MICROMACHEE

What Micromachee is

Micromachee is a fantasy console the size of a bar widget. The screen is 240×160 pixels and eight colours, and it runs at thirty frames a second. Every game is a single Lua file of at most 24 kilobytes — no sprite sheet, no sound bank, no asset pipeline — so a whole game is something you can read in one sitting. The console above is not a video of one: it is the console, running in this page, with nothing to install and no account to make. The same shelf runs on Linux as an Omarchy bar widget.

A cart indexes its colours and never names them, so every game repaints with the theme you pick — Game Boy green, amber CRT, greyscale — and each theme brings the screen it imitates with it: scanlines, phosphor glow, an LCD's cell grid. Six of them, on the swatch button at the top-left of the console.

The shelf

15 games. Move with the D-pad or WASD, open one with O or Z, and the home key on the console puts it back on the shelf. Leading the shelf is Mega Micromachee, which gives you a few seconds of each game in turn and then moves on, faster and faster, for as long as you keep surviving.

• Abaddon

  down as far as you can get. nothing escapes — by pixygon, 10.3K of Lua · free

• Down-Shaft

  it looks like a tower rising. fly it down. — by pixygon, 3.1K of Lua · free

• Dreadwager

  walk Limbo, empty the mag, take the cliff — by pixygon, 22.5K of Lua · free

• Farm of Arra

  a plate that carries a whole world. grow it — by pixygon, 4.7K of Lua · free

• Firekeeper

  hold the light. they come down in ranks — by pixygon, 10.6K of Lua · free

• Pixiel

  a discarded body, running the pit in stages — by pixygon, 16.7K of Lua · free

• Plate Fall

  the sphere is shedding. do not be under it — by pixygon, 3.4K of Lua · free

• Serpent

  coiling at the depths. do not eat yourself — by pixygon, 3.8K of Lua · free

• Signcarver

  the numbers describe a sign. carve it — by pixygon, 5.7K of Lua · free

• Sparrow

  fly for the temple. clear a wing, take its gift — by pixygon, 12.1K of Lua · free

• The Tower

  climb it. the journey's end is so close — by pixygon, 15.6K of Lua · free

• The Twins

  sun and moon. three in a row — by pixygon, 8.7K of Lua · free

• The Veil

  peel it away. that is how a world is born — by pixygon, 10.6K of Lua · free

• The Whale

  first to seven. it does not blink — by pixygon, 3.4K of Lua · free

• Veilwalkers

  gather the four aspects. turn off the Veil — by pixygon, 54.4K of Lua · 500 Lumen · too big for a cart, so it reaches the web bundled with the console

Write one

A cart needs exactly one function, _draw(). Around it there is an API of about two dozen calls — cls, rect, circ, line, print, btn, pget, save — and Lua's math, string and table. Nothing else: a cart cannot open a file, run a program or reach anything outside the console. The whole of it fits on one page of the documentation, and the shipped carts are each written to demonstrate one thing.

When yours works, SUBMIT A GAME above sends it up. Verification is automatic and takes about ten seconds — a sandboxed run of nine hundred frames, then two reviewers, one for safety and one for whether it is actually a game. Both have to accept; a rejection always says why, and an accepted cart is on this shelf within the minute.

Micromachee is made by Pixygon, who also make games, a shelf of small tools and sites, and the universe half of these games are set in.