Ah, very cool
Well, don't think there's much else I can say; I do like the way there's very little in the way of a HUD to get in the way.
Yeah! My approach to visual feedback in previous stuff tends toward clean functional visuals. If we're going to have a visual element it has to explain something about the game. It's fine for that element to be aesthetically pleasing (spangley particle explosions to focus the eye on an important point in space), but the bottom line, it has to help the player understand the game more clearly - it has to be linked up with some aspect of the game state. Rarely will we add anything purely for show (I guess the VLM background is an exception there, though we did experiment with music affecting gameplay for a long time, and the VLM is a cool side effect of that R&D).
That said, I
don't have a problem with game-play irrelevant particle blitzes like in Space Giraffe, because they're still affecting the ambience of the game (and I also have a pet theory about how if you're "blinded" momentarily, you're forced to use your internalized mental model to play the game, rather than the defacto game, and thus you play more intuitively/quicker... but that could easily be misguided bollucks on my part).
However, in a fast paced game where important game events are visualized more frequently, you ultimately end up with information blitzes. The answer there is to communicate the information as efficiently as possible. For example, I did the Chain Capture effect recently... it had your chain value (i.e. "x2", "x3", "x4") ontop of a clock (for the Chain time-out) as well as an arrow showing where your last capture was. That would have been way too much clutter, so now I'm thinking that a more efficient way to display that would be to remove the clock and use the arrow's length itself as the timer... like a fuse burning down.
