Tip jar

If you like CaB and wish to support it, you can use PayPal or KoFi. Thank you, and I hope you continue to enjoy the site - Neil.

Buy Me a Coffee at ko-fi.com

Support CaB

Recent

Welcome to Cook'd and Bomb'd. Please login or sign up.

March 28, 2024, 07:53:56 PM

Login with username, password and session length

Warioware DIY and other 'game creation kits'

Started by jutl, May 04, 2010, 01:57:07 PM

Previous topic - Next topic

jutl



Is anyone else playing this? I suspect a lot of DS gamers on here will miss it as it can't (AFAIK) be run from backup cards. It is really worth the purchase price though, I'd argue. I've been making a couple of games a day over the weekend and it really is terrifically enjoyable. It has something over most 'create-your-own-game' sets (even Little Big Planet) which is that the microgames are so minimal that you don't get bored and give up. The pixel art tools are based on Mario Paint and just a joy to use, and even the music tracker is simple and effective. If any of you have ever played with MIT's brilliant child-friendly development tool Scratch you'll have a good idea of what Warioware DIY offers. The 800 Nintendo point Wii-based 'Showcase' software is nice too, allowing you to play the games on the big screen. There's an interesting interview with the developers on the Nintendo site.

I've a bit of a history with these kind of 'lazy game creation tools'. Back in the days of the ZX Spectrum I created a few text adventures using The Quill and PAW. I even knocked up a simple BASIC program for editing the graphics and stats for creatures in Julian Gollop's Chaos, discovering as a by-product that there was a creature in the game image that never gets used in the game. I also had a great fun building and programming virtual killer robots in Mindrover (and was pleased to discover that there is a Linux version still available here, long after the Windows version has stopped being runnable or marketed).

Have you ever dabbled?

Now, having not quite given it enough time for substantial comment, I will just say that if you have an R4, the new 'Wood' firmware will allow you to play not only Warioware DIY but any ROM released so far. It's brought my R4 back from the dead.

Sorry to advertise thieving, you can't buy legit games in China. Carry on.

jutl

Quote from: The Boston Crab on May 04, 2010, 02:05:45 PM
Now, having not quite given it enough time for substantial comment, I will just say that if you have an R4, the new 'Wood' firmware will allow you to play not only Warioware DIY but any ROM released so far. It's brought my R4 back from the dead.

Sorry to advertise thieving, you can't buy legit games in China. Carry on.

No - if it can be done then it is probably a good idea, at least in terms of being able to back up your games on a PC, which the retail ROM does not allow.

madhair60


Lee

Many many years ago I used Multimedia Fusion (developed by Clickteam) to make very basic 2D computer games and animation. Thinking back, the things it was capable of were quite impressive (even if they were all in 2D), but I certainly didn't use it to it's full potential. In theory you could create some fairly sophisticated platformers, fighters, even RPGs, all using a very user-friendly interface with no programming knowledge necessary. But bearing in mind I was using this when I was 11, and managed to make perfectly playable games with it despite the disadvantage of being a child, it does surprise me how user unfriendly a lot of what's been and gone since has been. I still can't create anything decent in Little Big Planet, and I've had that for nearly two years. There was also that horrible 3D beat-em-up released for Playstation (1 I think, might have been 2 though) that let you design your own character to an incredibly dull level of detail, before going into a glitchy, so-easy-even-a-3-year-old-could-beat-it fight with the CPU.

Also, unless I'm mistaken, it was Multimedia Fusion (or one of its earlier versions such as Klik and Play or The Games Factory) that was used to create the car animation in Radioface 1, fact fans.

Consignia

I used to dabble with Klik and Play. It was great fun, but I never really got to grips with it because it was perhaps too complicated for me at the time. I did create a few decent games in it, including the satirical "Ping Pong World Championships" where you settled political arguments with ping pong (the best being Germany Vs. Japan World War II 3rd place play offs). Mostly juvenile stuff though.


Quote from: madhair60 on May 04, 2010, 08:08:46 PM
I'm a dab hand at ZZT.

Back in the day I made a Brookside RPG in ZZT. It was about Jimmy Corchill and running from drug dealers.

I've managed to 'make time' to give this a good go today and I'm really surprised with how much fun it is at every stage. I think I dreaded the idea of drawing cel after cel but once you get the knack of it, you can race through frames with a bit of style and get to work on the object interaction stuff, which is when it really becomes fun. The music sequencer is pretty sweet, too, very easy to use, charming presets and I've spent a good few hours today just making tunes. I'll dig out my dongle and upload some at some stage. The best one I made was probably D'Angelo Barksdale asking Stringer Bell 'Ey, yo, String. Where my dinner at?' and you feeding him a sandwich before he flips out with joy. Just like on the show.

AsparagusTrevor

Since being very young I've dabbled a huge amount in game creation kits, starting from keying in lots of crap in Commodore 64 BASIC, then stuff like Shott Em Up Construction Kit, and AMOS on the Amiga, and more recently using Multimedia Fusion and the brilliant Construct. Both very powerful 2D game creation packages, but using a WYSIWYG events-based interface rather than code. I've always been more of a designer than a coder, so that type of software is ideal for me.

In fact, it was only a couple of years ago I gave up the game design due to lack of time to create anything decent. I did get a good bunch of stuff under my belt though, a few projects here and there, demos and whatnot.

Here's a few screens of the stuff I used to do a few years ago:
Hand Game - 01 - 02
Monsters on Friday - 01 - 02 - 03 - 04 - 05
Monsters on Saturday - 01 - 02 - 03 - 04 - 05
Sod - 01 - 02 - 03 - 04 - 05 - 06
Zombies Now - 01 - 02 - 03 - 04 - 05 - 06 - 07 - 08 - 09 - 10
Traps - 01 - 02 - 03 - 04
Samuryan - 01 - 02 - 03 - 04 - 05 - 06 - 07

So yeah, this Warioware looks right up my street. I've been a fan of the Warioware games from the start, and being given the ability to create something original is something I can't pass up, even though I don't use my DS very often. It's a shame the sharing possibilities are very limited, but Nintendo do have an Apple like freedom-restriction.

buntyman

I've just bought this and had a fiddle around with it for an hour, it already looks like the best game for the DS by a mile. Nice and simple layout but flexible with lots of features. I think I'll try and get my imagination in order and make a few games over the course of the week and see how they turn out. I've stopped downloading games for my R4 thing after a couple of memory card problems causing complete data loss and I think if that happened with this game especially, it would be heartbreaking. Hardly any good games come out for the DS now anyway so £17 every 6 months is quite affordable.
How does the game sharing system work? If we all exchanged friend codes could we swap games with each other without any Nintendo censoring? Does the Wii Showcase thing allow you to save back ups of your creations on the Wii memory?

Mister Six

Quote from: Consignia on May 04, 2010, 08:31:07 PMBack in the day I made a Brookside RPG in ZZT. It was about Jimmy Corchill and running from drug dealers.

Crikey, ZZT! Those were the days.