Joys of small game development
Read it. I cannot say whether the concept of a manifesto for small games is a worthwhile endeavour. It sounds like an ideology, a stricture on creative thought, and then you start the endless debates as to what qualifies, and audiences bifurcate into "but what does it _mean_?"That said, I like to make what I have often referred to as "$10K games." If I was being paid a realistic hourly rate to implement an idea, what could I do for $10,000 USD? $10K is one month of household burn rate (for me), and so I can aptly weigh the decision  of "outsource this or do it myself?" It gives a very clear budgetary limitation.And sure, you could "work for free" or "get a friend to help out for a pizza" or "well if someone in a LCOL country could do it, that's like two years worth of income."But we would be arguing pointless nuances at that point.The question is "could _I_ implement this idea for $10K, if I were being paid the $10K? Would _I_ be willing to set aside all other possible endeavours to work on this, if _I_ were being paid $10K for it?"And so we get in to how to make a game that has a definite end, that somewhat fulfills the ideal of the small games manifesto, but still gives you enough creative freedom to achieve your goals whilst still shooting yourself in the foot by spending too many hours tweaking the individual pixels in a piece of artwork.A $10K game, for me, could be a day's worth of work writing code and $9000 worth of outsourced artwork to make it beautiful. Or it could be two or three weeks of intense labour, flying solo, creating the art, music and code because you simply need that itch scratched. The game then becomes secondary to the importance of the creative endeavour itself.