Did you know that Canabalt was originally made for the theme of “Bare Minimum” at the Experimental Gameplay Project? Okay, yeah, I said that already.

But I think it could be a good angle to approach the theme of “minimalism”, by thinking about the bare minimum that you can scrape by with in developing your game [wow, three prepositions in a row!].

What’s the bare minimum in terms of input? That would be one button, right?

How about in terms of output? Could you make a game with only sound and no graphics? Or how about using as few pixels as possible, to maximize data-ink ratio? Could you represent a 3D space with only a few moving dots? Or lines?

Or could you use as few rules as possible? Could you keep your game systems to a bare minimum?

Maybe I’ll just make my game as quickly as I can.