It's been a handful of weeks since it came out, but I've been having a great time with the latest in the WarioWare series, WarioWare D.I.Y. I waffled quite a bit over whether or not I should actually buy it—I don't feel creativity is really one of my strong suits—but I rationalized that even if it didn't turn out to be such a good fit for me, I'd at least have 90 new WarioWare microgames to play.
I needn't have worried. I've had more ideas than I've had time to put the games together with (the in-game medals say I've been working at it for over five hours now—and that doesn't include the time spent playing games, checking out friends', going through the amusing tutorials, or tackling the advanced programming challenges.) I thought I'd like to take you, dear readers, on a little tour of what I've accomplished so far; so I enlisted my lovely assistant Dean to use his copy of the WiiWare D.I.Y. Showcase to receive, play, and post video of my creations.
My very first game is more than a little embarassing. This was basically me trying to figure things out. I hadn't even been through most of the in-game lessons yet, and owing to the abject tiny-ness of the bell (D.I.Y. objects detect they're tapped within their boundaries), it's actually pretty hard on both DS and Wii.
The next game was my entry into the first in-game theme contest—the winners of this have yet to be announced, but the second contest is already underway. Obviously I was bitten by a bit of a sarcastic bug here, as you can see: this is my love letter to all those who would proclaim what a certain popular franchise really needs to make it awesome again is a dose of... well, you'll see:
Most of my D.I.Y. exchanges have been with players on GAF, where there's been enough interested parties to fill my Friend Roster up. Sampling some of their wares, I felt like there were a few people who were tending to overcomplicate things. The logical opposite was, of course, a game that was almost impossible to lose... and I was able to put it together in a shockingly short amount of time. Behold, the win button:
Joke games have their place and all—particularly in WarioWare—but by this time (Easter weekend, specifically) I was starting to feel like perhaps I should stretch my wings a little. I mulled over a few ideas and came up with this gripping medical simulator (not shown: the lawyer who pops up if you pick the wrong organ):
I took a little break from making games to spend some quality time with one particular classic that's getting a sequel soon. The result was this, Dean's favorite of the bunch—though, on reflection, it's a bit hard; could probably use some tweaking:
Finally, the last thing I've completed—my entry for the latest contest is still in the prototype stage—wasn't so much a game as a tech demo. The programming available to D.I.Y. games is very limited, but quite a bit can be done by simply considering the possibilities made by interactions of many different objects. So I decided to see how high I could make a game that has no numeric storage whatosever count—well, here's Dean trying to make sense of the result:
(He did much better on subsequent retries.)
There you have it, my mediocre efforts thus far—they may not be really all that special, but they certainly were entertaining to make. Programming D.I.Y. has been a lot of fun; it's reminiscent of the joy I—a programmer of much larger computer systems professionally—get when I figure out how to take a seemingly limited system and make it do something completely new. I'm already scheming to introduce the game to my kids to baptize them in the ways of the coder. We'll see how that goes...
I needn't have worried. I've had more ideas than I've had time to put the games together with (the in-game medals say I've been working at it for over five hours now—and that doesn't include the time spent playing games, checking out friends', going through the amusing tutorials, or tackling the advanced programming challenges.) I thought I'd like to take you, dear readers, on a little tour of what I've accomplished so far; so I enlisted my lovely assistant Dean to use his copy of the WiiWare D.I.Y. Showcase to receive, play, and post video of my creations.
My very first game is more than a little embarassing. This was basically me trying to figure things out. I hadn't even been through most of the in-game lessons yet, and owing to the abject tiny-ness of the bell (D.I.Y. objects detect they're tapped within their boundaries), it's actually pretty hard on both DS and Wii.
The next game was my entry into the first in-game theme contest—the winners of this have yet to be announced, but the second contest is already underway. Obviously I was bitten by a bit of a sarcastic bug here, as you can see: this is my love letter to all those who would proclaim what a certain popular franchise really needs to make it awesome again is a dose of... well, you'll see:
Most of my D.I.Y. exchanges have been with players on GAF, where there's been enough interested parties to fill my Friend Roster up. Sampling some of their wares, I felt like there were a few people who were tending to overcomplicate things. The logical opposite was, of course, a game that was almost impossible to lose... and I was able to put it together in a shockingly short amount of time. Behold, the win button:
Joke games have their place and all—particularly in WarioWare—but by this time (Easter weekend, specifically) I was starting to feel like perhaps I should stretch my wings a little. I mulled over a few ideas and came up with this gripping medical simulator (not shown: the lawyer who pops up if you pick the wrong organ):
I took a little break from making games to spend some quality time with one particular classic that's getting a sequel soon. The result was this, Dean's favorite of the bunch—though, on reflection, it's a bit hard; could probably use some tweaking:
Finally, the last thing I've completed—my entry for the latest contest is still in the prototype stage—wasn't so much a game as a tech demo. The programming available to D.I.Y. games is very limited, but quite a bit can be done by simply considering the possibilities made by interactions of many different objects. So I decided to see how high I could make a game that has no numeric storage whatosever count—well, here's Dean trying to make sense of the result:
(He did much better on subsequent retries.)
There you have it, my mediocre efforts thus far—they may not be really all that special, but they certainly were entertaining to make. Programming D.I.Y. has been a lot of fun; it's reminiscent of the joy I—a programmer of much larger computer systems professionally—get when I figure out how to take a seemingly limited system and make it do something completely new. I'm already scheming to introduce the game to my kids to baptize them in the ways of the coder. We'll see how that goes...