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"

When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works. (Image credit: Bigmode) In a recent AMA onReddit, 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.” I imagine there are some other tricks going - repeating but cleverly used visual assets, for one thing - but in just those two …