'How about a 1-D shooter? All you do is move along a line and shoot... No aiming, no dodging, nothing.'
'Sounds pretty terrible.'
'Er... Yeah...'
Thus began an interesting sequence of thoughts. Is it possible to make an enjoyable 1-D game? Just how much can you take out of a game before it isn't fun anymore?
Turns out, you can remove pretty much everything.
(Also, designing for 1-D is pretty much the most horrible experience ever.)
This is LINE.
A small suite of minimalistic, one-dimensional games, developed over the course of a week or so. We limited ourselves to a monochromatic palette, pong-style sound and graphics, and only 3 control buttons for each game. We're interested to see what people think, as what we found out during development was that making a one-dimensional game fun, without turning it into a rhythm game, is rather challenging.
The 3 games are called (rather pretentiously
), 'L', 'I' and 'N' ('E' is reserved for exit
). We're pretty happy with the design of 'L' and 'N', but 'I' needs some pretty heavy work done to it in order to make it, well, fun.
We made it in Java, so the file is a runnable .jar that you can find
here. The code can also be found in this zip,
here.
It's a pretty small game, which was only finished recently, so we're mainly looking for feedback and suggestions. Enjoy!