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Submitted for your approval: my TOP FIFTY design decisions in WarioWare DIY. This game has been a huge influence on me for the design of @castlexyz.
What does it look like when Nintendo designs a game development tool that anyone can use?
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What does it look like when Nintendo designs a game development tool that anyone can use?
#1 — In the intro, Wario offers you a job making games after all his employees quit. You have the choice to say no, but Wario completely ignores your input. Besides being funny, this conceit justifies why the player has a job doing game dev but also needs to be taught everything.
#2 — In the tutorials, Wario is totally ignorant about how games are made. This lets the player learn without having to feel inferior, because Wario will always know less and have a worse attitude.
#3 — Also in the tutorials, Wario will take control and play the game in your place, which accelerates sections of the tutorial and allows you to learn from his mistakes without having to make them yourself.
#4 — The in-world contraption that you use to create games is fashioned after the hardware of the Nintendo DS itself, so whenever you’re using the editor you’re “actually” using a fictional device that happens to have the same input scheme as the real device that you’re holding.
#5 — When naming a project, they offer great auto-generated titles. Besides being fairly amusing, they also play the role of prompts to spur game ideas.
#6 — This is a big one: the decision to use a music-inspired system of measures and beats as the units of time (as opposed to e.g. seconds or frames). This means that games can be sped up and slowed down, to modulate difficulty, and they still work correctly!
#7 — You can import assets from the other games. Grab a piece of art or music, or import an entire game and use it as the starting point for your own idea. Avoids blank canvas anxiety and lets people build on the work of others.
#8 — A key consideration of the DS hardware is that the top screen is not a touch screen. In some ways this is a limitation, but WarioWare takes the opportunity to have documentation visible at ALL times, something it would be hard to justify if that area could be interactive.
#9 — A small but good example of the above: if an action is disabled they don’t just gray out the button, they also provide a clear explanation for why you can’t use it if you do try to tap it.
#10 — The zoom controls are these freaky little eyeballs that close when maxed out. They blink occasionally, which is slightly disturbing and therefore good, because interfaces should be more disturbing generally.
#11 — The palette picker is grouped into sections, and the pitch of the UI sound climbs as you tap through them. This detail actually comes from KidPix, and it gives you an intuitive sense for how far you are into the list and when you’ve wrapped back to the start.
#12 — One of my very favorite details: the control for flipping and rotating palettes is made literal through this little butt-shaking fella. I really like how this clarifies the various transformations.
#13 — For some reason, when you switch to stamps and letters, the palette rotation guy ducks his head down and comes back up wearing a costume. For stamps, a caveman outfit. For letters, a barbecue chef? Not sure why those choices, but I& #39;m not mad.
#14 — The various font controls are adorable. I especially love the little elephant that controls font size.
#15 — Another favorite: the undo control is framed as a “time traveler” and when you tap the little figure, it yelps “REWIND” and if you do a redo it says “NEVERMIND”. Superb, but with an asterisk due to the lack of multiple undo.
#16 — Another KidPix feature pops up here: a variety of quirky ways to erase the whole screen. Besides just being fun, I really like that you can halt them, which keeps the art in a partially-erased state. This can be used for a variety of visual effects.
#17 — This little dancing pencil that indicates which animation cel you’re currently editing. Perhaps a relative of Mr. Crayon from Mario Paint?
#18 — The animation speed picker. Cute on its own right, but it& #39;s also a good example of how often the design goes for two different clarifying metaphors at once: the animal/vehicle icons but also the runner on the treadmill.
#19 — Another benefit of the non-interactive screen: plenty of space to provide a zoomed-in editor view at the same time as an in-context preview.
#20 — The control for toggling the in-context preview is a tiny little window opening and shutting, a metaphor for revealing the surrounding environment.
#21 — A real charmer: the controls for moving the drawing in the preview are represented as air marshals. This makes sense because the preview is on the non-interactive screen, so the marshals represent the indirect nature of an input of one screen affecting the other screen.
Gonna pause here before moving onto the music and logic portions of the game. Will add #22-50 tomorrow!
