Design brief #6

Hi everyone and welcome to the latest design brief article

So, this week I had to get started on the third and final brief

This time I was a little torn on which brief to tackle, there are so many viable options after all, but in the end I chose “Death of the Artist”.

In this brief I am tasked to design a videogame that would require no art resources during production, like creating original assets or touching existing ones to fit in the game, no artist is ( virtually ) allowed to work on this project.

My mind started wandering on various potential takes on this brief, here’s some:

First off my mind went to a game that utilizes only text to function, in the vein of an old school text adventure or a simple 2d game where graphics would be replaced by ASCII text, much like the original Rogue game. But I found all these approaches quite dull and immediate to what a game with these limitations could inspire.

Secondly, and more interestingly, a captcha solving game, where you would have to solve the typical problems of a Re-Captcha only with intentionally ambiguous questions and a timer to make the challenge more tense.

My thought process was that since normal captcha security checks utilize either stock photos or altered alphanumerical characters, no art would need to be produced.

And finally a project that I had in mind for a while and that would be based on a program that creates shapes starting from equations. I had no idea at the time how this game would function, so I kept it on the back of my mind.

With plenty of ideas at hand I asked for feedback on the concepts and quickly realized how I unknowingly breached the limitations already.

My favorite concept, the Captcha game, would still need artists to touch up the stock images or to distort the text in a semi-unlegible way; so yeah, that’s off the charts.

Of the various text game ideas, I can’t find any that I either like enough to iterate on or that I am comfortable enough to code. ( because, in case I did not mention it, I will also go for the extended work part of the brief, that requires you to actually build a demo of your design )

So after all, I find myself drawn to the “math to graphics” game more and more. So that’s the concept I’ll try to work on for the following weeks. I have to figure out how to implement fun gameplay onto the interesting visual style of the the program I want to use would provide me.