<aside> 📌 from the madwoman that brought you ‣…

Little Warioware (working title) is a platform for playing “microgames” created by community members

</aside>

A Little Job Called Warioware

Overview

i’ve tried to get this off the ground a couple of times throughout the years…mostly blocked by technical issues and/or lack of experience but NOW that i’ve made a Little Mario anything is possible 😎

previous attempts have used Construct 3 as a base - i liked this bc it’s usable in browser and the free version limits are probably still enough to make a “microgame”, so that’s all great for lowering the barrier of entry for new contributors, but the backend stuff would be a nightmare (merging microgames into the main project would suck, no automated build process, etc)

now that we’ve set precedent for a weird community contributed thing in Godot Engine i think it’s time to give up on the Construct dream and set my sights on something more realistic (and probably more sustainable long-term)

aside from being a straight clone of the WarioWare series in terms of microgame limitations and meta-structure, i’m interested in framing this as a sort of “spotify-like” discovery engine for gamedevs:

• microgame contributions include metadata that link them back to a dev
  • submissions are unified by a username (itch.io oauth?)
  • optionally link to portfolio/itch/twitter/etc
  • can also open an in-game “profile” to find other content by that creator (like Mario Maker)
  • allow for linking multiple users to a microgame if multiple ppl contributed
• community (devs and players) can create playlists
  • each playlist has its own leaderboard
• and rate games on various criteria (simple like/dislike or more in-depth, like difficulty)
  • used for manual sorting/filtering
  • used to auto generate playlists (e.g. ”good games for beginners”)
  • ratings could also be used for moderation purposes (if a game is overwhelmingly disliked, maybe the creator is notified and asked for a revision)

Infrastructure

i think Simply Not Making A Platformer will go a long way in helping keep this thing on the rails, but i also imagine this generally being less on the Little Mario end of the spectrum in terms of how the codebase is maintained. i’m fine with it being open source in the way that anyone who’s interested can still make improvements to the systems-level stuff, but in an ideal world the “average contributor” wouldn’t be expected to fuss with git to submit their microgames - this was the biggest pain point for Little Mario

still a lot of questions here but generally i want to ensure there’s a lot more planning and futureproofing before anything starts getting developed

Questions

• how are microgames submitted?
  • is there a way around git? or to simplify workflow for microgame devs?
• testing/validating games
  • like Little Mario, PRs kick off a build process automatically
  • auto PR build only includes the single new/updated microgame on loop
  • maybe contributor includes some sort of “input script” that an automation can run and ensure the game can be beaten?
  • and/or someone is required to open the build and beat the microgame X times before it’s approved

Microgame Submission Guidelines

with the full power of godot available for development the microgames could be pretty much anything (2D? 3D? yes) but we would still hold them to the strict limitations of WarioWare so they can easily fit into the greater meta-structure:

• must be completable before 6 second timer is up
  • i think some games that are more “think-y” tack an additional couple seconds on before the timer appears (e.g. 2 seconds to memorize something and 6 seconds to execute on the task)