Minimalism. I’m happy with this theme, even though we don’t have a game concept yet. One could say that every Ludum Dare game is minimalist by its very nature; the tight deadline forces you to leave out everything that is not essential. But making this into a theme explicitly opens up new avenues of exploration.

The most minimalistic game I can think of can be made in 15 minutes. The screen is initially black; when it turns white, press the space bar as quickly as you can. The time you have to do this decreases each time, until you finally miss the deadline. Your score is the number of times you got it right. There is just one problem with this game: it’s unbelievably dull.

Minimalism in other games? Canabalt is a minimalistic platformer, doing away with enemies and even left/right controls and focusing purely on the jumping. Duck Hunt is a minimalistic shooter, discarding player movement and the environment. The board game Go could be seen as a minimalistic turn-based strategy game: no health, no production of new units, no upgrades, not even unit movement; just capturing of enemy units.

These are as simple as can be, yet all of these are compelling games in their own right. Go in particular has an incredible amount of depth resulting from its extremely simple set of rules; it must be every game designer’s dream to come even close to this.

I predict we’ll see lots of black and white pixel art. Perhaps also some Philip Glass-like music. I will be voting in the Theme category based on whether people did something original with the theme, rather than just “platformer with minimalist graphics”.

Let me conclude with some inspiring quotes. It seems we’re in good company:

• “Keep it simple, stupid.” —Kelly Johnson
• “A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.” —Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
• “Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.” —Leonardo da Vinci
• “Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.” —Albert Einstein