Tiny Diggers – An iPad Construction Truck Game for Kids Age 2-5

I wanted to share my initial forays into microgame creation with Nintendo’s fantastic li’l game creator, WarioWare DIY. I’ve got the basics down, although I know there are some complicated options available… can’t quite wrap my brain around getting a random sprite to appear, but I’m getting there.

In “Tomb for Two,” the object is to open the twin sarcophagi and then wake the sleeping mummies. If you touch the floating dust cloud, you lose. “Fatal Framed” is as close as most people are going to get to playing a Fatal Frame game on Wii. You have to tap the floating ghost during the split second that she turns her head toward you, for a “Good Photo.”

If anybody wants to play these microgames, you’ll have to friend up with me, as WarioWare DIY (on DS and Wii) does not have a LittleBigPlanet-esque online database of user-created content. To its colossal detriment. Movies of both games in action follows.

Here I am explaining “Fatal Framed.” You can tap the ghost as much as you like before that without failing, because I like the camera flash and shutter sound effect. I composed the music for this one humming a phrase of the theme song to Fatal Frame 2 (“Chou” by Tsukiko Amano), but you can’t really tell what it is supposed to be.

Here’s “Tomb for Two.” I had the game compose the music for me, but I tweaked the instrument choices. I filled out the game with some animated tomb critters. Two of them are attached to the mummies so they do not appear unless you successfully tap. In both of my games, I used 100% of the alloted graphical budget.