Running games in extremely small windows seems to be a recent trend among developers 

Japanese developer STP WORKS, known for the Old Coin Pusher Friends series, shared an interesting piece of trivia about a certain feature of their games. It seems STP WORKS’ games are designed so that they can be run even in an extremely small window. This reflects a certain trend that might be becoming popular recently. 

STP WORKS is a Japanese game dev duo that creates unique and affordable multiplayer titles. Their “Pusher Friends” series is inspired by arcade machine games, and has a new entry titled “French Fries Pusher Friends” planned for release on January 12. 

Recently, STP WORKS shared a piece of trivia regarding their games via X/Twitter. Apparently, when running STP WORKS’ titles in windowed mode, you can resize the window to any size manually and even play in the smallest of window sizes. 

I tried this out for myself, and you really can manipulate the game window in any way possible – you can change the total size of the window, or alter the width and height separately. No errors occur even at extremely small window sizes. 

It seems this function was inspired by the browser game Kantai Collection, and the developers’ desire to play it at any cost while in the office. Kantai Collection is a game that doesn’t require a lot of operation by the player, but building fleets and the like is time-consuming. It is the kind of game you can stealthily progress in during spare moments at work. It seems the developers’ tactic for playing Kantai Collection in the office undetected was to make the game’s window as small as possible. 

The Pusher Friends series by STP WORKS also has settings that automatically perform in-game operations, so you can play it on and off in between other tasks. The window size manipulation feature complements this style of gameplay. 

There are other games with similar concepts – Maboroshi Caravan, which was released in December, is an idle game that you can window and keep an eye on while doing something else on your computer. 

There’s also the upcoming Rusty’s Retirement, an idle farming simulator which you can run on the bottom half of your screen while doing other tasks. It seems that the increase in idle games is naturally leading to various solutions that make multitasking easier. However, the previously mentioned games by STP WORKS are unique in that you can resize them both vertically and horizontally without causing any issues in the game, which is quite rare. 

There is of course the obvious drawback that its very difficult to see things properly if you make the window too small, as evidenced by the extremely blurry screenshots I took, so some balance is needed if you want to fully enjoy the game. I’m interested to see if this trend of small, windowed games will develop further. 

French Fries Pusher Friends by STP WORKS is scheduled for release for the PC (Steam) on January 12, 2024. 

Written by. Amber V based on the original Japanese article (original article’s publication date: 2023-12-23 18:39 JST)