May 4, 2010
Design!
WarioWare D.I.Y. was a kind of random purchase. I was all sick and out of it and I just kind of randomly picked it up. However, I have been, overall, very impressed with it. It’s a game that basically requires a community around it to be interesting, and Nintendo makes that has hard as possible to do. But if you do pull it off, it’s quite a lot of fun making things and seeing what other people are up to.
Basically, the game is full of the tools you need to make your own microgames. If you’re an artist (which I am not) you can sink a lot of time into making really great looking assets for the simple, silly little games. Although the DS is not the best art platform, you still have tools basically equal to Mario Paint, with some even more robust, like actual copy and paste functionality. You can make some really cool shit. However, I feel like Nintendo wins in that WarioWare already had a very strange art aesthetic that makes it feel okay to draw shitty art. Even my horrible scribbles fit in, to an extent. I’m not hindered from creating by my artistic talent, which is wonderful.
It’s also wonderful because you can bang out a working little game in a very short amount of time. Maybe 45 minutes or so? Longer if you do a lot of art and the game is complicated. There’s nothing that feels better than having a result from hard work. Creating something feels good. Shipping a game in WarioWare D.I.Y. feels awesome. “I did this! I made this thing!” and then you can play it, mix it up with professional games, and tell yourself “fuck yeah!”
Oh, I suppose you can also create music and comics too. The music creator is, again, Mario Paint Plus, and it works really well. I just rarely want to take the time to just compose music. I’m sure many can have fun with it. The comic creator is… a real missed opportunity. Being able to draw and share these 4koma is a cool idea, but for something like this, you really need a way to export them to the net, way more than with the games or music. If there was a comic viewer where I could link my friends to uploaded comics online, I would actually try to draw more of these. Still, they are kind of fun to do.
There’s some unfortunate restrictions, of course. I mentioned the online, and that is a huge issue. You can only store 2 games, 2 songs, and 2 comics at a time in your “crate” and you have to do stupid friend code exchanges to get anyone else to see your stuff. They have a thing called the “NinSoft” store, where you can connect to the server and download games from the community and “Big Name Games,” which are microgames made by famous and semi-famous game makers. This is an awesome feature, to be sure, and keeps you in quality stuff to fiddle with, but in the end, without having access to a full community, you’re only, at best, going to pick up the game once a week to try those new uploaded games before putting it back down, instead of it being something you can go back to whenever you want and see something new.
Still, if you can actually get a bunch of friend codes exchanged, it’s great to send out a game and then have people try it. It feels awesome. And that’s why WarioWare D.I.Y. is a success. It makes you feel like a programmer without being super complicated. Anyone can do it, and it feels good to. It’s fun stuff. It’s certainly worth a shot, if you were thinking about picking it up.