Theme:<\/strong> Waow! Minimalism, this was a tough one. I know\u00a0nothing about minimalism in graphical art, surely a bit more in music, but I didn’t feel like I was able to make a good music game in one week end.\u00a0I wanted to use minimalism on an artistic point of view but also regarding the gameplay. Can you see the battlefield ?<\/p><\/div>\n From scratch<\/strong>: Maybe one day, I will learn to be a good\u00a0developer\u00a0and stop wanting to write every single line of code.\u00a0Writing\u00a0everything gives you a complete freedom, but what a lack of time when you have to code GUI. Another advantage is that you think differently, you don’t ask yourself “what can I do with those tools?”, but “how can I shape my tools to do what I want?”. The problem is that you’re quickly trapped in unstable solution if you didn’t anticipate problems. A.I.<\/strong>: At the end of the first day, my prototype was ready and working, but only for two human players. I know that people usually don’t have the opportunity to play a game for two players, I definitively had to write an AI, even stupid, but something the lonely player could interact with. On\u00a0Sunday,\u00a0I started working on it, and I spent 6 hours. It was way too much. I should have stopped before, but a lot of small errors I made, resulted in a non working AI. Still in the compo version, the AI is buggy but at least, it acts like an opponent.<\/p>\n Tutorial<\/strong>: Even if the game is pretty simple, the rules are not straight forward, and without any explanations people doesn’t catch it. Hence the tutorial was an obligation. Therefore I decided to use the\u00a0remaining\u00a0time to work on this important point and sacrifice all other ideas.<\/p>\n M.I.A.<\/strong>: Since I lost a lot of time on the AI and I decided to choose the tutorial over the rest, some points are missing. I wanted to enhance the graphics, use some small animations to facilitate the understanding of the action, allow the player to save a picture of the final battlefield as a resulting minimalist frame, and finally add some ambient minimalist soundtrack.<\/p>\n Play Drimonna, a minimalist strategy game.<\/p><\/div>\n tl;dr<\/strong>: I wasn’t really in the mood for this LD. I got inspired by Mondrian and decide to make a minimalist strategy game. I lost ~10 hours over 23, on algorithm issues. I\u00a0finally\u00a0decided to\u00a0prioritize the tutorial over polishing, sounds and extra features. As usual LD was a great experience which\u00a0taught me a lot.<\/p>\n
\n Lacking ideas, I\u00a0finally\u00a0googled “minimalism art”, and the first result was a Piet Mondrian’s frame. I guess Mondrian inspired a lot of participants this week end, which is funny when Mondrian seems to not even be a minimalist. Anyway, this separation of\u00a0colors made me think of a battlefield with units, warzones, fortifications. The idea seemed a good one.<\/p>\n ![\"Can](\"http:\/\/www.ludumdare.com\/compo\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/05\/mondrian_1-300x213.png\")
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\n That’s what happened to me. I lost two hours trying to write an\u00a0algorithm\u00a0which\u00a0should give me the resulting rectangles of the intersection of two rectangles (btw if someone has a solution, please tell me, I’m still looking for)<\/em>. I had to change a bit the gameplay since I wasn’t able to find an efficient solution.<\/p>\n ![\"\"](\"http:\/\/www.ludumdare.com\/compo\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/04\/screen033.png\")
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