When the theme first came up, “Minimalism”, I wasn’t happy or sad… I was more like… whaaaa? So, off to Wikipedia I verily did trundle. The part of it that I was most familiar with was art… and art discussion… and art discussion makes me think of art critics, and art critics make me think of the wonderfully plummy-voiced UK art critic, Brian Sewell, so I decided early on that the game would have him in some way.

This is not the game I intended to make!

Original Plan
… was to have Brian as a sprite and similar to Ghostbusters (on the ZX Spectrum), you’d move around a grid city, except this would be London and you would be chasing art students who are turning London’s lovely landmarks (“St Paul’s Cathedral”, “Nelson’s Column”, etc.) into Minimalist versions and you had to race to correct them, all the while with Brian shouting “ghastly, you rotters”!

What went wrong

Well, it soon dawned on me the amount of sprites that I would have to draw to do this. There was (at a minimum) 4-directional Brian, a series of buildings, detailed landmarks (in both real and minimalist version). So, if Brian wasn’t going to be running and shooting, he could be talking!

My flat is rather small, and I was embarrassed that my neighbours might hear my Brian Sewell impersonations, so I took my little Zoom H2N into my office as no one was about and went BRIANTASTIC without a care in the world.

What went right

I started with a small sprite before I even got the game together and very much built it on the fly (as you tend to do in LD).

A fair bit of time was spent in Unity3D learning how to draw dynamically on a Texture2D. As I was pressed for time, I ended up using the native Texture2D.SetPixel, GetPixel and SetPixels(Color[] ) functions… which actually turned out to be really fast!

The more I use Unity (which I only started using for the last LD), the more I fall in love with it, and how it makes it so easy to get your ideas moving as quickly as possible.