I was shocked to find out that Balatro was like 80 MB to download. You don’t need million-poly models and 8k textures to make an really good game. Granted, yeah it’s a 2D game, but it’s a beautifully-presented one.

Yep, same! It’s probably a good thing that I didn’t know the first thing about Z80 assembly or I’d have flunked hard 😂 I would have loved to make my own clone of Phoenix!

I did basically all those things, or very similar things, in TI-BASIC back in high school. I didn’t care that they had already been done countless times; I had a blast figuring out how to make them work.

I dearly wish more people would try making basic programs that are 100% their own creation, even if it’s some random string generator. It’s more rewarding than they might think!

I haven’t played Foundation, but since you’re looking for laid-back and medieval, there’s a really cozy looking game I want to try called Tiny Glade that apparently has no objectives. It seems to be a pure sandbox game.

Plus, if you like supporting devs who use smaller/less-well-known engines, this one runs on Bevy, a small Rust-based engine!