 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."

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I imagine there are some other tricks going - repeating but cleverly used visual assets, for one thing - but in just those two tricks, Basso outlines a couple of things that aren't exactly common practice. A huge number of games are made in major engines like Unity or Unreal, which aren't exactly hyper-specific, and cause inadvertent bloat. And at a time when visual fidelity is held in such high regard, it's rare to see low-res art actually be low-res, rather than being stored in a far more intensive file format. File size aside, Animal Well remains an indie gem of 2024, but it certainly doesn't hurt that it'll take you a matter of seconds to install and try out for yourself.

Check out our Animal Well review.