WarioWare Wednesday Project #18
Cart description: Wipe off gunk and avoid getting wet!
At a loss for ideas once again, I just took a trip through my memories from the previous week or so and reflected on interesting things Iâd done. Celebration and elevation of the mundane is a bit of a classic WarioWare trope, as evidenced by microgames like Hard Core (in which you rapidly tap a button to eat an apple), Wario Wear (in which you must dress a paper doll of Wario), Right In the Eye (in which you must thread a needle), or many, many others. A few weekends ago, I washed my car with my nearly-6-year-old son. While itâs not something I do often, I still feel comfortable calling it mundane. It was enjoyable for two reasons: the first and most obvious reason is that I got to spend some time alone with my son doing something we donât normally do together. The other reason is becauseâdespite my own incredible laziness, particularly during the weekendâwashing the car meant I got some amount of actual work done, that I didnât spend the entire weekend inside eating, playing games, and/or hate-reading Twitter. At least briefly, the situation also had a playfully adversarial dynamic, as Sullyâmy sonâfrequently attempted to âhelpâ me by rinsing the car with a hose, complete with spray nozzle. In at least one of those rinsings, I was on the opposite side of the car scrubbing away, and was caught in the chilly spray.
So I knew immediately that I wanted the game to feature Sully and I on opposite sides of the car, with him spraying the hose my way. It seemed like such a natural fit. So I tried to program thatâmy initial vision involved he and I sort of sidestepping our way around all four sides, tasking the player with finding a way to do everything in their power to keep âDadâ dry. This proved a little too ambitious; pivoting the characters around the car and allowing them to move in each direction depending on which side of the car they were facing would have inflated the gameâs art âbudget,â maxed out their AI slots, and in practice it proved to be a little awkward. Simpler is generally better when it comes to WarioWareâafter all, the games are meant to be played in the span of a few seconds, so your motivation should be instantly apparent and your actions should be immediate and forceful. My original four-side design clashed with that ideology, so it had to go. Instead, I fixed âDadâ and âSullyâ on opposite sides of the car and set them to rove up and down along their respective side. It made more sense, required much less art, and it was easier to program.
The only action a player can take in this game is tapping the screen, which will cause âDadâ to scoot quickly away from the car, thus making him able to dodge the stream of water from âSullyââs hose. When âDadâ reaches a certain point on the grass, he will return to the car to continue his work.
At this point, I had a clear series of the actions each character in my game could perform and a goal the player must achieve (avoid the water). Now I had to think about the gameplay itself: what if a player simply continually tapped the screen, thus keeping âDadâ in the grass for the duration and circumventing the challenge completely? I needed a way to encourage the player to spend some time near the car, potentially in harmâs way, and so I developed a secondary goalâwhile dodging water, the player must also clean the car by allowing âDadâ to travel near it sometimes.
My original idea for this secondary goal was to include an on-screen âDirt Meterâ that drained as âDadâ made contact with the car, but tying âDadââs contact to the car with the disconnected âDirt Meterâ object seemed impossible to program correctly. Instead I took a more direct approach, making several âdirtâ splotches, spawning them on the car in random places, and having them disappear like magic when âDadâ made contact. Bing bang boom.
At this point I play-tested pretty hard, and quickly learned that the game was very predictableâsince âDadâ and âSullyâ always spawn at the same points (to give the player time to read the stage before the game begins), and the âdirtâ bits spawn at roughly the same places each time, the action almost always played out the exact same wayâbegin, clean three splotches, dodge, clean the last splotch. I didnât like that predictability, so I added one last new wrinkle: an inconsiderate bird. Flying overhead, it spawns in a random location and drops a fifth mess onto the car after a certain amount of time. Itâs impossible to win the game without cleaning all the dirt spots AND the bird poop.
Thus, all the problems Iâd introduced in the game were solved: you achieve a clear goal by avoiding the water, sidestep exploitation of the mechanics by requiring interaction with the car, and reduce predictability by having to deal with a fresh mess produced by the bird.
Like Lava Walk, Iâm quite proud of this, and glad I could translate a memoryâa slice of the mundaneâinto a pretty entertaining game. That feels very true to the spirit of WarioWare.
