Ludum Dare the recurring competition where you’re encouraged to make a game from scratch in 48 hours, happened again this weekend. The latest competition was the 26th and was held from the 26th of April until the 29th and the theme these talented developers had to illustrate in their efforts was Minimalism.

The accelerated game development event has just finished collecting games for its 48-hour competition with1616 entries submitted. We toyed around with many interesting entries and we give you a quick glance to what managed to impress us the most.

Maximalism

Minimalism means to expose the essence of something by removing everything that is unneccessary. Suyo’s Maximalism does the concept the other way round. The game starts the first level with the core of the challenge. Then stuff like ropes to throw your aim off, sounds to confuse you, lightning to distract you are added  to the game slowly taking away the minimalism environments you started off with. The game has six levels, the final one having online high-scores so you can compete with the whole world. And if that’s not enough, you can unlock a secret level which is totally worth the rage according to the testers.

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The Road

The Road was created by George Broussard of Duke Nukem and 3D Realms fame, and is a very minimalist platformer about the various challenges encountered in the course of a human lifetime.  The  catch with The Road is that as you age you get larger making it harder to avoid theses obstacles. You can die from drowning in a swimming pool, facing an alien invasion and many other hilarious death causes.

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Weapons of Minimal Destruction

Weapons of Minimal Destruction by Bluescrn, made with Unity, Blender, AS3SFXR, SpaceScape, and Photoshop, is an arena shooter with a twist. You don’t just start shooting everything – as the aim of this one is to get a minimal score. If you let enemies live, you lose score. Killing them gains you score. Kill as few as possible whilst still surviving. You’ll also lose a bit of score for dying. WASD/Arrows to move. Mouse to aim+fire.

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Budget Squad

As always a Ludum Dare entry by Deepnight, a winner of the 25th competition, and  always among the tops  spots in all the previous, is always a very interesting game to play. This time he created Budget Squad, a game that lets you control two submarines, Minnie (pink) & Malism (orange). Deepnight’s  take on ‘Minimalism comes from the fact that both submarines carry just the bare minimum due to defense budget restrictions. Minnie carries the lamb and she is invincible, while Malism has the gum, but no light, and only 1 life.

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Floating Point

Floating Point by 7Soul is a Point-and-Click adventure where you must connect two dimensions, a real simple world and an “abstract” complex world, to find an answer. The twist is that each dimension is opened in a different browser window. In order to play you have to open the game twice, then use the mouse to interact, use the hand to perform actions, and the eye to gather information. You can also press 1 or 2 to select the hand and the eye.

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The Sentient Cube

The Sentient Cube by Taro Omiya, the founder of Omiya Games, an independent game studio focused on experimental games,  is an action-puzzle game that combines Antichamber-like graphics, and feels like a mix of Katamari Damacy and Crazy Taxi in terms of gameplay. You play as a blue, sticky cube that can roll into other objects smaller than itself to grow bigger. By increasing the cube’s size, the cube can reach to the Goal with more ease. Scattered around the level are various physics-changing items and power-ups.

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Bashland

Bashland by McFunkypants is described as a mixture of breakout/arkanoid brick-bashing with Mario/Sonic style platformer mechanics. Use the keyboard to move left or right as you bounce chaotically around a hand-painted art universe. McFunkypants said that the painted art is inspired by Piet Mondrian’s use of squares of colour interspersed with lines, and was created using Corel Paint’s simulated oil paint system.

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Nod

Nod is a dating sim with just one button where your main goal is to get a date with a cute girl. Unfortunately, you’re too shy to talk. Instead, you have to nod your head at just the right moments to succeed. Nod  looks, great, plays great, fits the theme and has 4 different ends for you to explore.

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Be The Wind

Be The Wind by Dstozek, made in HTML5/JS using Canvas and JQuery, is an arty game that lets you  become the wind. Fly between branches, collect seeds and plant new trees. You can create a wonderful, minimalistic tree garden and share it with your friends.

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Pink Haze

Pink Haze by jwin is the developer’s minimalist take on the third-person shooter. Run around, hide behind boxes, shoot some robots. Most of the rooms are shuffled around each time, but there is a final room you can only get to by beating the previous rooms in a single go.

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Conclusion

We would like to congratulate all of those who participated in the event , and when the player’s poll comes out in 21 days, we’ll provide you with a sneak preview of the top rated games.  All of the entries are voted according to Innovation, Fun, Theme, Graphics, Audio, Humor, Mood, Overall and Community. There is no winning prize, but we don’t think this is necessary. Everybody here is a winner. Go check it yourselves.