I was scrambling to come up with a suitably minimal idea to make tonight, so I could have a game out for April and keep to my #onegameamonth challenge.

After playing Bladeless and Potato Dungeon, I realized how much I liked the idea of a minimal swordfighting game, and spent most of my evening trying to figure out how I could do that without resorting to ragdoll physics.

I didn’t come up with anything, so I ended up thinking about the simplest possible game design I could imagine, where all you do is press a button at the right time to win, and otherwise you’d lose. It could be a sort of meditation game, where you just have to sit there attentively and wait for the signal to press the button. If you succeed, you move on to the next level. The time before the signal appears is random, but the maximum time keeps increasing with every level, so you have to be more and more patient to progress further.

I remembered that the word “ninja” means “one who waits”, and I thought it could be fun to theme this as a ninja game, where you have to wait for a long time for the right moment to strike.  But I was having trouble thinking of how this would actually look on the screen, especially if I was going to make this happen tonight.

Of course, then I realized this could simply be a samurai dueling game like Bladeless, where you stand facing your opponent, and you must press the button to draw your sword immediately after your opponent does. Or maybe it would make a bit more sense as a cowboy duel, but I like swords better. Still, it would have to be samurai, as no self-respecting ninja would stand around in the open, waiting to strike second.

So I tried drawing a person holding a sword.

…

Okay, yeah. This isn’t going to happen. I give up. I’m way too tired, I feel terrible, and there is no creativity left in my body.

So much for one game a month.