…Was the theme for the 26th and latest Ludum Dare, which came and went last weekend and which once again I participated in. Minimalism is certainly a very useful theme for a game jam in that it encourages you to drop the baggage of detailed artwork or superfluous features, but I could see it being dangerous in enabling excuses too…
I’ve threatened to make a roguelike a couple of times before. In fact one previous effort got quite far before I abandoned it. So what better time to finally get one out of my system than a game jam about minimalism? Roguelikes have always gone for a minimalist graphical approach anyway, right?
My fourth game of the year, then, is Pyramid: a minimalistic roguelike. Things went quite well on balance: I actually went with my first idea, which is often a bad move but it allowed me to get good and focused early on. The pyramid motif comes from the level progression: level 1 is merely 2×2 squares, and indeed looks very minimalistic! Each subsequent level expands the size of the layout by 1 in both directions. Gradually a vision fog comes into play more and wandering spirits (the coloured blocks) appear and will attack you without a second thought.
I’m quite pleased with the clean visual style. It certainly helped having the simple graphics (although getting that highlight on the top and right edges of the squares took far more investigating than it ever should have… there’s always something).
So now we’re into May already! Four games in four months achieved, but my day job is going into overdrive this month leaving me with concerns over what I can do. I have this fishing thing in the works, hopefully I can find enough time to make it a game. We shall see.
And I almost forgot – I’ll stick a timelapse of development up soon but I just haven’t got around to compiling it yet. Busy busy…