It’s been twelve hours since LD has started and although it took a while for me to get some traction on an idea, I’m definitely happy with where things are at now.
My take on minimalism was twofold, one graphical and one conceptual.
The concept started off as me wanting to explore the idea of human connection which essentially forms the basis for the daily lives of every living thing on the planet. We all form connections to other living things, some good, some bad, and some purely neutral. This game explores the idea that there is a connection which can be better than the others, and you have to find it through a simplistic mechanic of simply walking up to a character and chosing to interact either positively or negatively, which impacts the connection you have with that character.
If you find the character which has the highest possible positive connection with your character, you win. However you have limited time and you also have to avoid characters you form negative connections with (or who start the game with a negative connection to you!) because they will reduce the amount of positivity you can use to interact with the other characters, thus not being able to win.
Graphics are single-colour simplified 3D objects with just ambient occlusion baked in, representative of the concept that I’m attempting to explore. Connections are represented visually through the use of three colours to indicate the state of the connection. The town in the screenshots is just a small representative of the style, the final one will be about 4x bigger and actually have things that resemble houses and whatnot, just for a bit of atmosphere.
And just a stress test of 160 characters, because.. well.. why not?
I’m not sure what this will end up being like, if it will be fun or not, but I’ll see it through to completion and see how it goes.
Tags: 3D, minimalism, Monogame
