WarioWare DIY

[miffy495]

Anyone else playing around with this? I just spent about an hour and a half making a simple minigame based off of an injoke between a friend and I, and had a great time doing it. Of course, I should have spent that time on homework, but it's mid-afternoon so I have that "eh, I have all evening to work on things" mentality going on. Most of my time was spent on art. Luckily it's harder to fuck up a heavily pixelated picture of a person than it is to fuck up a semi-realistic thing. The programming is incredibly basic (hell, the games are 5 seconds long) and thus easy to get a grip on. The tutorials at the beginning of the game take fucking forever to get through though. Didn't mess around with the musical track composition, except for changing around the instruments used in the generated track in order to fit the mood I was going for. Seems decently deep for a two bar music creation tool. I can easily see occasionally getting struck with a stupid idea and creating a game. Oh shit, I actually just had a great idea for modifying the game I made. Damn, I wonder if you can edit a game you've already clicked "ship" on.

EDIT: Yes. Yes you can. Game edited and made better.

Anyway, any thumbs messing with this thing? I'm having a bunch of fun so far, and I'd look forward to seeing what sorts of things you folks would create given the chance. How do we trade games, and who wants to?

Edited April 8, 2010 by miffy495

[Korax]

I've been playing around with it a little. The tutorial is a pain to get through for someone who already knows a bit of programming. I had one flash of inspiration, and then got distracted by other games after I had made it.

In order to share games, you and your friend must exchange Friend Codes, and then both connect to Nintendo WFC to actually register as friends. You can store up to two games online.

[miffy495]

Only two? Dang. I also have the WiiWare DIY Showcase, which I think allows people to send games from Wii to Wii.

The tutorial is a pain for anyone who knows any logic at all. All I have ever done programming-wise was to set up routines for completely basic Turing machines in a Logic II class, but I found myself wishing throughout the thing that it would just give me an option to show the game I know what I'm doing. "Make the ladybug run away." Ok then, give me the tools and then let me ask for help if I find I need it. "No, do it this way. First click this thing agonizingly slowly. Then this. Now this. See the highlighted thing? Poke that." etc. Damn, I'm really glad I never need to do that again.

Apropos of nothing, I went onto the gamefaqs forum looking for advice on what button the game wanted me to press in order to put a sprite I had created into a game (for all the tutorial does with its irritatingly slow manner, it doesn't label the freaking "place sprite" button) and have never been sadder with the internet. No advice. No "what's the most efficient technique to do x?" threads. Just page upon page of retro-game ripoffs ("CHECK OUT MAH MEGAMANZ LEVEL!") and amateur porn games ("My very first Ecchi game! ^_^"). Goddamn it, Internet. Just... goddamn it.

[Xeneth]

Can anyone confirm that DIY ONLY makes use of the touch screen for actual minigame playing and design?

I doubt I'll pick this up if I can't create a game where you have to, say...

tap a button to hack away at a thing at the point where the stylus is resting. Or something. I understand that every control limitation you impose on such a thing drastically lowers the complexity of the editor, which is probably the concepts main sticking point with most people, but...

The original WarioWare was my favorite, and I want to be able to recreate the button mashy madness in addition to new tappy madness.

[Korax]

It is touch screen only, but they have trigger commands that allow you to create an on-screen button or even have the entire screen be the "button." The editor itself is fairly simple, but once you know what you're doing, you can put together some pretty elaborate stuff.

[miffy495]

Yeah, it's tap only. This isn't that bad though. As said, you can put buttons on the touch screen and trigger them however you like, tying them to any object you wish. It's really not that limiting at all. As an example, take the following anecdote about my most recently created game.

When at work Friday night, I was challenged to put together a game about work by the girl who was working concession with me (my theater is small enough that we only have two people on at a time, one manager/projectionist, and one concession/box office) so we spent about an hour of the shift putting it together. It was about a brain wrap, which is when the film gets stuck to itself going through the "brain" in the film platter, tangles up going through the complex series of rollers, and gets stuck in front of the xenon bulb. This causes the film to melt and the movie to abruptly stop working. Y'know at the end of Fight Club when the movie pretends to melt? That's how an audience sees a brain wrap. The game "Brain Wrap" consisted of putting out three randomly placed fires on the projector and tapping on the tangled film on the platter 3 times to pull out different bits of film out of the brain. This meant 4 images of different states of tangled for the platter, as well as teaching myself how to make fires appear in random places on the projector, but not random places all over the screen (the game was split-screen, with the left half a top down view of the film platter and the right half a side view of the projector). There were also two frames of animation for the fire and four of dissipating smoke for after you put out the fire. It looks and plays great. In practice, it's pretty frantic. You need to rapidly tap the film 3 times to unravel it, then hunt and peck for the three fires in the time limit. The win will only trigger once all 6 actions have been performed. As you can see, only having the ability to tap on the screen may sound limiting, but it is possible to make fairly complex things. There's much more complicated than that possible as well (I've seen full driving games on youtube, with randomized obstacles), so I wouldn't worry too much about being limited by the interface.

[syntheticgerbil]

So if I have Warioware Showcase for my Wii, which I bought because I had leftover money to spend, then can I see everyone's games basically?

[miffy495]

Yeah, you can play the things I've made if we swap friend codes and I send them to you, I think. I know there's definitely a way to trade, anyway. I have Showcase myself, so even if you can't do my DS to your Wii, we can still do a Wii to Wii trade.

[syntheticgerbil]

Cool, I not going to be near my Wii until this weekend, but I'll go find my friend code. I don't know it by heart.

I see if I can add you from the multiplayer thread.

[miffy495]

I think DIY has its own code, which I'd need to look up as well. Don't know if I'll be playing my Wii before Monday or so anyway (last week of my bachelor's degree. Waaaaay too much stuff to do to actually play any games. I'll still talk about them though, damn it.) so don't worry about timeliness.

[miffy495]

Just had a look through the Wii Friend codes thread, as I wanted to take a break from homework and decided I'd try to figure out how sending games in Warioware works. Turns out you do just use the standard friend code (that is, the one that lets you swap Miis) so I browsed through looking for your number, Gerbil. No luck. PM me with your number if you don't want to put it in the thread (understandable given the crazy amount of spam and bullshit that thread attracted) or do so soon and I'll send you along the two games I created. There's the projector one described earlier and that in-joke thing that a friend and I had a good laugh over. It's a pretty dumb joke, but whatever.

We were looking through the local GLBT magazine (OUTlooks, I think it's called) and they had a section of reviews of recent same-sex porn releases. One of these was "Gay Road Trip 13: San Fransisco" which was met with my completely incredulous reaction to the fact that it took them 13 trips to get to what most outsiders would consider the GLBT acceptance mecca. This prompted my speculation that the eighth installment in the series was in fact a brief documentary where their party bus entered Salt Lake City and was abruptly run out of town. Thus my first game, "Gay Road Trip 8," was a simple affair where the player simply needs to jam down on the party bus' gas pedal to get it away from angry mormons as quickly as possible.

...And yeah, I know the correct term is now GLBTQ, but adding "queer" when you already have "gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgendered" seems redundant. It's always been my understanding that "queer" was just a synonym for "gay/lesbian," so unless there's some other meaning to it, I don't see the point in adding it.

[Xeneth]

Thanks for the run down.

It does indeed sound powerful enough to do just about anything you can think of within the constraints, but I'm still a much bigger fan of d-pad+a/b controls on that sort of 4 second game format. I guess being an NES kid and getting older means grumbling about kids and their silly fangled touch screen gimmicks... Nothing hacks me off more about iPhone games than when they have you "pressing" on virtual buttons or joysticks on the screen that have no feedback. That's the most bass ackwards way of shoehorning atypical game designs onto a buttonless device that I'd never be caught dead making a microgame with a "controller" interactable graphic pasted in the corner...

I would imagine that not knowing up front which sort of grip you were supposed to have on your handheld prior to the timing starting would get annoying and make it play more like the generally less favorably recieved Smooth Moves on the Wii, (Where it has to prep you with a title card before every microgame, limiting the number of possible ones you could be asked to perform through segregation).

Perhaps if I spot an opportunity to pick this up on the cheap down the road I'll try my hand at it.

[miffy495]

I would still recommend it regardless. I've only created 2 games with it so far, and it's already one of my favorite things this year. Hell, with LittleBigPlanet I tried making a level, I really did. I have a three page design doc kicking around somewhere of the level I wanted to make for the Idle Thumbs contest, including exactly how everything would work and an extra page containing sketches of every object the level would require. I could never make it manifest due to the editing tools not clicking in my mind. WarioWare makes everything just work. I figured it out. I even found weird workarounds for cycling through art in ways unintended by the game when I hit a wall mid-design. It's programming, not flying a sackboy with a jetpack around a level. As much as the latter sounds more friendly as an interface, actually having all the triggers, conditions, and outcomes staring you in the face as they do in WarioWare makes the whole thing much smoother. I straight-up love the creation tools in this game. The Mario Paint vibe gives it just enough whimsy to not be terrifying, but the lack of separation between you and the scripting keeps your mind on track with how things are going to end up.

[Xeneth]

Oh crap.

You said the magic words from my childhood...

MARIO PAINT.

...Reevaluating...

[miffy495]

Just gonna say right now, the music composition system, though limited to only two bars, is straight-up copied from Mario Paint. And you can compose longer things in the music creator if you do it outside of the context of game creation. You can pretty much consider this game the love-child of WarioWare and Mario Paint. At least check out some video reviews or tutorials or something to get a feel for how it looks and works. It's wonderful.

[Fuzzy Lobster]

My favorite thing about the music maker in Mario paint was the cat, dog and pig(?) noises. At least I think I remember a pig noise. I made many a cacophonous disaster back in the day.

This sounds pretty fun! I bought one of those game making programs that lets you control all of the variables without having to know any kind of coding (which I absolutely do not). It was a kick drawing up dorky sprites and making them do stuff, then forcing my buddies to play my crap. I assume it requires no real programmy knowledge? Or am I misunderstanding?

[syntheticgerbil]

Somebody once prank called my house with the baby noise from Mario Paint on super slow and then hung up.

Best prank call I've ever received.