MicroWare: Janked!

Game-A-Week 2026: Week 2 - Speed

Game-A-Week is an intensive program in which participants will create 6 prototype games or works - one each week. The aims of Game-A-Week are multifaceted and center around the benefits of “sketching” - something not practiced as often in games as other arts. With your “sketches”, you’ll practice working on small scope ideas, experimenting in a low stakes and supportive environment, practice receiving feedback and help discover and develop your own taste as an artist. Drawing influence from game jams, Game-A-Week will prompt you with weekly thematic, aesthetic, or mechanical constraints (e.g. “time” or “black-and-white” or “one-button input”).

Theme: Speed

This week we’re focusing on creating a sense of speed! How do we do that with our senses? How do we accomplish that with the pacing and structure of a work? How do we thrill people, make them react fast, and make them feel like they’re put under the pump?

Game: MicroWare Janked!

This write-up was written after GAW26 concluded, with more retrospective notes

I love microgames. I have been playing so much buster jam and MINDWAVE, and grew up playing Warioware Touched on my Nintendo DS. My friend also got me to play WarioWare: Move It! on Switch which was very, very fun. These games are often so ridiculous and absurdist, and really scratch a particular itch. Big fan. Naturally, I've wanted to try to make a bunch of microgames for years. Though I've never tackled this, knowing that there would be a lot of work involved.

Speed felt like the perfect theme to try this out on. I had actually planned to do similar in the previous week, (Thinking Small = micro), based around completing captchas, but it was too big!! Funnier, my friend sent me a game shortly after which was exactly what I wanted to make/play, which I had a good laugh about. Writing this after week 6, it seems that just about every week was very busy, and I wasn't able to complete any games to the degree I wanted, this being no exception.

I was able to build out a very rudimental system for challenges, which allows their logic to be self-contained, whilst being part of a parent class which enabled handling of success/fail states. There are 5 challenges in the game, which are chosen in a random order, and cannot repeat the same game until all have been cycled.

During this week, I ended up being quite unhappy with this game. I recall being quite overwhelmed, and feeling like I was cobbling together different ideas and styles with no direct vision. In retrospect, I disagree, and think I did quite well all considered. There is a game loop, with lives and level tracking, and a gradual speed ramp-up, making this technically a functional game, despite some jank in the games (shout out the one with white on white text). The five games included ended up being:

• Don't Click to Win: <-- title. do not kill the bug
• Enter Disco: walk that fella inside, using the arrow keys
• Hit With Car: the old woman is evil. its okay. you don't want to know what she did. use your arrows to hit her w your car.
• Input PIN: beep beep. write the number in the box. correct length but incorrect numbers is auto-fail
• Test: click the (uhhh invisible?) box to win, or! to fail if you want

Clearly a lot of work goes into making a variety of fun, fair minigames. A lot of respect for designers who manage this.

There are a few references to other projects hidden in this one. The background image, and popup pyramidal sprite are taken from Virtual Dream, and the disco game is taken from my Snowcret Santa game jam entry.  The music was also intended for another game, but I can't remember which!! Glad i got to use it for something so fitting though.

Acknowledgements

• wario, and all the sound effects i stole
• scar, rowan, daniel for playing warioware with me after a long d&d session
• people keeping the microgame genre alive wow thats so cool how do you design so many wacky games