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.

STPWORKSのゲーム豆知識なんですが、ウインドウモードにするとウインドウを手動で動かすことができます。

こんなに小さいウインドウサイズにしても、一応ゲームは動きます。

昔、艦これを仕事中にどうしても遊びたくて小さいウインドウにして遊んでいたときを思い出して実装しました。 pic.twitter.com/3hq1weEug5
— 【公式】STP WORKS＠ゲーム開発 (@stpworks) January 5, 2024

Post translation: A piece of trivia about STP WORKS’ games – if you make a game windowed, you can move the window around manually. Even if you make the window size tiny like this, the game will still run. We implemented this feature upon reminiscing about how we used to play Kantai Collection in a small window so that we could play it during work.

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.

Three Pusher Friends series games being run at the same time in widows of different orientations and 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.

Maboroshi Caravan being run in a small landscape oriented window at the bottom of the screen.

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.