WarioWare Wednesday Project #16
Title: Warthstone
Date: 4/28/18
Cart description: Beat your opponent in a card game!
Postmortem:
…I’ve been playing a lot of Hearthstone lately. In all that free time, of course, I could’ve been making new WarioWare games.
So why not combine the two? Recreate Hearthstone in WarioWare! How hard could that be? (Not surprisingly: VERY.)
Hearthstone is, if you’re not familiar, a collectible card game for PC, Mac, and mobile devices—think Magic:The Gathering meets World of Warcraft. It’s beautiful, well programmed, impeccably polished, and strategically rewarding.
You know, polish and strategy: the two things WarioWare DIY is best (worst) at! What could possibly go wrong?
One of the things that wowed players when Hearthstone first debuted was the attention to detail in elements like animation—not the first thing you’d think of when you hear “card game.” I tried to imbue a fraction of that detail in the animations for my sprites: at the beginning of the game, you draw a card from your deck that animates fairly smoothly as it curls and turns to face you, and when you choose a target for your fireball spell, there’s a small shockwave of flame that issues out of the target after it’s first hit. I also tried to recreate the playfield and the cards in play—a Fireball and a Mindbreaker—from memory. You know, for fun! The player “heroes” are somewhat less ingrained in my brain, so I decided to put Wario and Waluigi against one another—what can I say? I feel bad that Wario got his own platforming series and the WarioWare games, but Waluigi’s never gotten a series to himself. It ain’t right.
The actual DIY game as played is incredibly simple, and there’s almost no way to lose aside from letting the timer expire: you draw a Fireball card (yes, it’s always the same card), select it from your hand, and choose a target. That’s it. Choose Waluigi and you blast him with the Fireball, winning. However, since the gameplay is so limited, I went out of my way and cut some corners graphically to allow for different outcomes: aside from letting the card sit it your hand while time expires as I mentioned earlier, you can also target Waluigi’s Mindbreaker minion with the Fireball. Mindbreaker disables your special hero powers—both yours and your opponents’—so in an actual game of Hearthstone where you and your opponent have actually whittled one another down to 1 health, using your spell to take out a minion instead of the enemy hero would almost certainly mean doom for you on the next turn anyway. Therefore, in my DIY game, launching your Fireball at the Mindbreaker constitutes a loss. Also, because it’s a thing that can (and has) actually happened in Hearthstone: yes, you can target your own hero—in this case, Wario—with the Fireball. I’ve seen it happen on more than one occasion, and it’s always hilarious.
Finally, because a “gong” sound effect exists in DIY, and because I always tap the working gong on the Pandaria playfield whenever I play on it in IRL Hearthstone… Warthstone also has a working gong. You can tap it as often as you like. It doesn’t do anything except animate slightly and make the gong sound. I think I executed on that part perfectly.