WarioWare Wednesday Project #15
Title: AstroBreaker
Date: 4/24/18
Cart description: Your ship blew a fuse! Trash it!
Postmortem:
The game’s title sounds more exciting than the actual premise: you play as a tiny mechanic in a spaceship, whose job it is to eject failed circuit chips and dispose of them in the proper trash receptacle. I’m not sure why a scene of Data from Star Trek: The Next Generation quickly replacing the Enterprise’s control chips got into my head over the course of the last few weeks, but that’s what I have to thank for this game’s existence.
Early on, my idea for the little guy you’re controlling was based on a simple gag: he’s small, so when you select a chip to remove, he should have gargantuan hands. Due to graphical and programming limitations, I ended up giving him a large holographic hand to do his work with. It doesn’t have quite the same oomph, but it still communicates the premise. I like this little guy and this game so much that this is the only one I’ve made so far where I drew it out as an actual physical doodle first:
Once I got around to doing the actual in-game art, I loved the idea of sticking with a super-limited color palette, so our protagonist and his world are rendered mostly in neutral shades, with highlights of blue for important moving or interactive objects.
Programming-wise, this wasn’t too much of a stretch from other games I’d already made—one of the chips is selected at random at the beginning of the game to be the “bad” chip, you tap the button to eject it, tap the chip, then the mechanic grabs it with his holographic mitt and moves it over for disposal. At this point, you must note the pattern on the chip and tap the matching receptacle. Tapping the right one nets a win; tapping any of the other three causes a loss. Simple as that.
He doesn’t have a name, but I like this guy. I might bring him back someday.
