Minigames
Every Buddy carries exactly one minigame, built from one of five templates. The template decides the rules. The dials, and the art you draw, decide how it feels.
The five templates
| Template | The idea | How you play |
|---|---|---|
| Beat | An endless pulse that keeps getting faster. | Press in time with it. Miss and it is over. |
| Quickdraw | A go or no go prompt after an unpredictable wait. | Press as fast as you can when it says go. Press on a no go and you lose. |
| Sequence | Simon style memory. | Repeat the pattern back with short and long presses. |
| Command | Four things it can ask for, called faster and faster. | Do the one it asked for before time runs out. |
| Gyro | Keeping the cube upright while it fights you. | Tilt the cube to stay balanced. Let it fall and you are done. |
Quickdraw
The cube sits idle for a stretch you cannot predict, then throws up a prompt. Your score for the round is how much of the window was left when you pressed, so being fast is worth more than being safe.
Quickdraw needs its idle art drawn, the clip it holds during that unpredictable wait. Without it there is nothing on screen before the prompt.
Sequence
The cube plays a pattern, then hands it back to you. Each beat is either a short press or a long one, judged by how long you hold the button, and the dividing line sits halfway between the two lengths the game uses. So it is not about timing the gaps, it is about the length of each press.
Gyro
Gyro is the odd one out, and worth understanding before you draw for it.
Nothing gets played. You draw a single posture chart, one clip showing the Buddy at every angle from falling one way to falling the other, and the game picks whichever frame matches the current lean. Frames are scrubbed, not animated.
- Draw an odd number of frames, so there is a true middle.
- The middle frame is upright.
- The outer quarter at each end is falling over.
The lean builds up rather than tracking your hand directly. A drift pushes the cube one way and tilting pushes back against it, which makes it a balancing act rather than a test of holding still.
Gyro on real hardware
Tilt is not wired up on the cube yet, so a gyro Buddy on real hardware just topples. Use the tilt slider in the Buddy Maker, on the left of the cube panel, or the arrow keys. Everything else about the template works.
Tuning
Each template exposes its own dials: how fast it speeds up, how wide the windows are, how long a pattern gets. Change one, then play it in the tester. Nothing here needs a cube attached.
Gyro ships gentle. With the default numbers the drift reverses often enough that doing nothing at all survives the first half minute, and only the speed up eventually makes it dangerous. If you want it sharper from the start, that is what the dials are for.
Art each game needs
The Art this game uses panel in the Minigame workspace
is the authoritative list for whichever template you picked, and it
tells you whether each slot is drawn or still empty. A minigame slot
plays exactly one clip, so a card reads drawn or
no art rather than counting frames.
Watch the fit bar on each card. A clip that runs longer than its slot gets cut off mid play, and the frame ruler shows you exactly which frames never get reached. Fit to slot fixes the common case in one press.