No play
no gain
A wario-ware made by
42 gamE designers
No Play No Gain, is a WarioWare-like made by 42 game designers. I worked as a project producer and game designer. It was a class-wide project during my third year at Rubika. Each student had to design and create 2 mini-games for a total of over 80 mini-games. I acted as a producer alongside 3 other students to manage the whole project. On top of the mini-games, the class was also tasked with creating the macro-game that would encapsulate all of the mini-games that we created individually.
What I worked on for this project
working for a 'client'
What I really loved about this project is that we didn't design the mini-games that we would end up programming. Each student received a selection of two random concepts from other students and had to make the mini-game to their specifications. This gave us a really interesting sort of client to game dev relationship that taught us a lot about how to satisfy a client and understand how to work around and realise someone else's ideas.
Managing 42 students
A really challenging aspect of this project was to coordinate 42 game design students to actually have a finished and coherent product. I was part of a team of 4 students that managed the whole operation to make sure that everyone was coordinated and that everything was running smoothly. We setup a system that divided students into teams that had specific roles and tasks, and we also had a 'support system' to let students help each other out when needed.
developing as a team
A big hurdle that we faced was: how do we make code from 42 relative novices fit together properly? To Achieve that, we created an overarching macro-game system that took care of the progression and the wario-ware 'rhythm'. Students had to 'plug in' their micro prototypes into that system by using the proper names and variables so that their mini-games could be affected by our difficulty system. Each prototype had 3 versions setup for different difficulties and could be scaled in time by the rhythm, this gave us a really wide variety of different difficulty levels for various situations, just like in the original wario-ware.