Nintendo on how to make a great WarioWare microgame, says over 1,000 ideas were pitched for WarioWare: Move It!
Getting a move on
WarioWare: Move It! came to the Switch recently, acting as a spiritual successor to WarioWare: Shake It! on the Wii. The game brings us hundreds of fresh mini-game experiences that are almost entirely motion-based affairs, getting Switch players off the couch and moving around in ways they likely haven’t in years!
How do you craft a new WarioWare game and keep the experience fresh after 2 decades of titles in the series? Nintendo’s Goro Abe spoke to Polygon on the matter, and he should know. Abe has been handling the WarioWare series since its inception, so there’s no one better to take it forward for new generations to experience.
There are many factors, but I think the following are the most notable:
Microgame controls and rules should be intuitive, where any player can instantly grasp how they work. For example, the balance we were aiming for was for players to be able to beat a game on the second or third try, even if they didn’t get it at first.
The theme for each game should be unique and relatable. We carefully chose themes that would make sense to as wide a range of ages and audiences as possible.
As long as developers stick to those ideas, they should be able to come up with some pretty fun microgames. That was clearly the case with WarioWare: Move It!, which includes 223 microgames for players to enjoy. Of course, that list came from a much wider submission process, with Abe saying that over 1,000 ideas for microgames were storyboarded. Abe was the one to jump in and whittle things down to what we have now.
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