Humpday Gaming: Warioware D.I.Y
When I get tired of playing whatever time sink I’ve recently devoted my time to, I’ve been throwing in Warioware DIY. If you’re unfamiliar with what Warioware is, it’s essentially a game based on very quick “microgames” that can last anywhere from a couple of seconds to, well, not much longer than a couple of seconds. The idea of DIY is that you make your own collection of microgames to play, share them with friends, and download their stuff as well. So you know that one racist game you’ve been wanting to make about a butt and a few choice religious figures? Well here’s your chance to shine for all that can bare witness to it.
As for me, I love the concept of making my own games. I know it’s not for everyone, but I love the idea of finally being able to put the creative hat on, and build my own game from the ground up. DIY literally lets you do just that, with a surprisingly advanced (for a DS game, anway) suite of game editing tools. Anything from making the backgrounds, character art/animation, composing music, it’s all right there for you to mess with. There certainly are limitations to what you can do (any object is limited to four frames of animation, music can only be so long, etc) but what you can do is more than enough to make whatever stupid microgame you would want. It ends up being completely addictive once you get past learning how to do shit, which will probably be the biggest hurdle for people.
So how easy IS it to actually make games in DIY? Depends on what you want to do. Some games can be scripted and drawn from scratch in about half an hour. These would be the games that involve a simple “Touch this object, win game” script. Anything more advanced is certainly going to take more time, requiring you to get the hang of how to work with switches, moving objects in and out, and then making it all work together to make a functioning game. Though a good majority of the time spent comes down to custom art assets, and debugging your game so that things work the way you want them.
Wait, I probably just scared everyone ever away from this game with the word “debug.”
A quick look from the beginning of a project to the end...in Japanese.
Okay, so yeah, you will be debugging your shit. While DIY doesn’t contain any sort of code you need to produce, it does however contain “scripts” that you make for each object you need to use in your game. At its base level, a script is simply making a trigger for an object, and then the action that goes along with that trigger. A basic script for an object looks like this:
Trigger:
Tap object on screenAction:
Once object is tapped, move west
This would make your object move west once it has been tapped. Pretty simple, right? And if you want, you never have to get much more advanced. You could simply draw cows farting themselves off the screen when they are tapped for days and easily get your forty bucks worth. If you do wish to get into the more advanced scripts, you’ll be adding multiple triggers and actions per object, along with object switches, which are essential for making any game that involves more than tapping on something to win. The crazy long tutorial goes a long way in easing you in, but really the best way to learn is to just jump in and play with the scripting yourself.
The object editor along with the script editor
If all this sounds like a bit much for you, you’re still covered. You don’t HAVE to build anything in DIY. If you simply want to see what other people are making, you essentially have an unlimited well of Wario microgames to play. Heading online to the Ninsoft store gets you weekly “best of” games, along with games being made from famous developers in a sort of developer spotlight. Last I checked, the guy who made Cave Story made a way pretty game. These are all available to download to your DS, which you can then mix into your own custom Warioware game. You can also connect with friends at any time to check out the games they have deposited in their online warehouse. There is sadly no dedicated online hub where you can search everything, but when you think about it there is no way Nintendo would be able to keep up its kid friendly image AND be able to monitor every tubgirl game that came in at the same time. This kind of leaves it up to you to store your own collection of people to find games from, which kinda sucks.
To help you out, I’m going to be doing a sort of running thing on the various DIY games I make over the next few weeks. I’ll go ahead and post the first here, along with my DIY friend code on the Humpday Gaming blog so you can check in on the various retarded shit I make that will all inevitably degrade to dinosaurs fighting monster trucks.I’ll give a bit of insight on what I’ve made, then leave it up to you to decide if I wasted an hour of my life making it. In the meantime, go check it out Warioware DIY if you’re curious about making your own games. Or just curious to see how many terrible microgames you can play before you start choking yourself.
