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Minigame
Minigame is a very small and simple game intended to entertain the player in a simple way, usually for only a short amount of time, unlike a full fledged game. Minigames may a lot of times be embedded into a bigger game (as an easter egg or as a part of a game mechanic such as lock picking), they may come as an extra feature on primarily non-gaming systems, or appear in collections of many minigames as a bigger package (e.g. various party game collections). Minigames include e.g. minesweeper, sokoban, the Google Chrome T-rex game, Simon Tatham's Portable Puzzle Collection, as well as many of the primitive old games like Pong and Tetris. Minigames are nice from the LRS point of view as they are minimalist, simple to create, often portable, while offering a potential for great fun nevertheless.
Minigame is an ideal project for learning programming.
Despite the primary purpose of minigames many players invest huge amounts of time into playing them, usually competitively e.g. as part of speedrunning.
Minigames are still very often built on the principles of old arcade games such as getting the highest score or the fastest time. For this they can greatly benefit from procedural generation (e.g. endless runners).
List Of Minigames
Almost any traditional game idea can be made into a minigame if we simplify it enough, but for inspiration here is a list of some common minigames and minigame types.
- 2048
- arkanoid
- asteroids
- backgammon
- button smasher: Games whose goal is achieved mainly by smashing a button as quickly as possible, usually e.g. sprint simulators. This may perhaps even include a game that requires you to press a button as quickly as possible (achieve fastest reaction time).
- card games
- checkers
- chess, its variants and chess puzzles
- city bomber: A plane is descending on the screen, player has to drop bombs to destroy building so that it can land.
- concentration
- donkey kong
- dots and boxes
- endless runner
- fifteen
- flappy bird
- game of life
- go, especially a small board one or variants such as atari go
- guess a number
- hangman
- invaders
- jigsaw puzzle
- knowledge quiz
- loderunner
- ludo
- lunar lander
- mahjong
- maze
- minigolf
- minesweeper
- pacman
- pinball
- poker
- pong
- racetrack
- rock-paper-scissors
- shoot'em up
- snake
- sokoban
- solitaire
- sprouts
- sudoku
- tangram
- tetris (block game, "tetris" is trademarked)
- The Witness puzzles: The kind of puzzles that appear in the game The Witness.
- tic-tac-toe
- tower of hanoi
- tron
- untangle
- QWOP
- ...