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Towards a Minimalist Design

    As a budding game designer, I have very limited resources available to me when developing a game, either this be time or the amount of work one person can accomplish on their own. One of the design philosophies that people like me can follow is one of minimalism. After reading the scholarly article Towards Minimalist Game Design I have had some ideas on how to make my games more tangible for one developer to create.
    An important observation is in minimalist games that are made by indie developers and can claim wide success. One such game is Undertale, created almost entirely by one developer Toby Fox. This game expresses many of the minimalist design philosophies that are described in the scholarly article, which is the focus of this post. Most primarily, we see the lack of macro-mechanics. This is a primary target when designing a minimalist game as it simplifies development while not necessarily sacrificing depth of play or exploration. The main macro-mechanic that exists in undertale is to not allow your hit points to reach zero. This is underlined by many micro-mechanics that all work together really well. From the simple movement system, working seamlessly with the simple graphical approach; to the more complex system of attempting to befriend a creature rather than killing it. By selecting one maco-mechanic, Toby Fox greatly simplified the complexity present in many RPGs in present memory. Permitting him to create an RPG, without building complex damage tables like the one shown in this article.
    In developing my current 2D game project, I will have to keep these ideas and goals in mind in order to create a game that is both intriguing and deep, while not being overly complicated to build and maintain.
Image Source: Unity Form

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