I couldn’t find a comprehensive list of all of the actions that are available in warioware diy for programming your games, so I thought I would write one up for people that are interested in focused game scripting. Nintendo did some really clever things here that both make the types of games that you can do really small, and make those types of games really easy to make. The mechanics that you can have in your game are pretty straight forward, and it allows you to make ghosts of familiar genres, but not the genres themselves.

Trigger Conditions

Tap

Reacts to the stylus coming down. Can react to either:

• This object
• Anywhere on stage

Contact

This is the collision detection. The main types are either touch or overlap, but I am not sure what the difference is. Perhaps with overlap, the object in question needs to be fully enclosed or enclosing the other object. In either case you can define one following parameters.

• Object: The object to check for collision with.
• Area: The area to check for collision with.

Art

Allows you to check conditions on the art for this object. Can be one of two conditions.

• Specific art: when a specific art for this object is being displayed.
• Art finishes: when any art animation reaches the end of a loop.

Time

Can be one of two types.

• Exactly: Triggered when a particular time is reached.
• Randomly: triggered when a random time within a selected range is reached. This gives you the timeline with range controls. It is the way to make random things happen at the beginning of the game.

Switch

Allows you to check the switch state on any object. The switch state can be one of four.

• Switch turns on.
• Switch is on
• Switch turns off
• Switch is off

Win/Loss

You can check for game conditions.

• Win
• Has been won
• Not yet won
• Loss
• Has been lost
• Not yet lost

All conditions when combined are && operations. To do things sometimes, on the first frame set a condition that says “when time == 1-1 and time randomly == 1-1 .. 1-8”. The range of the second clause gives you the possibility of that happening. This can be used for shuffling objects on the stage.

Actions

Travel

Go Straight

• Starting at: This can be the current location or another location. In the case of another location, it can be a point on the stage or another object, with the offset from the other object.
• Direction: This can be a specific direction or a random direction. In the case of specific direction, it gives you an 8 point compass to set. In both cases, it allows you to set the speed of travel.

Jump To

Takes one of the following two types:

• Location: Can be a point on the stage, or a random location within an area.
• Another Object: Jumps near another object then stays attached to that object. This brings up the object selector, and then an offset editor.

Roam

Takes four parameters. The first parameter is one of the following movement types:

• Wiggle: Appears to be a drunk walk that can change its direction wildly, and moves in short steps.
• Reflect: Bounces off the area that you define for the movement in a pong style.
• Insect: Drunk walk, just like wiggle but with a larger step and changes the movement direction less.
• Bounce: Same as pong, but accelerates due to gravity. Seems to have enough energy at the end of the bounce to make it to the top of the area that you define.

The second parameter is one of the following:

• Anywhere: Moves anywhere within the area you define.
• Try not to overlap: Not really sure how this works, perhaps it bounces off of other objects.

The last parameters are an area on the stage that the object will roam within, and a speed of roaming.

Stop

Stops the current travel.

Swap

Trades location with another object.

Target

Moves towards another object. Takes three parameters:

• Object: The object to move towards.
• Offset: The offset from other object.
• Speed

Lose

Ends the game with a loss

Sound Effect

Plays one of 64 sound effects. These are arranged in 8 banks of 8.

Switch

Turns the switch either on or off.

Art

Change

Can change the animation style to one of three styles. It also allows you to select the art for the object. There can be 1 - 4 arts per object.

• Hold: Stay on the current frame.
• Play once
• Loop

Stop

Stops the currently playing art.

Stage Effect

These are effects that play over the whole stage.

• Flash
• Shake
• Confetti
• Freeze: Stops everything, including all further object actions.

I think this list is more or less complete. If you notice any errors or corrections that you would like to make, please tell me in the comments.

I just got Challenges for Game Designers recently, and have started working on the various excercises in it. I don’t know how many I will post, but here is the first one that I finished off. This game is a response to chapter 2, challenge 1: the path.

uncover the gold

A card game for two players (tested with 2 players, may be possible with more)

Required Pieces

One 52 card deck A token for each player

Setup

Lay out the cards in 13 stacks of 4. These stacks should lie on the table in 3 rows of 4 and one row of one. This last stack is the goal stack.

The players place their tokens on the first stack on the bottom row.

Setup Diagram

[goal]
[] [] [] []
[] [] [] []
[tokens] [] [] []

Object

To take the last card from the goal stack

Order of play

On each turn, each player may do one of three things:

1. Move their token forward one stack, and pick up a card from the stack their token landed on.
2. Discard a number card, and move their token forward the number of stacks displayed on the card. Draw a card from the stack they land on.
3. Discard a face card, and place another card from your hand on one of the remaining stacks on the table. Move your token forward one, and do not draw from the stack you land on.

some notes

This game feels a bit like reshuffling the deck to me, I don’t know if there are enough meaningful decisions that can be made over the course of a session of play. That said, I did win three games in a row (and although the rules changed slightly between each game) it felt as if there was some strategy that was going on.

Also, I somewhat ignored the rules of the assignment and made a racing game where the goal position changed depending on how the players played the rest of the round.

Thinking about further changes, and reading the tips specified at Tic Tac Totality I think that there are a few things to change. First, make the player that gets the last card on any stack the loser. That way you can try to force someones hand, and there are way more failure points. The second way that I think it could be tightened up would be to have only 4 stacks, one for each suit, which would again make the game a bunch tighter.