Developer Daivuk has released QUOD, a 64KB ‘boomer shooter’ with an uncanny resemblance to id Software’s seminal FPS title, Quake. Astonishingly, this tiny executable delivers a Quake-like 3D gaming experience with “3 levels, 1 boss fight, 4 unique enemies, 4 weapons, and a handful of power-ups.” Moreover, it doesn’t call on any external resources; the whole caboodle of textures, sounds, music, levels, models, animations, and code is compressed into that minimal 64KB download.
The developer starts by explaining that the QUOD project has been about 10 years in gestation, but has only really been worked upon in the last year. Daivuk indicates to viewers that he has long thought 64KB is the sweet spot for such impressive demos. “It’s very small, but still leaves room for creativity,” he says.
Devotion to optimization shows in several key segments of the video explaining how this 64KB feat was achieved. For example, instead of saving image file resources into the tiny file, Daivuk saved ‘action-based textures’ which are a Photoshop-action-like ‘recipes’ for creating these visual ingredients. The dev even went as far as developing a custom VM and programming language for the sake of smaller file sizes.
Despite its 1980s-era (tape drive, pre-floppy drive) game file size, QUOD.exe still requires a 2010s era CPU and GPU to render its frantic FPS-blasting fun. The minimum specs for this demoscene title include an “Intel i5 or equivalent, GTX 770 or equivalent, 8GB RAM.” Of course, you will also need a spare sliver of disk space – that’s also a mere 64KB, as this is a self-contained non-install application.
Daivuk seems to have plenty of ideas on how to make 64KB demos and games even better. In the video outro, he mentions a host of possible optimizations and refinements that may come to QUOD v2, or whatever may be next. We will be staying tuned to this creator’s channel, for sure.
We’ve seen and reported on impressive small-file-size demo works before, like a colorful ray tracing animation app squashed into a minuscule 483 bytes! We also wrote about a Quake-like JavaScript game in 13KB. Nevertheless, QUOD remains outstanding for its slick Quake(y) FPS playability, looks, and feel. You don’t have to rely on watching the video to judge this, you can download and run it in seconds…
30 years prior
Incidentally, id Software’s Qtest multiplayer-only demo of Quake was released exactly 30 years ago today. But Quake’s shareware release was on June 22, 1996 (MS-DOS), with the full version becoming available to buyers a month later.
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