Kenta Cho’s “Crisp Game Lib” Games

by Kenta Cho.

This is a collection of 30+ tiny arcade games, each of them delightful, compelling, and playable in seconds. They’re created in what the author calls “Crisp Game Lib“, a personal, puzzlescript-like framework specially made for making these kinds of rapid/minimal arcade things.

This whole thing is just, like, incredibly cool. The games themselves are a blast, especially played as a collection – and the framework behind it all is fascinating. The entirety of each game is contained in a single typescript file, with variables shared across each game – a score, a simple description so that you know what the controls are, and common functions like end() to trigger a game over. Graphics are defined as these big strings where you can block out rough sprite designs:

Want sound effects? You can just write play("jump") or play("explosion"), and it all works. Want background music? set isPlayingBgm to true and it’ll just… generate some. What?

You can find the entire collection on the crisp-game-lib page, but here are a few that I particularly liked:

[Play FLOATER][Play COUNT]
[Play GRENADIER][Play FORFOUR]
[Play DOSHIN][Play DIVARR]
[Play ARCFIRE][Play SLALOM]
[Play SURVIVOR][Play FLIPBOMB]
[Play LLAND][Play PILEUP]
[Play CYWALL][Play REFBALS]

It’s worth saying: Kenta has been doing this sort of thing for a very long time now – Crisp Game Lib is the latest iteration of a series of projects that includes mgl.coffee, and a collection of flash games made in the now defunct wonderfl.

(Via Tim at Warp Door. Thanks, as always!)

2 comments

  1. Great suggestion as always. I’ve been enjoying this series, and this might be my favourite so far. Love it, thanks!

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