

I’ve been trying out some really obscure microgames on Nintendo DS lately.

There’s “Dog Drool,” where the goal is to get a dog named Otis to drool over a plate of curry by tapping on the screen. Then there’s “Escape!” where Otis has to jump over a fence without falling into a garbage can.

They probably sound lame, but even if they are, I honestly can’t tell — because I wrote them myself.

The five-second microgames that make up the titles in Nintendo’s Wario Ware series are an addictive dose of instant gratification gaming. The latest in the series, Made in Ore , makes creating your own games just as engaging and rewarding as playing them.

It wasn’t long before I found myself addicted in a way that I don’t often feel with videogames these days. Preparing for this review, I couldn’t stop thinking about what kind of game I was going to create next. And I’ve only scratched the surface, since Made in Ore lets you create and share not only games, but also music files and four-panel manga.

User generated content is all the rage these days, and why not? Participation is the essence of play, and franchises as diverse as Dungeons and Dragons to The Sims to the minimalist Line Rider have flourished by getting the customers to do most of the work.

But creating great user creation tools is hard. Even when the opportunity is offered in a tantalizing package, I rarely bite. For example, as easy as it was to start designing an action game with LittleBigPlanet , I wasn’t about to invest days and weeks creating levels. Ditto Spore ‘s lauded creature creator.

The big advantage Made in Ore has over rivals in this genre is its simplicity and quick development cycle. You can create a decent Wario -style game that takes five to 10 seconds to play with just a few hours’ work. It turns out that’s just about what I’m willing to spend to create my own videogame.

Made in Ore is the seventh game that Nintendo has released in the Wario Ware series, which debuted on the Game Boy Advance in 2003. That first game was a radical new idea: It was composed of more than 100 different microgames that took five seconds each to play.

After seven nearly identical titles, the series had gotten a bit old. But Made in Ore (Ore means me in Japanese) injects a much-needed dose of innovation.

The game introduces game-design concepts and tools at a pace that won’t intimidate or bore you. Made in Ore won’t even let you get into the game-creation tool when you first boot it up. Instead, you can either play the many, many sample games that are included on the cartridge, or visit the game factory and do some “part-time jobs.”

These are sample games that are mostly finished, save for a single bit of design that needs doing. In the first minigame, “Wario Quest,” you’re asked to enter the game’s painting mode and draw an enemy character. Once you’re done, you’ll be able to play the game back and attack the enemy that you just drew. It’s an instant introduction to how much fun it can be to create your own artwork, then see it come to life in a game.

Once you’ve explored a bit of what Made in Ore has to offer, you can play a tutorial that walks you through the creation of a complete game. You’ll start out by doing the easy, non-interactive stuff — coming up with a title, drawing a game’s background graphics.

The next step is to start drawing characters. Made in Ore uses a type of object-oriented design — the first thing you do is create the objects and things that you’ll interact with in your game, and then you define what each one of them does. Each object that you create can have up to four different visual states, and each state can have up to four frames of animation. You can copy frames, then edit them to make sure the animation matches up. You can also take one frame and overlay it onto another as a transparency, letting you trace over your work.

Once you’ve got the objects drawn and animated, the real work begins. Jumping into the “AI” mode, you’ll see your background and your list of objects. You can now start placing them into the game. As soon as you decide which one you want to put into the field of view first, the real genius of Made in Ore reveals itself.

You don’t just start plunking down objects. Before you place something into the game, the creator starts walking you through a step-by-step process, using plain language, asking you what you want this thing to do.

In the games I created (see the video above), I used my friends’ dog Otis as the main character. The second game in that video shows Otis drooling onto a plate of curry. Since the only way to interact with the game world is by tapping the Nintendo DS’ touchscreen, I decided the goal of my game would be to tap Otis’ strand of drool and release it all over the curry.

Made in Ore uses easy-to-follow steps to lead the game creator, making the process very accessible even to non-programmers. To use programmer-speak, you don’t need to comment your code, because Made in Ore ‘s code is one big comment. It’s in plain language. This not only helps in the writing, it helps when you’re trying to free your game of bugs and unintended side effects.

While my first effort didn’t have much in the way of gameplay, I was very quickly stringing together more complicated series of programmed objects, all of which worked together in precise ways.

In the “Escape!” game in the video above — which I started on the bus to the Wired.com office and finished that afternoon — Otis has to jump over the fence to escape, but he can also accidentally fall into the trash can, which opens and closes at random times during the game. Besides the three objects that you can see, there are four invisible “sensors” that I placed around the stage to let the program know where Otis is at any given time.

Made in Ore ‘s one major flaw is that it doesn’t have simple tools for sharing what you’ve made with the world. LittleBigPlanet and Spore allow you to upload creations to the game’s servers. Made in Ore doesn’t allow that — you can trade games in person with other players, or send them online to your friends, but there’s no one-stop shop for new games.

Nintendo does offer a WiiWare game for about $8 called Asobu! Made in Ore that allows you to upload games from your DS and play them on your television screen. (Asobu means play in Japanese.) You can also use Wii to access the online store.

Games like LittleBigPlanet offer more detail and ultimately more control of the world you can design. But few can match Made in Ore for its versatility, and speed to market. It is designed to let you come up with a wacky concept in the morning and have it running that afternoon. And that’s the killer app when it comes to custom game tools for amateurs like me.

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