Format: Flash
Developer: The Monkey Odyssey Project
www.gamepoetry.com/blog/4k-flash-4kpillars/

From Marcus Fenix’s offal-splattered grandeur to the user-generated multiverse of LittleBigPlanet, there are plenty of examples to be had of what happens when game developers set to work on a big canvas. But what happens when they think small instead? That’s a question posed by GamePoetry.com earlier this year when it created its 4k Flash Competition, offering web-game designers around the world the chance to explore the boundaries of fitting fun into the space of just 4096 bytes or less.

Perhaps the most astonishing of all 29 of the games produced is 4kPillars, an arcade title created by Filippo Bodei’s mysterious Monkey Odyssey Project. A 3D avoid-‘em-up in which you pilot a small craft past a series of deadly structures as they rush towards you, MOP’s offering may not be much to look at, but it’s definitely something to marvel over, particularly when you take into account the fact that you can fit the title’s entire code into the same file space occupied by the Google homepage logo. Actually, you can fit it in twice.



With no room for enemies, unless you count the titular pillars that spin towards you, and no interaction beyond the four-way movement as you struggle to stay alive for as long as possible, perhaps the most interesting aspect of 4kPillars is not what the developer left out, but what they left in: the areas they eventually chose to spend their handful of precious bytes on. Rather than complicating the central mechanics, then, MOP lavished attention on getting the basic handling right – the sway and heft of the ship as you pull it back and forth through the air, the lazy spiral that ensues as it falls from the sky after impact, and the seamless spin of the world unfolding beneath you. Such a focus on feedback suggests that tethering your audience to the controls of a game in a satisfying manner is sometimes of more primal importance than what you subsequently get them to do when they’re actually playing, and the results bear that out: 4kPillars always feels good, regardless of how simple its agenda ultimately is.

Inevitably, having pared the project down so harshly to meet the rules of GamePoetry’s competition, Monkey Odyssey has since released a more elaborate version. Simply titled Pillars, it’s telling to find that the gameplay remains largely untouched, aside from the addition of a hilariously challenging two-player mode, and much of the changes revolve around the presentation, with a succession of different planets to beat (each with their own dreamy colour schemes), tweaks to the extremely limited HUD, and a smattering of effects.



As entertaining as 4kPillars is - and with the score always zipping along in the game’s left-hand corner, and a mere push of the space bar separating failure from one more go, it can be surprisingly hard to tear yourself away from - it’s impossible to separate the title’s simple charm from its bizarre technical achievement. MOP’s game is a project that goes entirely against the grain of the bigger, better, and more badass philosophy of most contemporary design, and the end result shows that there’s a tantalising future for those who choose to look inwards as much as outwards. All games are something of a magic trick, creating vividly detailed worlds and then fitting them onto something you can keep in your pocket, and 4kPillars, coaxing three dimensions out of the space of a small Jpeg, is perhaps doubly miraculous. Ultimately, such alchemy always comes at a cost, and it’s only fitting that in a recent development post-mortem, Bodei conjured up a little of the tragedy and sacrifice that went along with the ultimate triumph: “When I had to throw away my beautiful particle system,” he says, “I was throwing away a piece of my heart.”

Additional links:

Pillars: www.monkeyodyssey.com/games/pillars/
4kPillars post-mortem: www.gamepoetry.com/blog/2009/03/20/4k-flash-game-post-mortems/6/