Minigame Manifesto: A Many Minigames Roadmap

TL;DR

I am continuing to work on Many Minigames and will be adding an overworld and organizing mingiames into simple microgames and further fleshed out and juiced up minigames.

Context

I was recently travelling and away from my regular routine for 2 weeks. On the flight there I created a new minigame: Know the Balkans. This minigame was a continuation of my approach up until this point. Another small and simple minigame that doesn’t look very interesting in screenshots or videos.

Steam

After completing this minigame I watched Chris Zukowski’s excellent video How to Market a Game on Steam. This brought up some rather uncomfortable questions:

• What genre is Many Minigames?

• How well does Many Minigames fit into the Steam ecosystem?

Sadly, Many Minigames does not fit into Steam very well at the moment. I chose genres and tags based on what I think fit the game best but none were really a strong fit. Someone suggested that I look at similar games on Steam and what they use for genre and tags:

By reviewing the common genres and tags that appear in Wario Ware-likes I can make changes to Many Minigames' genres and tags to make it easier to find for likely fans. This will hopefully improve Many Minigames' fit within the Steam ecosystem. As an aside, I find it interesting how many of these games include funny/comedy/memes/humor.

Feedback

Since I wasn't in my usual development cycle while travelling I instead sought out feedback from several different game dev-related Discords as to what people thought of the Many Minigames Steam page. Similar points kept coming up:

• Overall there is a lack of polish to the in-game video and screenshots

• There is a large difference in visual quality between different minigames

Current state

Let's go through what is currently implemented in Many Minigames:

• 35 minigames

• 3 game modes: play, practice, and Infinity Challenge

• Achievements

• High score leaderboard for Infinity Challenge

What's good

I think Infinity Challenge is fun. Trying to keep your streak alive as you play faster and faster minigames is actually pretty good.

The other main good part is that I'm really enjoying working on the project. Since Many Minigames is a passion project that I work on during nights and weekends it is important that I enjoy it.

What's bad

I've been focusing on increasing the total number of minigames. This has led to a lot of minigames that aren't very polished. Another major issue as mentioned above is that going from a menu to a bunch of minigames and back to a menu doesn't feel like a fully game. There needs to be some mix of progression and narrative to elevate a bunch of unrelated minigames into something more cohesive.

The minigames that look the best are the ones where I used free art assets that someone else created. The worst looking ones are where I made the art. This makes sense because I am a programmer and not an artist. Going forward I will be leveraging more art assets and avoiding making any art myself.

The plan

Someone once said something along the lines of "I'm not paying for a bunch of minigames, there needs to be an actual game involved". To create this "actual game", I will add an overworld where you could walk around and trigger minigame sessions, sort of along the lines of Lego Island or Shenmue.

This will provide opportunities to add narrative and progression elements. For example, you may start with a Minigaming Learnings License and have to go around and complete some tutorials before getting your Minigaming Full License. With your full license you can participate in some daily challenges which win you money that you can spend to buy stuff in the overworld like clothes or accessories or vehicles. I've also always wanted to make a character creator and this would be a good opportunity. You could also bump into people while walking around in the overworld and chat with them.

As someone sarcastically put it, I will be adding a sort of "Land" to my "Wario Ware".

Uneven minigames

In order to resolve the issue of minigames having widely varying depth and polish, I will split them into two groups.

Microgames

These are all of the simple minigames that lack depth. These will all get one strong visual filter and live in a sort of gameboy that your character can open and play. Examples include Alphabet, Alphabetize, BEDMAS, Graduation, Grandpa TV, Know the Balkans, etc. By keeping these microgames as part of the game I can continue adding them when I feel like it. Even though I'm reducing the focus on total number of micro/minigames it will still be exciting to get to 100 microgames one day. And adding little one off microgames is something I quite enjoy.

Minigames

These are the minigames that have room to expand: more polish, more gameplay, more difficulty. I will dedicate more time to adding juice and polish to these. Also, your overworld character will feature prominently in each of these minigames (but not in the microgames).

One example is a kart minigame. Parking, merging, and avoiding can all be combined and expanded on. Your overworld character is the driver and you have to complete similar challenges all based around driving, parking, and traffic.

A second example are RTS minigames. Many Minigames once included a minigame where you had to select and split your units so they wouldn't die to splash damage. This was widely regarded as way too hard and I eventually removed it.

I replaced it with a minigame where you just select units as they pop up. The idea was to build up to splitting units one minigame at a time. By shifting my focus to a small number of more fleshed out minigames I can continue down the path of making SC2-inspired RTS minigames with a higher skill ceiling.

Weekly updates

I will continue to strive to release a game update every Sunday. This means I will need to be tactical about which new features I add and in which order so that I can keep up weekly updates. I'm looking forward to the first update on this new journey!