There’s a whole bunch of interesting things in the Power of Pride Bundle that I wrote about a bit ago. The combined earnings from that is more than (holy fucking shit) $40,000 and it’s still running to the end of the month. There’s one thing that definitely has me interested, so I figured that I should check highlight that: wareware, by riprip, spiders, krisekrise, Robin Vehrs and Chris.

There are a lot of games where you’re a funky little person walking around and talking to people. I particularly point at some of the works by thecatamites, like Magic Wand and 10 Beautiful Postcards. wareware is an in-development engine aimed to easily help people make their own goofy walkarounds like those, and you can play around with an early version of it even without getting the Power of Pride Bundle (would be cool if you still did, though).

I was fresh off of making a separate small thing, so I figured I should play around with wareware myself. wareware is easy to understand, as someone mainly used to RPG Maker. You place tiles as blocks around and interact with the bar at the bottom of the screen to rotate the world diorama around. You can place down ramps to accommodate the fact that there doesn’t seem to be any platforming and to make more interesting looking environments. You can readily edit art assets or upload new stuff if you don’t just want to use the default stuff.

When a sprite is placed down, you can put a chain of actions to be done when the player interacts with that sprite. The main attraction of course is starting up a yap fest, but there’s a bunch of other things that can be done.

And so, I made a short thing. Don’t know if it’d be a project I’d fully commit to, but using wareware was a fun experiment. Behold, the start of a Dracula vs Nosferatu story.

My biggest problem with wareware so far is that there’s no real on-off switch or if-else logic present in the game. If dialogue needs to change or characters have to act differently, the current way to do so is to make a separate copy of the map and teleport the player to the copied map with the changes that warrant the teleport. It feels rather counterintuitive, especially after I spent a bunch of time working on a text adventure made in an RPG Maker that has a switch system to accomodate what I wanted to do.

However, this is clearly just a consequence of this being an early iteration of the engine. In the comments of the tutorial I used, developer riprip makes it clear that that’s something being worked on.

There are a few things made in wareware currently published on itch for other examples. An appropriate example for this month is procuring estrogen for your toxic slime girlfriend, a stylish looking spooky and goofy game by spiders. Minecraft WareWare by Raddiant_kara feels something in line with those narrative Minecraft ARG videos that the King in Yellow would smile upon. They’re short, but they’re good examples of wareware’s potential.

wareware’s good at what it does and has clearly has the opportunity to grow. If you want to play around with a simple game engine, I recommend giving wareware a try and giving it a wishlist on Steam.