In what is surely an achievement in efficiency, one game developer has managed the rather impressive feat of fitting an entire video game’s code into a single 140-character tweet.
The challenge was set, unsurprisingly, on Twitter, by game developer Ben Porter, who called on his kin to try and write a video game code that could fit in its entirety into just one tweet.
Spotted by Rock, Paper, Shotgun, the teeny, tiny game called Tiny Twitch was developed by Alex Yoder and has a rather simple concept.
I challenge you to make a game whose source fits in a single tweet
— Ben Porter •ᴗ• (@eigenbom) June 27, 2015
Given that it’s only 140 characters of code, the game presents you with a white screen with one solitary X marking the spot that you have to click. It’s then a matter of trying to click as many Xs as possible, with this journalist’s high score being a measly 16, compared with others who appeared to have reached scores nearer the 20 mark.
<script>var e,s=0,t=Date.now();function f(){((e=Date.now()-t)<15000)?a.style.margin=++s+e%300:alert(s)}</script><p id=”a” onclick=”f()”>X
— Alex Yoder (@alex_yoder) June 29, 2015
The game has also been kindly put up on GitHub for anyone to play.
In an era where games are getting infinitely bigger and taking up gigabytes of space on people’s hard drives, it has now become an enjoyable challenge for game developers to push their skills to the limit to create the smallest games possible.
Earlier this year, Siliconrepublic.com reported on a game developed by one French coder, who managed to fit an entire game of chess on to a file-size of just 487 bytes making it, as of now, the smallest computer game file in the world.
X marks the spot image via Michael/Flickr
