Minimalism is the attempt to strip out all the unnecessary and leave only the essence or core of something. In games, this is done by removing all visual and technical hiding of the game and exposing the core, the raw data, of the game to the user. And when you think of raw data, people will tend to think of excel. Enjoy.
I played around with it a bit. However, I kept dying suddenly (Negative HP) while exploring. Nothing seemed to have attacked. No clue what was happening there.
Neten: I agree to point. The mechanics are certainly part of the core of a game, but useless without data. And data is not a game without the application of mechanics on it. After thinking about it for a bit, my position is that the core of a game is the application of mechanics on the data.
Fun game! Equipped with shotguns and potato sacks, my party made an alluring target for the local rat populace... It would have been nice to get some detailed battle reports each round (i.e. rat gnaws member 2 in half for 15 pts of damage)
It's very hard to figure out exactly what's going on, which is impressive when there's so little to do. On the other hand, it's an excellent representation of the theme: a role playing game at just its numbers. Unfortunately, the spacial side of CRPGs really helps to convey the current state of the game world. Also, the excel spreadsheet theme would be vastly improved if you used the Windows UI font (Segoe UI, or even Tahoma).
However, I think it's a bit cumbersome/unintuitive to use, especially considering that modern spreadsheets always support mouse input. Also, the tab system was confusing. I didn't know when things changed on other tabs or what those tabs represented.
Well I hadn't seen anything like this before o,O Too bad it's not working very well. I'd expect at least a "GO NORTH" kind of experience in the action field. But it's better then another pixelated platformer pretending to be minimalistic because pixels :)
This is a very interesting take on the theme, and it looks well thought out. It gets somewhat repetitive, however; there's not much to do between encounters apart from switching armor. It's also hard to tell what some of the cells are for, like "Exit" and the Location number. The game's pretty well done, and it is undeniably minimal~
Amusing use of theme. Actually playing it felt a bit too close to my day job to really be "fun", but I think that's probably a sign that the concept was successfully executed. ;)
Interesting game idea. Somehow I ended up with negative hp. Maybe one of the potatoes killed me? This is probably the first game I've played that made me feel like I was doing homework.
Clever but I couldn't get it to "feel" like a game, I didn't understand what all of the numbers were saying to me. I pressed enter a lot and didn't seem to get anywhere. Maybe I'm misunderstanding something?
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It would have been nice to get some detailed battle reports each round (i.e. rat gnaws member 2 in half for 15 pts of damage)
However, I think it's a bit cumbersome/unintuitive to use, especially considering that modern spreadsheets always support mouse input. Also, the tab system was confusing. I didn't know when things changed on other tabs or what those tabs represented.
Overall, highly innovative.