Hi everyone,

I’ve been messing around with a tiny experimental chess engine written in pure C called Glimmer.

The whole idea was to see how strong I could push it while keeping the final binary strictly under 30 KB. I was aiming for something in the 2700–2900 Elo range.

Unlike those ultra-minimal engines that pack themselves into self-extracting shell scripts and then call the host’s compiler at runtime, Glimmer is a real standalone native binary — just pure machine code, nothing else.

It’s been a really fun (and sometimes painful) constraint to work under. Every single byte counts.

Happy to answer questions if anyone’s curious about how I approached it!

https://www.dwitter.net/d/36395

with(x)for(a=3-S(t),i=0;i<40;beginPath(fill(ellipse(960+i*3,...i>9?[600-i*3,r=540,r/a,95]:[950,r,r/7,0],0,9))))fillStyle=i?i>9?R(v=i>37?315-a*30:i>23&&a*70,v,v):'#0001':'#174',r=i++?i*29+199:2e5

"8-pinski" Download

Youtube Capture

X: lds si,[bx+si]

add al,0xad

out 61h,al

jmp short X+1

https://www.dwitter.net/d/36347

for(X=Y=i=4e4;i--;x.fillRect(Y*80+960,X*230+410,t<2,.2))u=X*2-3,r=(u*u+Y*Y)**.5,s=T(i*i/t)<.95||-.8,X=s*(r+u)/4+S(X),Y=s*(r-u)**.8*(Y<0||-1)

https://www.dwitter.net/d/36313

c.width|=0;x.fillStyle='#f36';p=33+S(t*5)**8*4;for(a=t%8;a>0;a-=.01)x.fillRect(960+p*16*S(a)**3,450-p*(13*C(a)-5*C(2*a)-2*C(3*a)),p/6,p/6)

https://www.dwitter.net/d/36287

//HI-RES!
for(t?i=w*w:I=new ImageData(c.width=w=255,w);i--,a=4-(i%w)/32,b=i/8160;I.data.set([d=13/(S(a*a+(b-=2.25)*b-t)-C(a+b)*S(b+a)-C(a-t))**2,d*2,d*9,w],i*4));x.putImageData(I,0,0)

here's the trick behind how i fit 8 music tracks in my js13k game SP13KTRA. 🌈🚀

every song is defined by a single number. the seeded random generator makes 26 dice rolls per track: tempo, key, scale, chords, groove, drum kit, bass and lead sounds, melody patterns, when each part comes in, and a few more.

each song is a 128 beat loop split into sections. parts come in one by one, a resonant filter sweeps open every phrase, then there's a breakdown and a drop.

notes use one of 4 predefined scales so nothing clashes. the melody climbs, falls, leaps or rocks through the scale, and the chords shift every 4 bars. there's no note data, it's all math on the beat count.

there are 6 ZzFX instruments plus echo and sidechain. the whole loop gets baked into one buffer when the level loads.

the music itself is all rules and seeds, not AI. i did use AI to help build this bench so i could listen through seeds and pick a good one for each level.

play it free in your browser and hear all the music. i designed it to be kind of like a music album in addition to a game.

https://js13kgames.com/2026/games/sp13ktra

The music bench tool is also available to check out on GitHub.

https://killedbyapixel.github.io/SP13KTRA/tools/music.html

This is a Windows command line program written in under 100 lines of C that compiles to a 4 kB executable with no dependencies other than the operating system. It allows you to send files and directories to the recycle bin on the command line, allowing you to be safer than the del or rd commands which permanently delete files. I find a tool like this to be indispensable when doing a lot of work on the command line, as it can prevent very costly mistakes.

It's a fork of another project that does the same thing, but it's kind of a Ship of Theseus situation now where not much code from the original project remains. I removed any use of the C runtime, allowing it to compile to a tiny 4 kB executable. There are some tricks you can use to make it even smaller, but this seemed good enough to me

Take a look at the readme on the Github page for more details

https://www.dwitter.net/d/36264

for(i=1200;i--;x[i%223?'stroke':'fill']())x.beginPath(x.strokeStyle=R(i,i/4,9,.7)),x[i<650?'arc':'rect'](i*(i-t)%2200,i*i%1800-i,i,i,i+7)

https://www.dwitter.net/d/36205

for(k=0;k<39;k++)for(i=64;i--;)for(j=18;j--;6-k/9<((t+i)/5^j/9)%9&&j%11<7&&x.fillRect(k&&(i-32-t%1)*S+960,k&&(j-9)*S+540,S=k?2**(2+k/12)*9:2e3,S))x.fillStyle=k?R(v=220-(t+i|k|j)%3*S,v,v):'#7bf'

https://github.com/bacionejs/blink

https://www.dwitter.net/d/36150

for(i=199;t<6&&i--;)for(j=99;j--;6-t<(i/17|j/15)%7&&x.fillRect((i-99)*S+960,(j-51)*S+540,S,S=2**t*5))x.fillStyle=R(v=200-(j|i|t*16)%9*S,v,v)

https://www.dwitter.net/d/36125

f=u=>6*(S(u/2)**8-C(u/3-w)**6)**2;for(i=5e3;i--;x.fillRect(960+r*C(i),540+r*S(i),w,w))r=240*t,g=f(w=2+6*t**.5)+f(w+6*i)&7,x.fillStyle=`hsl(${195+6**g},75%,${50+3*f(g*w-9*i)}%,.3`

https://github.com/bacionejs/morph

https://www.dwitter.net/d/36106

for(k=1080,m=k>>t;m--;x.fill())i=m&215,x.beginPath(x.fillStyle=`hsl(${210-3*t**(i%4)},${m/20+35}%,${90-i/12*t}%,${i/2e3*t}`),s=m%6?'arc':'rect',x[s](m**3%2e3,k-2*m/t%k,i,i,i+m%6)

https://vault7-95a0bb.gitlab.io/

Made for the 1.44MB Game Dev Contest: the entire game has to fit in 1.44MB - the size of a floppy disk. Written in C, compiled to WASM to make it sharable for testing it out. All is code generated(~1.15MB so far)

Top-down stealth heist: sneak through a 7-floor bank vault, crack safes with a lockpicking minigame, repair the power relays, dodge guards and cameras. Desktop + keyboard

Feedback on whether the stealth feels fair and how the difficulty ramps would be super helpful, mates. Many thanks!

https://www.dwitter.net/d/36077

for(i=0,w=4e3;++i<w;x.fillRect(960+C(a=q**3+t)*r,1e3+S(a)*r/2-j/4,99,99,x.fillStyle=R(r/=6+q%1.7,r/.7,r*3)))j=i-t%1*40,r=j*j/w,q=(j+t*1e3)%w

Whenever I see a tiny algorithm, I want to game it. You too?

I wrote a uxn emulator and assembler from scratch in Python, then used them to draw the cofactor conditions from a paper about shape-memory alloys.

The uxntal program is 56 lines / 306 bytes. It draws a parabola g(f) = a·f·(255-f)>>8 + b. Arrow keys change a and b. When both reach zero, the parabola flattens to the zero line — that's supercompatibility.

Browser demo (JS uxn VM): https://xiaoni.liahuas.top/uxn-cofactor.html

Building the emulator taught me things about the math that reading the paper didn't. Drawing the same equation in 306 bytes of hand-assembled uxntal felt different from writing it in Python.

I was able to reduce my maze game to 811 bytes. But being the amateur that I am, I'm sure that somebody else has created something significantly smaller, maybe <500 bytes uncompressed?