Hi! My name is Izzy Kestrel and I made A Little Game Called Mario! (maybe you’ve heard of it?)
Little Mario was a shitpost made flesh which ended up going slightly viral in a way that I was not at all prepared for. A year later, I’ve been invited to attend GDC and talk about it at the Experimental Games Workshop, which is very exciting, but also has me wishing I had spent more time on my follow-up idea (which I’ve actually been thinking about for years prior). I learned so many great lessons from Little Mario that it really feels like it’s time!
Of course, A Little Mario Wasn’t Made In A Day and I definitely can’t do it alone…so maybe you’d like to help me?
<aside> 💰 PLEASE NOTE: THIS IS A PAID OPPORTUNITY!
The funding for this project was obtained via my game’s inclusion in the Trans Witches Are Witches Bundle. I’m very fortunate as a trans person to have a stable income and good healthcare so this money is not lifechanging for me, but it certainly could be for others!
To respect the intent of the original bundle (and my own personal values), I would like to hire a few trans folks to help get this new project off the ground!
Please keep in mind that this is likely a one-time contract deal, as my spending is limited beyond the bundle earnings. I’ll negotiate rates on a case-by-case basis and try my best to pay fairly, but please don’t expect more than a few hundred dollars. Also, this project will be released free and open-source, so it’s unlikely to ever generate any meaningful income.
All that said, I’m hoping it can be a good learning experience for anyone involved and make for some good portfolio/resume padding. Also, it would mean a lot to me if I had the opportunity to work with someone who was really eager to learn and was able to help them further their career goals as a result!
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Gladly! If the name didn’t tip you off already: it’s another shameless rip-off of a classic Nintendo series: WarioWare!
Obviously, “Little Warioware” is a working title and I don’t intend for it to turn out as Legally Provocative as Little Mario was, but it is clearly a riff on the basic design and structure of those games. If you’re not familiar, WarioWare introduced the concept of a “microgame” that lasts for less than 10 seconds before a win or loss state is achieved. These microgames are played randomly and in quick succession, with the goal of a single “run” being a high score (most microgames played before 4 total losses are accumulated).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h_cQWl_drqg&t=113s
While there’s no shortage of WarioWare-likes, Little Warioware is unique in that it aims to follow in Little Mario’s footsteps by being freely available in your web browser, open-source, and have a special emphasis on creators being credited for their work.
My lofty goal is to end up with a platform that has a really diverse catalog of hyper-focused microgames with the individual creators’ websites/portfolios/socials linked directly inside. I would love for this to become both a place for new developers to cut their teeth (what better way to sidestep the classic “over-scoping” pitfall first-time devs fall into by making a game no longer than 10 seconds?) and to improve the discoverability of lesser-known devs (who players can easily trace back to itch.io or some other place to engage with more of their work).
There are lots of ways to help! I don’t want to limit the “job description” too much by saying I’m looking for a specific role to be filled, so I’m just going to talk a little bit about where we’re at now development-wise and what we’re lacking.
There’s a private GitHub repo with a fairly barebones Godot project that supports most of the core gameplay loop:
There’s also a single microgame that is very simple (and ugly!) that I made, mostly for testing purposes. So that’s all to say, we have the framework, but not a lot of content or polish.