A question about game dev workflow a little, so let’s say you want to make a game but have hard limit, e.g you can’t use specific style, you can’t use tools you use, you can’t optimize game or you can’t add QoL features
can limits like these help you make great game or they do opposite?
Technical limitations typically breed creativity.
The examples used here sound like very arbitrary limitations that seem to only be there “just because”.
In this case, I don’t think it’s useful or helps you learn at all.
However, on the other hand, things like the Pico-8, where you have “real” and resonable hardware limits, limited amount of memory, limited screen space etc…
Those kind of limits can absolutely help you become a better programmer and developer in my opinion, since those kind of limitations will force you to think about problems differently and optimize where you can.
I tend to argue that while I love the freedom modern technology provides by having a lot of room to do things, there was a certain charm and creativity in the earlier days where you had to truly squeeze things in and work around very strict limitations
Take for example a lot of older games (i.e. the 90s and earlier) where the game was in a small box in the middle of the screen with a static frame around it, that was done to reduce the draw rate as most computers at the time couldn’t update the whole screen with detailed graphics at a fast enough rate, or the way games like Elite was randomly generated because there was no way to have the whole game world just stored
Modern games tend to just not care about performance and saving memory because we just have so much of it, at least they don’t care a lot
Not saying I want to develop games on a 486 or a C64, but it was a simpler time with more tricks to get things to just boot
Example, original Doom:
They might sound like that cuz they’re from discussion i’ve got with friends about technical limits, overall everything came down to “game jams are good cuz limits make you better”, when during small game jam half of participants ran out of motivation due to these strange limits we decided to add as rules
that’s why these limits examples sound strange
In the contexts of a jam, those limitations sound random. They look like obstacles that are there just for the sake of making things harder, instead of presenting an interesting “limited playground” inside which you can explore creative approaches. In game jams you want things like: specific/minimal color palette, low resolution, using boxes only etc. The limitation should entice participants to think: “hmm, interesting, let’s see how far we can stretch this limitation”. It’s also a plus if it emulates an actual technical limitation of some (old) hardware or software platform.
