Our studio’s idea for the first mini-game is to provide the player with a SCHMUP that has a clean minimalistic art style, that also offers some challenging gameplay. The main focus is the gameplay, to provide players with a challenging experience. It would not only rewards players with quick reflexes, agility and speed, but also smart play. A clean minimalistic art style would compliment this by only providing the player with useful information, with very little screen clutter (e.g. Massive HUD, exaggerated explosions, intrusive Health Bars, etc.) Some examples of how the art style will provide useful information will be as follows:
- Coloured enemies denoting what kind of play style they have. Green may have a complex movement pattern, while Orange may just home in on the player.
- Enemy design that tells the player exactly how strong they can expect them to be. If we use basic geometric shapes, for example, the more sides the shape has is how tough it is (in terms of their Health/Armour values).
These goals are very important for our studio’s game because we believe that everybody, to some degree, enjoys learning at their own pace through the use of game cues. People enjoy figuring stuff out, so we’ll be providing them with that experience. The very minimalistic HUD is a very key element for this to work, because it forces the players to look at the game world much more closely, compared to some more modern games that just give players information freely.
Salty Nuggets Studio - IGB100 