Game maker

How many times when you’re playing a game have you said to yourself, “I could make a better game than this?” If you’re an avid gamer, probably more than a few times. And it’s for these people that games like Warioware DIY are created.

The idea of user-generated content in games is nothing new, of course. With games like LittleBigPlanet and the upcoming (and awesome) Mod Nation Racers, gamers have been able to make new levels or otherwise add content to game worlds that developers have already created.

The number of games that (more or less) let you create your own game from scratch—whether dealing with art, animation, design, artificial intelligence or whatever else—are somewhat more limited, aside from, say, the RPG Maker series and a couple of other standouts.

DIY is unique, based on its own pedigree, however. The game’s conceit remains unchanged from its original debut on the Game Boy Advance, but this time around, DIY offers more than just new mini-games (although there’s plenty of those to play through).

There’s an extensive workshop mode centering on you alone making whatever kind of microgames your heart desires. Unlike a lot of games with level editors or other creative tools, this one is only streamlined in terms of its actual coding, so you won’t be programming things from scratch.

The casual approach ends here. DIY offers a robust editor brimming with pretty much with anything you might want or need, at least inside a microgame-based design. You can choose your own art from stamps or create it from scratch, animate each cell so that it looks correct, make your own music and give each object its own behavior parameters.

The extensive tutorial goes over all of this stuff, and even though it takes close to two or three hours to get through it, the learning is necessary if you want to understand anything that goes on. The art, music and animation segments, while sometimes quite arduous in and of themselves, are just the tip of the iceberg.

The biggest hurdle of DIY—what consequently is its biggest make-or-break per player—is the AI scripting. You’d be surprised to see how much backend programming, variables and command issuing even go into a five-second game, and this stuff all requires a certain amount of logic on your part. Needless to say, the creative crux of this title isn’t going to appeal to everyone.

However, if you do have enough patience to make something of your very own, it’s a pretty good feeling. This may be relatively easy stuff for someone that’s ever done any kind of programming, but for near math-illiterate English majors (or whatever non-science people you may happen to be) it can be pretty challenging stuff.

So, is DIY fun? Insofar as it’s a Warioware game, yes. The DIY part is interesting, and can be very rewarding if you’re willing to put thought into it. At least you can make your own chiptune tracks or comics if you get burnt out on everything else.