Can You Fit A Game Into An 88X31 Button?

Sun, 13 Apr 2025

Yes. I mean, obviously. If people are porting Doom onto calculators etc. there’s no reason you can’t make a game a button. Yet one quick web search later and I can’t find anyone that’s tried.

Wanting to give it a go, my first thought was to try and squeeze a small already existing game into the resolution. Maybe a minigame that would be easily playable with a single button press, even better if it was something originally on an NES or Gameboy game as they already had to design around smaller resolutions.

Play in fullscreen here.

It’s tight, but there you go. Quick Draw from Kirby’s Adventure, playable at 31p. Mouse click to shoot, or alternatively once it’s in focus you can use the Z key as the action button.

Kirby belongs to Nintendo, but thanks to both The Spriters Resource and Jermungandr for the sprite rips. ✌️

The game is significantly easier than the original, but I figured that was better for a small button.

The frame counter is calculated for thirty fps, which felt more inline with the original. The numbers otherwise looked massive on my monitor!

If you want to embed the button yourself, you’ll need this snippet of code:

<iframe src="https://fishricetomato.com/projects/31pKirbyQuickdraw/index.html" name="31p Kirby QuickDraw" width="88" height="31" frameborder="0" scrolling="no" ></iframe>

My takeaways:

The real killer is the 31 pixel height. Even with their small sprites, taller enemies like Dedede clip out both the top and bottom. It’s essentially a super-superwide resolution and it’s brutal trying to squeeze everything in there.

Visibility is also rough if you want the button to be playable at its default size. I added an outline to all the playable sprites to separate them from the background a bit more, otherwise it was kind of challenging even seeing the sprites change!

My assumption that NES would be okay due to it’s smaller resolution is obviously flawed. Sure 256 x 240 is small, but compared to 88 x 31 it might as well be 4k. Take a look at the difference in “background” sprites.

The section used for the button is highlighted in black.

• File size wise, you don’t want a button that’ll take forever to load. Not much of a problem for our lightning fast modern internet, but according to The 88x31 archive the largest button they had comes in at 392.9 kb. This lovely Rupert Grint fan gif.

• Kirby Quick Draw is more than double that at 1.09mb. Which I honestly think is pretty good! Not much work on my part, that’s all construct and their minification, but I thought it was impressive!

To round this post out, I did find the 88x31 dungeon, which is more a game-like experience surrounding buttons. It’s a fun site to surf around.

I think I'll have another go at making a 31p game in the future. It’s fun to play around these limitations, and having an interactive button is neat conceptually!

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The word Button appears thirteen times on this page!

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