kontra VS roadroller

https://straker.github.io/kontra/ Kontra is a lightweight JavaScript gaming micro-library specially optimized to be used for the js13kGame competition. Kontra aims to implement basic game components like asset loading, user inputs, loading loops, and sprites. This allows developers to spend less time worrying about smaller components and only focus on their personal game designs.

I was still in doubt about using Kontra or Replay as the game engine. Still, in the end, I decided to use Kontra for having more built-in features I needed, and also because I had used it in a previous js13k game.

If you've never done anything like this, or even coded much JavaScript before, it can be a little intimidating. Here's a quick little tutorial how to build this suh-weeet game using Kontra.js (a tiny game library made just for JS13) plus a few lines of code:

Crinkler [1] is a popular compressor-linker for 1--8 KB demos and its decompressor (partially embedded in a PE header) is probably around 1--200 bytes. Later efforts like oneKpaq [2] also have a comparable decompressor size.

If you don't mind a shameless plug and a slightly larger decompressor (about 500 bytes in JS) for better compression, my Roadroller [3] might fit the bill as well.

[1] https://github.com/runestubbe/Crinkler

[2] https://github.com/temisu/oneKpaq

[3] https://lifthrasiir.github.io/roadroller/

Roadroller [1] is probably a borderline general purpose compression algorithm, and with some automatic parameter tuning it results in 12,170 bytes estimated [2], at the expense of a lot of memory. "Estimated" because the algorithm was originally meant to be recompresssed in a ZIP file, so it doesn't bother to generate the smallest JS file in terms of uncompressed size (yet).

[1] https://lifthrasiir.github.io/roadroller/ (the exact parameters: golf.horse dataset; input mode text; action write to document; # contexts 12 with 12,15,49,50,70,79,96,97,131,154,292,353; pollute the global scope; max memory usage 150 MB; precision 16; learning rate 1333; model max count 11; model base divisor 14; dynamic model flags -1; # abbreviations 64)

And compressed final code even more with Roadroller (reduced 1.3 KB in the zip). And used ECT to recompress the zip (reduced 300 KB).

I'm honored that Q1K3, in addition to many other entries to js13kGames 2021, is compresed with Roadroller [1], which is the reason that its source code is basically a random-looking string plus some bit of JS code.

[1] https://github.com/lifthrasiir/roadroller/