Blanket Fort Games Blog

In the original Processing demo, the boids were little more than wandering triangles. While this wouldn’t cut it for Microsoft’s sexy factor, but there were huge advantages to the triangles I wasn’t willing to give up.

• Minimalism – The triangles were not organic or inorganic, space ships or wandering viruses. They had no narrative attached to them, no weight. They were symbols  that players could interpret however they pleased. That sort of narrative minimalism is powerful. It invites players deeper into the world as they invest more of their imagination. The more imagination players supply, the more customized the experience. The developer’s world becomes their world, as it should be.
• Simplicity – Perhaps a subcategory of minimalism, the triangles were simple – their silhouettes were easy to see and differentiate. They conveyed orientation information and created a streamlined feel. They accentuated the natural motion of the flocking algorithm, which was the key point of the game.

As we decided that there should be multiple boids, and that those boids should be another factor in differentiating players, I asked for concepts that were simple, with distinct silhouettes, and neither organic or inorganic.

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Some were stripped out for being too intricate, too “ship like”, or too geometric. As quickly as we decided to go with “ships” for Microsoft we backed off that plan and decided that narrative minimalism was essential to our core.

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