What Kirby Taught Me About Minigames
Hey there! This post is part of an indie game project I made in August 2022. There’s a lot more ground to cover other than what’s covered in this post. So when you’re done reading, check out the full project here.
“New indie game developers should start off by making minigames like the original Donkey Kong or Pac Man!”
You’ll hear this advice given by tons of experienced indie developers. As an aspiring indie developer myself, this was not what I wanted to hear.
At the time I was excitedly learning how to write code and create pixel art in Game Maker Studio 2. I wanted to create grand adventures with wacky locations and epic battles. In my mind, there were no worthwhile experiences to be had in playing minigames.
This turned out to be incorrect. Unfortunately for me, I had to learn this lesson the long and hard way.
One Eager Beaver
So I went about trying to create full scale adventure games like the kinds you’d see on the NES or the Gameboy. Those are small games right? By today’s standards, yes. But back then, they had entire teams to work on them. Even so I spent hours coming up with ideas, writing code, and creating charming sprites.
To my credit, the prototypes I made certainly looked good. On the outside looking in you might think that I had devised some solid games.
Unfortunately, I just couldn’t make them fun. I loved writing code and sprites weren’t a problem, but level design eluded me. How did I make a game fun? As a guy who’s played them his whole life, I thought that would be the easy part. And yet trying to come up with fun and well made levels was like trying to see in the dark.
Despite all this, I stubbornly refused to follow the advice I’d heard echoed from so many other developers and continued going too big too soon. There were times where I felt like I was getting close to a breakthrough, but in the end I always ended up having to scrap my projects.
This process made me absolutely miserable. It made me dread opening up Game Maker Studio 2 to work on anything. I became trapped in an endless loop of wanting to create a fun and memorable gaming experience but getting burned out before I even turned on my computer.
I considered scaling back and making arcade games a few times, but I couldn’t think of anything that hadn’t already been done better than what I was capable of. Besides, they were only impressive back at the dawn of the gaming industry right? If I had been around back then, sure. But I wasn’t so I felt out of luck.
At this point I began to question whether or not I was really cut out for game development, a thought which only made me feel even worse. Luckily, an epiphany came to me in the form of a familiar pink puffball.
Serving Up Fun
In March of 2022, Kirby and the Forgotten Land was released on the Nintendo Switch. I was so excited for it that I bought it on release day and sat down to play it.
The base game provided hours of content, but what surprised me was just how many addictive minigames it provided. One of which came in the form of the Waddle Dee Cafe.
It wasn’t complicated by any means. Cute little Waddle Dees would show up at a counter and place their orders. You would shift Kirby left or right to select the correct dish. That’s it. A total of three inputs and each round only lasted about a minute. You didn’t even get much from playing it. Just a handful of coins which you could easily find more of in the main game.
Yet despite this minigame’s simplicity, I found myself returning to it time and time again, even after I had cleared its hardest difficulty.
This got me thinking (and rethinking) about how I viewed minigames in general. The grand adventure games I played as a kid had fun and addicting minigames. I had fond memories of going fishing in The Legend of Zelda Ocarina of Time! Of surfing on giant squids in Super Mario Sunshine! And much more. So many of the great experiences I had with video games were when I stopped to enjoy the little things.
Game Changer
All the titans in the game industry today started off by making goofy minigames. Shigeru Miyamoto, the creator of Mario, started off with Donkey Kong. Satoru Iwata, the late CEO of Nintendo, began with titles like Balloon Pop. All single screen games that can be beaten in a matter of minutes, yet people remember them.
So I’ve decided to change my approach. Rather than jumping straight into the deep end, I’m going to play a little game. It’s now the beginning of the game industry and I’ve been tasked with developing an arcade game. Games like Pong are pretty popular, but people are looking for something with a little more substance. That’s where I come in.
