A few weeks ago a random motorcycle ape got a bee in his bonnet:
M A: Brian, what do you know about J2ME? ("Java 2 Micro Edition") BRIAN: A little. MIDP, that stuff. Why? M A: We have to make cell phone games! BRIAN: We do? M A: A bunch of companies are all releasing phones with microJava. BRIAN: Whoa. Okay...
So he looked at the development kit Sun put out, and all was quiet…
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A week later to celebrate getting a new job I bought the Gameboy Advance SP,
the slick new flip-top gameboy- I previously only had a Gameboy Color and one of the giant original GameBoys with the pea-green monochrome screen, so I couldn’t play any of the new games.
With it I bought Wario Ware, Inc. (Mega Microgame$).
This game is so perfect. It’s basically a bunch of very simple games
(“microgames”) that you play for about 3 seconds each. A single word instruction
will show up like “PICK!”
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and you have to figure out what the object of the microgame is
and how to play it. In the case of many of them it’s a matter of pressing
a single button at the right time, or pressing a single button fast enough.
Suddenly Motorcycle Ape’s obsession makes total sense.
He saw this game and got hooked, and being a game developer
thought “I can do this!”
And it’s true. The games are so simple you could
easily write one in a single day, even if you’re not a game programmer.
They are all based on hobbyist games which people made at home.
Some of the games are so Japanese
( = “random” or “pointless” or “nonsensical” )
you can tell the impetus was indeed tiny cell phone applets.
The next question: making a tiny game and showing it to your friends is
simple. But:
- How would one use the network connectivity to make multi-player games?
What would gameplay be like? - How would one get huge numbers of people to play it?