- 2024 Year of the Minigame - 3 March 2024
This year I've been busy adding new minigames! Let's review what games I've added so far in 2024. Home Run 2 Swing to hit the ball. It's like the beloved sport baseball! https://i.imgur.com/u7RQgx5.gif Cubert Based on the arcade classic Q*Bert which was apparently almost named @!#?@!. https://i.imgur.com/aCziXZP.gif Man in the Dark Based on the classic website, this is a rework of an existing minigame Pose Match. I tried to do something cool with different camera angles in Pose Match but it didn't really work too well. The reworked version is more simple: move the mouse to match the pose and make sure to wait long enough to line up before going on to the next pose. https://i.imgur.com/RJQo8aO.gif Spin In general I want new minigames to include your selected character. This is the first example. https://i.imgur.com/NcaNji9.gif RTS Move Another minigame using your selected character. RTS…
- Looping AI Kart - 7 May 2023
This update includes an AI Kart which drives through a fixed set of waypoints. At each end it parks for a bit and takes a break. It also avoids you if you happen to venture into the road. The overworld is slowly starting to come alive. In addition to livening up the overworld, the AI Kart will be used for minigames. With a robust system for looping through waypoints, different minigames can have any number of AI Karts going through any pattern of waypoints which provides a lot of gameplay options. This video demonstrates the AI Kart: https://youtube.com/shorts/t2q_9JV_i1c
- Progress Update - 24 April 2023
There's no game update released this week. I've made a pivot to only include minigames that use your character which means it will be a little while before the next update. What I've been up to The character select screen. I initially implemented it in a convoluted way where each character had their own camera so I could animate camera properties independently. The result was extremely laggy. I added a frames per second counter in the corner of the screen that goes from green to yellow to red as the fps decreases. This way I will quickly notice if fps is poor. With this in place I remade the screen using a simple image for each character and an animation for each state: unselected, hover, and selected. And it works pretty well. Simple is best. The next thing I added is NPCs and dialog. Currently the only thing the NPC does is stand still and explain the controls. In the future, the NPC…
- Choose your Character - Weekly Update Apr 3 - 4 April 2023
You can now choose your Overworld character!
- Connecting the Overworld - Weekly Update Mar 26 - 27 March 2023
I've released an update today which uses the new game flow. The game launches into the Overworld and use tab to toggle using your gameboy which contains all the minigames! I'll need to think of better names than Overworld and gameboy, but they'll do for now. The next steps will be adding more features to the overworld. I was thinking it would be fun to choose a name for your character and then have some NPCs you could have brief convos with. That might be the focus of next weekend's update. Or maybe not!
- Overworld Progress - Weekly Update Mar 19 - 20 March 2023
There's no game update this week but I wanted to share the progress I've been making on the overworld. I've settled on art for the main character and have an early draft of a character controller. After trying several premade controllers I decided to write my own that doesn't use the physics engine at all. There are still some bugs with the collision detection, but hopping up and down the curb works quite nicely. Also I'm happy with the 8 way movement. Once the character movement and collisions are working well, the next step will be tying together the current minigames and the overworld. At first, you'll probably just trigger the current minigame menu by going up to an arcade machine and pressing a button.
- Overworld Progress - Weekly Update Mar 12 - 13 March 2023
I spent this week tinkering with cameras and assets to improve the look and feel of the overworld. Here's how it's progressing! As you can see, I ended up ditching the character asset from last week and going with this more playful animal humanoid asset. The animations are for a human so it looks a little weird, but we can sort that out in time! If you want to see these slightly off animations and the broken jump then give the latest update a try. You may be wondering "what does this have to do with minigames?" First of all, great question. The idea is that most minigames will be launched on a gameboy from the overworld. Something like this: And then there will be minigames you play in the overworld itself and these will be higher polish and have more depth. I also fixed a little draw order issue in Fally Bird.
- Know the Balkans and version 0 of Overworld - Weekly Update Mar 5 - 6 March 2023
Know the Balkans The newest minigame! Learn where North Macedonia and Bosnia and Herzegovina are on a map of the Balkans. Each time you play the target country is randomized. Overworld It is very early days for the overworld and I plan on focusing on it for the next many weeks. In order for you to be able to test it out while I'm developing it I've added an Overworld button to the main menu. At the moment you can walk around and dance and that's pretty much it. I promise the Overworld will make more sense over time!
- Minigame Manifesto: A Many Minigames Roadmap - 28 February 2023
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 str…
- New Minigame & Bug Fixes - Weekly Update Feb 5 - 6 February 2023
Monster News The newest minigame is Monster News! Choose an appropriate facial expression based on the headline for an appropriate and compelling news broadcast. Headlines are randomly chosen from a list of 16: 8 positive and 8 negative. This brings the total number of minigames up to 35. Bug Fixes Fixed a sort order issue with How Many where the fellas and their accessories weren't displaying correctly. Cleanup Awp bullet holes when the minigame ends
- New Minigame Pose Match - Weekly Update Jan 29 - 30 January 2023
It's my pleasure to announce the 34th minigame. Inspired by maninthedark.com, this game involves matching a pose by positioning your mouse just right. This update includes some other minor fixes.
- New Minigame Arc Man - Weekly Update Jan 22 - 23 January 2023
New Minigame Arc Man! Keep your character in the circle to win. The total number of minigames is now up to 33. One step closer to the dream of ONE HUNDRED MINIGAMES! Making of Tweets https://twitter.com/aidanwaitecomma/status/1616822787452043272?s=20&t=eGONS_IvumdIa3biw9dWnw
- Reworking Minigolf - Weekly Update Jan 16 - 17 January 2023
As more people tried minigolf it became clear that it was sort of super broken. The friction the ball experienced seemed to change unpredictably. When I looked into why, I found the ball was being slowed down by three different mechanisms 😂 Some of them these "slow down" methods were affected by frame rate and some were affected by game speed (ie. the % increase in Infinity Challenge). The result was not great to say the least. So I reworked minigolf from the ground up! Including a new power indicator and predictable friction regardless of frame rate and game speed. Smaller fixes and improvements Added a reset button Spruced up infinity challenge intro screen Scroll position in practice menu now persists Improved clarity of birthday game by highlighting each friend Fixed Number Count bug where submitting an empty answer broke things
- New Minigame and More - Weekly Update Jan 8 - 9 January 2023
Achievements I've been getting bogged down adding achievements and it has ballooned into a larger undertaking than I had hoped. Once I admitted to myself that achievements wouldn't be ready for this week's update I decided to add a simple new minigame instead. Number Count Inspired by a very similar game from Brain Age. Number Count is a simple "brain teaser" similar to the BEDMAS and Alphabetize minigames. It works exactly how you think it would. Jump Rope One of the most common points of confusion among players has been how in the heck to beat the Jump Rope minigame. After recently watching people struggle in person I decided on these changes: Make the jump occur as soon as possible after hitting the button Make the jump the same every time regardless of how long you held the button Trigger the jump on key down not key up
- Practice Controls and Cleanup - Weekly Update Dec 18 - 19 December 2022
Summary A recent update introduced the Infinity Challenge game mode. This included leaderboards as well as the concept of speeding up gameplay. This update adds several related improvements. Practice Controls New controls for practice mode include: Loop: the minigame repeats indefnitely Speed: adjusts the gameplay speed These controls allowed me to test and tweak minigames at different speeds. Hopefully they'll also allow everyone to practice specific minigames more effectively. Here is Keepie Uppie at 300%. Not recommended! Leaderboard Cleanup The initial implementation for leaderboard support was hastily written and duct taped together. For this update, I did a complete re-write using UniTask. This fixes several issues that players encountered with the leaderboard.
- Infinity Challenge + Leaderboard - Weekly Update Dec 11 - 12 December 2022
Infinity Challenge This new game mode gives you one life and lets you run the score up as high as you can. You could score infinity! Or 1,000! Every 3 minigames the game speed increases by 8%. It also includes a global leaderboard. Fixes Texas Hold Me is now in the practice menu Fixed BEDMAS bugs where a few questions had the wrong answer BEDMAS now fails you if you submit any wrong answers Fixed an issue where Mouse maze would start too easily Fixed UI on AWP minigame so it's always visible
- Leaderboard and Feedback: Weekly Update Dec 4 - 4 December 2022
TL;DR There's no game update this week. I'm working on a new game mode with leaderboard support that should be released on Dec 11. Leaderboard In order to make Many Minigames more replayable I've been working on support for a friends-only and global leaderboard. This includes a few different parts: A manager to programatically save new scores and fetch the global or friends leaderboard UI for the leaderboard A new game mode called Infinity Challenge where you have one life and continue playing random minigames until you lose. This includes repeating minigames you've already played so there's no limit on high score. I'm considering adding some mechanism to slowly make the minigames harder for Infinity Challenge, perhaps increasing the game speed slowly. I'm not sure if minigames will still work when I start tweaking the game speed so I'll need to try it out. Feedback I got a variety of v…
- Rethinking Split: Weekly Update Nov 27 - 28 November 2022
This week's update focuses on the Split minigame. Inspired by splitting Marines against Banelings in Starcraft 2, Split never made much sense as a simple minigame. It was simply too much to ask of players who likely weren't familiar with Starcraft 2 controls or the specific situation. This updates removes Split and replaces it with a Whack-a-mole style game where you have to select friends as they emerge out of holes. This is the most basic version of the RTS mechanics that were in Split. Other updates include several small changes and improvements based on player feedback. One example is updating the screen where you select a specific minigame to play so that it now has images in addition to text.
