The complicated art of minimalist design
I’ll talk about the design of a game I made for the global game jam in under 36 hours.
We use visuals, sound, and motion. The huge difference is software has a 2 way communication, you communicate with it and it communicates back, the communication back needs to be easy to read so the user can interpret it’s surroundings.
A good silhouette, a readable character
3D Games are not safe of this. In class shooters being able to know the character just from there silhouette is VERY important.
Animation has and will always rely on strong silhouettes.
Wendy was designed to be extremely readable since she’s very tiny in the stage.
Anthropomorphize game mechanics.
The wind machine was originally just a box that threw wind, giving it a face allowed to make it something that the player would eventually care about, a living thing that also houses the iconic elements of the game in turn making the game iconic. This is common in nintendo games, where a fairy represents the Z-Targeting in one game, a Luma represents the spinning attack in a platformer, and a water backpack represents the water mechanic.
Just for some examples, every time a character talks to you in a tutorial that’s also antromorphizing game mechanics
With <36 hours We didn’t have time for complex art so I had to design an easy to animate character for my assistant to clean up, and for me to animate.
Visual design has to be redundant, not everyone sees the same thing, we need to know where the eye is and how to move it where we want to at all times.
The game makes you place your hands on the keyboard by first making you click on the keys that you will use in-game
First stage (and only one we had time to make), the player can only move from left to right, so it will eventually hit the green button.
There’s also some environmental storytelling, the tube right above, the dead wind machines, all creating a story without words.
Game focused on keeping the characters readable and easy to tell apart from the background.
And that’s it please play this one minute prototype I created during the weekend. and remember the amount of work it takes to make a readable design.
http://globalgamejam.org/2017/games/wind-machine
Due to traffic here’s stuff hosted on my site.
http://fernhw.com/game_files/html5_wind_machine/
http://fernhw.com/game_files/The_wind_machine_source_files.zip
Appeal is the most important. A character design is first and foremost a visual description, please consider that the user should know everything they need to know of a character with a glance.
more at studio high ground https://www.studiohighground.com/