So, I’m best at understanding a concept when I’m explaining it to other people. Combined with my fairly inebriated state, I felt like just typing out my thoughts and hoping someone would get as much use out of them as I do.

So one thing I noticed of how people instantly reacted to the theme, is that they immediately thought “minimalist” = minimal graphics. That’s a fairly strange assumption in my head. Minimalism can refer to many things especially minimalism game-play. However, I see minimalism to be very closely associated with simplicity; any programmer can tell you that the best way of solving a problem is the simplest, and these often require the minimal lines of code. Likewise I associate it with good design, breaking down a game or concept to its minimal core of what makes it tick.

An example of a game that would have been perfect under this theme is Dive Kick.

A video by TB, takes a closer look at the game.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5uzaxQ5RF4I

The game boils down all the core concepts of fighting games into their bare bones, and creates a compelling and deep game that only uses two buttons. This is what I really see this theme about. Not about minimal graphics, but minimal design. Boiling away everything but the very minimal requirements of the game to be itself. So my game is going to take a genre or game I greatly adore, and strip away everything that is auxiliary until nothing but the bare bones of the game remain.