Fun Toboggan - Play free and cool games!

Hey, I'm going to enter the Java4K contest this year. This is going to be my first participation. If you don't already know the contest I suggest you to consult and play a a lot of very cool games at java4k.com. It's truly amazing what can be done in a game with only 4kb (4096 bytes) of size! Believe me, I browsed all the games for this year and past years and I was simply stunned by the quality, playability and fun factor of a lot of them. But, yes there's a but, don't expect full fledged games there of course. Some have multiple levels (many here means different content and not just increased difficulty in levels) and you can play those ones for up to 1 or more hours. Again, you know that these games can't be compared to normal PC games and not even casual online games, even those crappy-marketing purpose games. The comparison doesn't stand here because of the limit of size of 4k games.

Talking about size, since 4k is a very small size (that wasn't the case in the vic-20 era), the typical developer makes every possible attempts to save space. This makes room for more content, better graphics, etc. To save space, many compression techniques can be used such as pack200, lzma and gzip. An obfuscator can also be used to further compress the code. But before applying these techniques, the developer must take great care about how he codes his game to try saving space. Such code design or style I should say implies for instance having only one class, which is named with only 1 character. Other guidelines are:

• avoid creating methods
• avoid instance variables
• instance variables should be named with 1 character
• and more

I'm going to start coding my first 4k game very very soon (since the contest ends in about a month or so). The game concept is based on the snake game. In a summary, you - the snake, have to eat the highest number of eggs before time is over and by competing with other snakes. Your snake never stops moving. He must avoid walls, blocks and his rival snake otherwise his life decreases.

My last point I wanted to cover about 4k games is how fantastic it is as an exercise of prototyping game concepts/ideas. Because of the size limitation, you're forced to focus on gameplay to achieve a complete game. Having less emphasize on graphics and sound keeps you concentrated on the most important thing in a game, the gameplay. Sure you have to spend time on byte saving but I guess it's a question of getting used to.

So stay tuned about my 4k game I'm starting developing. Before leaving you, here is a small list of impressive and great 4k games this year:

Assassins 4k

http://www.java4k.com/index.php?action=games&method=view&gid=284

Don't Reach The Square

http://www.java4k.com/index.php?action=games&method=view&gid=271

Falcon4k

http://www.java4k.com/index.php?action=games&method=view&gid=268

GTA4K

http://www.java4k.com/index.php?action=games&method=view&gid=280