Micro Fiction Games Jam

The micro fiction games jam is a yearly event where people write games that fit in a single tweet on a common theme. I started the jam in November 2020 as a fun way of exploring extreme limits on creativity. It ran for two weeks and people were allowed to submit multiple games in that time.

The Website

The website for the game jam was made very minimalist for three reasons.

• The small format of the games means that you can not put anything in the game that doesn't need to be there, the website matches this with aesthetic.
• Too many websites concentrate on fancy presentation that often distracts from the content. The games were the focus here and there was no need to hide them with unnecessary elements like rollover effects and images.
• Small bandwidth usage. The games were small so it made sense that the games footprint on the internet should be as small as possible while still being aesthetic. What is the point of writing a game in 280 characters if the pages uses 1MB of bandwidth to download

Things like JavaScript, tracking and external fonts and API's were avoided as much as possible to to provide a clean and fast user experience. CSS was also kept to a minimum. These technologies are often used when they have no real need to be. While creating this website I continuously asked myself the question "Does this add to the content on the page in a useful way?". If the answer was that it bought nothing to the actual content being displayed then it had no need to exist, nor actually should it.

The Tools

To generate the website when people sent entries in I created a set of simple fish scripts. Running the scripts when in the websites root directory creates all of the pages the site needs from template files.

Topics

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