Indie | Experimental Gameplay Project: Bare Minimum

For Kyle, his game based on the ‘bare minimum’ theme was born out of the various puns he had swimming around in his head, and a desire to make a game that was fun – not necessarily something he would make a commercial release out of. Kyle reveals that, in T-Time, “you play as an 80’s icon breaking up a gentlemanly tea time event. By running and jumping into gentlemen you gain mass and thus ramp up the speed of the game, but it makes it harder to dodge oncoming obstacles.” This fits in with the bare minimum theme, with there being little interaction involved; all you have to do in the game is press space to jump over the the obstacles and into the gentlemen who try to get out of your way.

Interestingly, Adam Saltmsman, who made Canabalt, had a very similar take on the theme. In Canabalt – which we covered earlier this week – you must escape from your office by jumping from rooftop to rooftop, ideally without hitting the various objects blocking your way. Adam went for a “baseline interpretation,” limiting the input to just a single button and opting for a minimalistic presentation. “I would like to be the kind of developer that could have explored the societal impact of bare minimum dedication, or irresponsibility, or something,” he says.

//Words in motion
Paolo’s game, Ergon/Logos, is decidedly different to the creations from Kyle and Michael. It’s a piece of interactive storytelling, in which you can control the story’s direction by pointing the mouse in the splinter of text you want to follow. Paolo says that Ergon/Logos “sits somewhere in between the non-linear narrative and the arcade game, and in a way it’s an avant-garde-ish commentary on both. There are no graphics and rather few choices to make, but the closeness of the interaction is balanced by the narrative openness of the texts.”

By looking at just three of the games that followed the ‘bare minimum’ idea, you can see the variety of ways in which the idea can be interpreted. If you look at some of the games made by other developers – though not directly linked to the EGP – you can find numerous other ‘bare minimum’ games. 29 of these have been collated in the ‘Best of the Net’ piece over at the EGP site.

Michael feels that the EGP is very beneficial to the indie scene. As he says, “indies have always been making small games, but I think this more focused concept – the EGP – of a game in sevendays, it’s a strong thing to be in the scene right now. There are so many benefits of making small games, and this is a great way to do it.”

Kyle describes the EGP as being “[a] place where a lot of indie developers cut their teeth,” and Paolo thinks that projects like EGP have contributed to “establishing [independent games] as a culturally relevant alternative to the mainstream. It’s not just about being small or budgetless; it’s about exploring creative horizons that the industry would preclude.”

And Adam chipped in, saying that “there is a deadline, time and theme constraints, and the knowledge that your work will be compared to some of the best game creators alive. As an environment for fostering creativity and interesting things, I’m not sure what more you could ask for.”

The EGP theme for September is ‘Failure’, and I can’t wait to see what kind of games are made using this. If ‘bare minimum’ can lead to titles such as Broken Brothers, T. Time and Ergon/Logos I can only dream of the variety of games we will see based on the new theme. If the original EGP led to genuine breakout hits like World of Goo and Crayon Physics, then I’m sure this reincarnation will lead to similarly great titles emerging.

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