Some ideas just stick in your head.
These are the ideas I know are truly worth pursuing. And this idea — creating a game that can fit on a single 1.44 MB floppy — is one of them.
But it doesn’t really mean much to just make a game that can fit on a floppy, does it? A simple game could easily fit. So, who cares?
But what about a game that feels impossibly deep—rich, layered, sprawling, but still small enough to hold in your hand?
Like the house in House of Leaves—a building that is bigger on the inside than the outside—I wanted to create a game that appeared small but was truly MASSIVE—a game world that would expand before the user, causing them to wonder: “How far can this thing actually go?”
Meta-narratives have always been one of my many fascinations—a dream within a dream, layers of meaning. Not the appearance of depth or complexity, but the actual presence of it. And not complexity for the mere sake of it either (that’s just spectacle)—I’ve committed to building something that requires complexity.
As usual, I’ve bitten off more than I can chew. Creation as iterative process has always been my Achilles’ heel. I want the cow, not the calf. But that isn’t how it works. You have to believe the cow is worth the wait, and trust that it will arrive in its own time, exactly as you imagined.
And that’s hard.
Really hard.
About as hard as a 1.44MB “floppy” disk.