Wevva

Create unique and inspiring emoji games with the Wevva app! The world of game creation is at your fingertips, and producing bouncy, fun, colourful, physics-based casual games can be done right on your iPhone or iPad in minutes.

Features:

- 32 pre-loaded emoji-based mini-games to play, master, customise and learn from

- A unique game creation tool with which totally new games can be created easily and quickly just by making choices

- An AI-powered inspiration button that will create a new game using evolutionary algorithms, ready for you to try out and improve

- A sharing mechanism so that you can send your creations to friends and family as toys, challenges and messages

Wevva's amazing game creation tool allows you to make games, play them and share them with friends. Everything from the characters to the game mechanics to the sound effects and scoring can be changed. You can start a new game from scratch or use the inspiration button to give you a head start with a game that needs fixing up.

Wevva comes with 32 pre-loaded casual games in four packs: simple, fast, skilful and tricky. You can play and master these games, but you can also learn about the kinds of games that Wevva empowers you to create. Everything is fluid in this app, so you can even alter the pre-loaded games to make them easier, harder or crazier.

The game creation tool lays out the options for game dev in a simple user interface which requires you to just make choices - no external design work or programming is necessary. You can alter the choice and nature of the emoji characters in your game: when and where they appear on the side of the screen; how they move over the screen; and what happens when they collide with each other.

You can also alter how players control the characters: how tapping and dragging affects the sprites and the game controller, adding in effects such as teleportation, jumping, springs, pinging and explosions. Changing the look and sound of your game is also only a few taps away: backgrounds can be altered, musical soundtracks can be created and added; ambient sounds can be carved out; and sound effects can be selected for the events that happen during gameplay.

Finally, how players beat your game is customisable: do they have a number of lives and a time limit for staying alive, is surviving for the longest time the aim, or will they need to show mastery of the game by scoring a certain number of points? Alternatively, you could make a zen-like toy with the stress of competition left at the door.

Making a new game can take just a few minutes, or you can fine tune it for longer to make it perfect. Once you're done making a game, you can send it via a message to a friend, who will be able to play it, alter it if they want, and send it back or pass it on. Wevva is great for learning about aspects of game design including spawning, scoring and rule mechanisms, physics simulations and look, feel and sound design. It's also great for rapid game jams, where teams can get together and see who can produce the most creative game.

This project has been supported by the European Commission's ERA programme (European Research Area Chars). It has been carried out in The MetaMakers Institute, which is part of the Games Academy of Falmouth University in the UK. One of the aims of the project is to democratise game design, so that anyone and everyone can make cool games.