I’ve always loved one-button games… and found if impressive that game designers can stuff a game full of fun with just one button…
Following this this thread of thought, I came across “Pax Britannica”:
You can download this free game here.
The idea of the game is to defeat your enemies in a space battle royal, using only one button… Up to four players can play on a single keyboard (unfortunately, the single player is a tad too easy to really enjoy the game), and they can hold only one key… That will trigger a needle in the UI, and releasing the button will make a ship spawn. That ship will depend on the quadrant in which the needle is.
The game as a bit more tactic that it seems at first glance, and it’s a load of fun… and more importantly, should make game designers think about their design decisions… as I said in the past, I don’t care much for developing one-button-games, but thinking about the distillation of the game components into one button helps distinguish what’s fun and what’s not, and how to simplify the UI and actions available in the game to their most basic form, until all you have left is pure game, no fluff… Of course, a game like this is only fun for an hour or so, but adding more components to it is easy enough by extending the GUI, but keeping always in mind that all additions must bring a load more fun to the game and discard the idea if it doesn’t…