I agree with Darkhamster on majora's mask. It was a very small world but it was fun seeing what everyone was doing at different times and what were the consequences of your interactions w/ NPCs depending on other events all over that world

Recursion. I think the smallest you can possibly scope a game in would be the size of a moderate-to-large city, you simply need to draw every corner of the city together again and again in an interesting weave of plots and characters without turning it into a 'take this here, follow me there' questfest.

Much harder to do, IMHO, than with a larger world.

A city seems a little large to be the smallest possible setting. It's certainly possible to create games which take place in a smaller setting. The smallest possible setting I can think of in viewpoint-relative terms would be something along the lines of a game where the character is trapped in a single place - Shawshank, for example, or the Green Mile as a more extreme example. The interaction has to deepen at each step, of course, which is exactly what we're discussing anyways, and I think the focus has to sharpen at every constriction as well - the player has to have specific goals at every moment, and they have to be capable of a number of interesting and engaging actions which make a difference in the flow of events.

The absolute smallest, most focused, deepest game setting I can imagine would be at the site of a disaster, where the player would be trapped under debris trying to guide his or her rescuers to their current location. I'm sure someone else could come up with something even tighter, but I think that's pretty much at the limit of my imagination.

ld

There was a thread in the "Writing For Games" forum titled "Closed Environment Stories" which you might want to look at.

Some of the environments mentioned were on a train, in a cube (like the movie) and in a haunted house.

As for commercial games set in a small environment, several adventure games have been set on a ship/spaceship or in a single house (murder mysteries or horror stories) and a number of RPGs have been set within a single dungeon (Eye of the Beholder) or a castle (Stonekeep).

Quote: Original post by liquiddarkThe absolute smallest, most focused, deepest game setting I can imagine would be at the site of a disaster, where the player would be trapped under debris trying to guide his or her rescuers to their current location. I'm sure someone else could come up with something even tighter, but I think that's pretty much at the limit of my imagination.

ld

You could imagine playing a bacterium trying to escape the white blood cells. The setting could be a frog body, even smaller than a human. Of course, the actual in-game size would be the size of a planet to a human, since bacteria are so small.

Alternatively, how about a game where you are required to control your immune system and involuntary reflexes to fend off disease / repair damage, SimCity style? Again, a game the size of a single body, although of course I am moving away from the adventure genre.

I think would be making the content you have adhere to a set of rules, like physical matter laws, that can be combined in any game-situation.

Ex:

Make everything you do have more interactable. If you have the picture of a plant, make it pickable, make it burnable, make it killable.. basically make the world as interactive as possible-- you will get problems but you will also get creative reward.

if you can see it, make it what it is supposed to be. Build things with rocks? You cant lift it if you are too weak. If you build an engine that can efficiently mimic physics you could get away with so much just with good models for mass, collision quality, durability..

it would be possible to get carried away, but it is the job of the game designer to decide what needs to make the cut.

haiku

I just want to point out the two Glden Sun games for the gameboy advance made good use of space. The dungeons weren't large for no apparent reason, but they took quite a while to complete, making them feel a lot bigger than they actually were. Maybe this would be a good reference for sizing and filling of a game.