Last year, Chicago-based, solo independent developer Shared Memory, headed up by Billy Basso, released its first game: Animal Well. Offering a combat-free approach to the exploration platformer genre (also known as a Metroidvania), Animal Well garnered a wealth of acclaim and praise for its highly stylized design ethos. Once the project was complete, its file size clocked in at a microscopic 33MB. Even compared to other independent games at this scale, shipping a game that takes up less than one-tenth of a gigabyte on a hard drive signifies a feat of technical wizardry.Appropriately, Basso hosted a talk titled, Developing at 5MB per Year: The Making of Animal Well, at the Game Developers Conference this week. Focused on both the scratch coding he used to code the game and the discipline required to stick with a seven-year project, Basso spilled some of his secrets to making such an impressiveand smallgame.First, he broke down the tools he used for various parts of the game, saying, I used Visual Studio for code. That actually covers a lot of development because you dont really get a level editor when youre not using Unity or Unreal, so theres a lot of good data in the game thats hard-coded in C++ files. I did make my own custom level editor thats kinda built into the game that can be toggled on and off. For the sprite and pixel art, he used the program Aseprite for the pixel art, mentioning that he modified the program itself on GitHub after coming up with a bespoke animation format. And for audio production, Basso used Reaper, another common choice for smaller developers.Related:But here is where Basso began to deviate from his peers. Addressing the discipline and workflow side of managing a solo project like Animal Well for nearly a decade, he said, For design and sort of task-tracking production stuff, I would just open up text files in Notepad on my desktop. The crowd chuckled a little before he followed up, I wouldnt even name them or save them. Id just type things in them and then when all the tasks were complete, I would close and then Windows would warn me You might wanna save. This got even more shocked laughs from the packed convention hall.Returning to the development tools he used, Basso demonstrated the various modes of his homebrewed level editor. Using a tool that resembles Super Mario Makers level editor, he showed the palette of every sprite and tile in the game, adding I could just pick one and sort of paint them around. [Designing levels] was just a matter of drawing these sprites and making the screens with all the basic kind of Photoshop-y tools. Basso described a handful of Photoshop-inspired tools like the eye dropper and paint bucket. He even went into the Photoshop install files and extolled the applications paint bucket icon because he liked that tool so much.Related:Exactly 256 rooms in Animal WellHe used these tools to fit Animal Wells world into a 16-by-16-room grid, making exactly 256 separate rooms. Basso said, I couldnt create any more because every room had a one-byte ID to it, so it only had 256 possible values. That was a deliberate choice on his part to avoid any kind of scope creep where possible. Instead, he says he focused on getting the absolute most out of each of the rooms, adding, I just focused on making every room as dense as possible. It was kind of a fun constraint.Animal Well received glowing praise thanks in no small part to its dense, efficient use of its detailed world map. Cramming the entire map into a one-byte system feels appropriate for a game that was hailed by players for its Swiss watch-like complexity and attention to detail.