Hackaday

Developer daivuk created QUOD, a fully playable Quake-like first-person shooter compressed into a 64kB Windows executable. The project includes multiple enemies, levels, textures, and animations — none of it procedurally generated. To achieve this, daivuk built an entire custom toolchain: a procedural texture editor, a bespoke model tool with bone/pose support, a sound synthesis tool using square and sine waves, a tracker for music, and even a custom scripting language with its own virtual machine (which saved 2kB and allowed fitting an extra level). Levels are designed in TrenchBroom and reprocessed into an optimized format, while Blender exports symmetric half-meshes to halve vertex data. A Python-based map file analyzer was used to track the exact byte cost of each game element and validate optimizations.

QUOD Is A Quake-Like In Only 64kB