The 2015 In Review Contest [Reviews: 74]

[Bob the Hamster]

Weird. I though I explored every possibility in that game, but somehow I managed to miss all the pervin' and all the incestuous pervin'

[Gizmog]

I would too if I was a shapeshifter.

Anyway, there's the big problem of the hard part not ACTUALLY being done. Lotta scripting things I couldn't figure out. That being said, if I ever work them out and finish this, would you be willing to play through it and make captions like this again so I can know where the bad storytelling is? You seem like a reliable source for that.

The story-telling isn't bad (I feel really dumb for missing the textbox at that start that mentions its his daughter), I just like to make dirty jokes. It's a real problem I have. At one point it got so bad my friends made a SECOND batch of IRC Channels and hid in it so's they wouldn't have to hear me be dirty 24/7. As for helping, I'm really bad at committing myself to stuff and then flaking out, but tenatively yeah. Drop me a line when you get done and I'll give it a shot.

[guo]

I just like to make dirty jokes.

Suddenly your avatar makes so much more sense.

[kylekrack]

Hey man, dirty jokes are my life. I just happen to find yours particularly creative. Also I don't expect any kind of commitment from anyone, I was just planning on throwing a game at your face and watching the way it falls off.

I'm bad with metaphors.

[Gizmog]

Witch.RPG is reviewed!

I just sprayed some Febreze and accidentally walked into the cloud so I'm not sure I was totally coherent through this review. The game was actually funnier than I remembered it being, too! Make sure to walk backwards when air freshening, kids!

And thanks Kyle, if that's all you want from me I can probably deliver.

[Feenicks]

Glad you liked it.

Also; never really mentioned it anywhere here, but all the music's from this stuff. Thank the soviets for this one.

[TMC]

The story-telling isn't bad (I feel really dumb for missing the textbox at that start that mentions its his daughter)

Don't feel bad, I couldn't make sense of the intro until I went back and rewatched it after playing the game for a few minutes.

Hmm... did I ever post my minireview of the game? Time is running out! Sorry folks.

[Feenicks]

Man, maybe I've been a bit too rough on some of these games. I'm going to act like I'm an elementary school sports coach and give out awards to all the games! Sure, most of these are the only

1GAM: January - Discotheque - Most like a drug-related PSA

Allu in the Demon's Cave - Most stylish enemies

Bad Boy - Game that feels most like a video game adaption of some made-for-VCR christmas movie

char's lovely home - Best Review Game

Crusty's Heyday - Best skippable intro

Devs Like Waffles - The "I want to eat waffles after playing this game" Award

Drydocks - A Merchant RPG - Best Day/Night cycle

Element of Power, The - Best town [fish town]

Festivus - Best first-person dungeon crawler

Fly, The - Best game that's trying to be an Atari 2600 game

Fridge Racer - Best [s]rhythm[/s] racing game

Ghost's Towns - Character most reminiscent of OFF's Zacharie [Dymphna]

Lab Rat - Most like a flash game I've probably played at some point

Late For Work - A 3 Minute Game - Best use of ripped music

Little Prince, The - Best remake of a book

Macabre - Game with enemy most likely to win a Homestar Runner lookalike contest [the first enemy in the time place]

Martin Van Buren, Monster Slayer - Best use of First-Person narration

MrNintendo1's Michael Jackson Dancing - Best exploding skeletons

Mr. Triangle's Adventure - Game with highest proportion of animated vegetable enemies

Noodle Within, The - Best game involving pasta in an integral way

Painted Space - Most starting options [49!]

Paladin Traducer - Game that most enticed me to draw fanart

Phlan - Best powered armor

Return - A Point and Click Adventure - Best game about transforming into animals

Shooter Game - Best arcade-type game

Sprout - Best lookout point

Teekee - Enemy I was least expecting to see [the chicken breast]

Time Twister - Best famous person cameo

War on Christmas, The - Best contest announcement

witch.rpg - Most sudden difficulty drop [get Hi-Fire/Elec and it's all over]

Have one more review to do, and I'm working through the game in question. This has been fun, and depending on what actually pops up through the rest of this year I might give it another shot come 2017.

[Gizmog]

Wasn't what I was expecting but interesting! Ghost's Towns is reviewed! Not sure what the meditation on life and death stuff in the subtitle was about, but I never have been too fast on the uptake. I hate to repeat what I said about C. Kane but I'm not entirely sure what the game was trying to say? It's an intriguing little mystery, but I'm not sure what, if anything, I'm suppose to take away from it and that makes me feel stupid.

It does have personality, which goes a long way. It would be so easy to this game a totally pointless and lifeless affair, and it's not. Don't feel like I'm explaining how I feel very well because I don't know how I feel. Oh well, no time for emotions. Onto the next!

[The Wobbler]

Moving my comment to the thread for the actual review so it's less likely to get lost.

[Feenicks]

Festivus by Pheonix

I made this thing for the 2015 Christmas Contest in about a month. As I was back home for most of that month and didn't really have to do all that much I needed to do otherwise, I was able to put a ton of time into this.
First, let's get all the things I didn't get in or otherwise blatantly messed up out of the way:

• Two entire planned systems - missions [which would get you extra items and put a bit more story into the labyrinth] and information [which would let you know about some of the more obtuse stuff in the game] got axed due to time constraints.
  Several of the cutscenes got messed up - one doesn't have the proper text show up, while others have the wrong cutins show up, or just have misspellings.
  I forgot that the light color in the enemy sprites was actually the background color, leading to them looking wonky when they appear in situations outside of that.
  Treasure chests probably should have disappeared from the minimap once collected.
  One character's series of specific accessories isn't actually in the game save the last one, leaving her at a bit of a disadvantage and ridding her of a neat form of skill progression.
  What items you need for buying new weapons isn't reflected in how often those enemies appear; this is exacerbated by the fact that enemies from earlier on in a block also appear on later floors of that block, diluting how much they will appear.
  Winning against the third boss doesn't actually turn off the NPC that triggers it, leading to a situation where you can fight it multiple times in a row.
  The whole game is incredibly unbalanced - it's definitely not a spacebar holder, but it's a game where by the end there's several ways to completely cheese through everything without too much effort.
  The final boss's cutin is pretty messy.
  The ending has a lot less going on that I had originally intended.

Now that that's done with:

Festivus is a first-person dungeon crawler, ripping extensively from the Etrian Odyssey series in several respects.

The actual first-person maze stuff wasn't made in the timespan of the Christmas contest, thankfully. I had originally made it for the Hans Stinkman contest, where there would have been some sort of robot monster you'd have to have either hunted down or avoided; due to specifics (how that hunting/evading would have actually worked mechanically... any actual graphics) nothing ever came of it. I did start using it for another game, and got to the point of having a wall graphic drawn up, but I laid that to the side one day and never really came back to it.
The main issue is this: while you'll only have to draw a handful of graphics for a 3d Maze (a wall type or two, doors, ceiling/floors), having them in-game is another issue altogether. In a 3D game engine it'd be relatively easy - just map the textures to where they need to go - but the OHR is a 2D game engine, without any proper 3D support (and not much that allows for faux-3D, either). I eventually used the GIMP to manipulate all the graphics into their correct shapes, something that took a good amount of time. Block 1 has over 50 graphics comprising its set of walls and floors, and there's three more graphic sets in the game that had to be taken care of. Needless to say, the game's large file size isn't just because of the music.

The inspiration/ripping off of Etrian Odyssey comes across in two ways; the first-person dungeon crawler aspect of the game, with its specific elements (shortcuts and how they're accessed), and its weapon-crafting system. Most weapons in Etrian Odyssey are bought in the shop, but before that's possible certain items, either dropped from enemies or collected from specific spots in the labyrinths, have to be sold to the shop; these items are then used in the making of the weapons. Festivus uses a variation of this method - the relevant items have to stay in the inventory, which makes things a little bit awkward (do I keep ____ in my inventory because it might be used in a weapon later, or sell it?), but overall the system still works. Each enemy has one to three item drops; most enemies have their items drop randomly, but several require some action to be taken - use a specific element on them, defeat them before they use a special attack - for those items to pop up.

I took the idea for equipment skills from a RPG Maker script, which itself was probably inspired by some other source (FF IX, or some other game, presumably). Its implementation here is fairly straightforward - weapons, clothing, and accessories can each have up to three skills - but they add an extra level of depth to the act of equipping items. Do you go for something with high stats but lousy/too high-leveled skills, or do you go for something with lesser stats but more immediately useful skills? Deciding to use FF1-style magic (as well as going for a different skills/level progression than the default) gave even more depth to this, allowing two weapons that have the same skill on them differ due to what level the skill in question is at.

Generally like how the enemies and general enemy progression turned out. You have enemies in Block 1 that show off things (buffing/debuffing, multiple attacks, elemental weaknesses) but not really using them in a way that's all that dangerous to the player, and generally progressing to the point where in Block 4/the Top Floor those same elements have to be dealt with fairly quickly, before they have a chance to completely overwhelm the player party. Block 3's a bit of an exception, as most of its enemies are either not much of a threat to the party or can be dealt with before being able to do much damage; Block 3 is the most mazelike of all the blocks, though, so the enemies there can take a bit of a backseat. Most of the encounters in the game can be dealt with in two or three turns when the player isn't deliberately using their lowest-level skills, which I feel is about right for a more encounter-heavy game like this one.

I like how all 4 main characters, even at the end where they all had really high damage-dealing capabilities, still had different roles in the party. Verdi's the typical mage type, focusing mainly on fire-type spells, and with her specific accessory gets steady low/mid-level spells of a single element of her choice throughout most of the game. Norn's weapons are largely electric-oriented, but her specific clothing gives her a healing role. Nattan's a physical damage dealer, but most of his weapons also come with status effect skills. Stymph's also a physical damage dealer, but in a different vein; save for her ultimate weapon, all her attacks go off her increasingly absurd Accuracy stat, meaning that her attacks can't really be buffed any higher than they already are. All in all, I think it's a pretty good spread.

The story's silly and largely an excuse to go through a christmas-themed labyrinth, but I feel it works. Verdi/Norn feels a bit too much like Verdi/Wyrd's relationship, but it's fine. High Elf's my favorite character, honestly.

tl;dr: how did I make this in a month?

[Mammothstuds]

I'm honored to see my little experiment of a game get three reviews! Even if they weren't so glowing, they were certainly fair, and definitely amusing to read. I also really like the fact that someone went out of their way to make an MSpaint drawing featuring my eponymous demon. Seriously, that was really rad.

I don't really have any plans for the project's future, and as it stands I think Allu is best left as a history lesson. However, I did get some good feedback on the enemy design, and so I'm thinking of maybe re-using some of their graphics for a future project. Of course, I'll also add new guys in said project. I'm not THAT lazy.

Thanks for taking the time to trudge through the demon's cave. You guys deserve a medal.

[Gizmog]

Compilation Review of my other slime

2014 In Review Random Picker: There's two main interesting things about this. One is that I ran into a slice layering bug that I didn't realize was a bug till way later. (Don't have a heart attack TMC, it's just the loaded slices appear in a different order bug that was fixed). The second thing is that I designed it to be as plug and play as possible, so I could just type in the name of each game for a year and release a new version without any muss or fuss. And then I didn't do that this year. Woof!

Who Left All These Clowns Here: Super disappointed how this turned out. Thought I'd finally made my first "real game". Worked my butt off on the scripting and the graphics and forgot BASIC DESIGN. Gameplay required multiple maps and the scripting wouldn't easily take to it. Plus a lot of weird questions as to how the maps oughta work out in the first place. I was thinking something like Smash TV, but then I remembered I'd never played Smash TV. Woof!

OHR Screensaver: If you haven't looked in this directory recently, it's got a lot more crap piled in there than just screensavers. Why the hell does so much stuff in here have 100+ downloads? Maybe my next project will be OHR Song Lyrics...

OHR Screensaver Mini-Compilation Review!!!

OHR Screensaver v1.0: Was really excited how this turned out, but it clearly "wasn't quite right". It's more like when your ship explodes in asteroids than like the old Star Field screensavers I was trying to emulate. I like the ship exploding in Asteroids visual, though. Gotta find a good place to use that.

OHR ScreenSaver v1.1: This is a little righter than the first one. I remember TMC bitched at me that it didn't render depth correctly and that there was an equation for that, but I wouldn't understand what he was on about till Fridge Racer. It's kind of slow in my book, and the bluish ness of the stars makes me think of bubbles slowly rising in water rather than stars whizzing by.

OHR Screensaver v1.2: I think this is the one that's titled "OHR Screensaver volume 1" 'cause I was gonna pile 'em all into one file rather than multiple.. and then I decided to hell with that! Who wants to CHOOSE what screensaver? It defeats the purpose of the screensaver! The main difference between this and 1.1 is a little bit of the color, there's a lot more stars, and there's a "deadzone" in the middle where stars don't spawn to make it seem like they're moving past you rather than at you. Not a huge improvement on 1.1 and a little laggy.

Sticky Snow: Basically just the title screen snow fall for OHR Typewriter 3 with a simple collision check to make the snow accumulate. Doesn't work terribly terribly well, and if I remember right it was some kind of a test to visualize how random numbers work/if they're really all that random. Some old emulator used to do this and I always thought it was super cool.

NameGenerator: This was inspired by a conversation with Newbie Power about D&D. We both hated coming up with character names and this gives you 1-1000 random combinations of letters and a Tactics Ogre portrait to stimulate that "Ahh, this is a real guy!" feeling. You're gonna have to buy your own vowels on a lot of 'em but it isn't the worst random name generator I've seen.

TankTutorial v1.1:I think I made this because somebody on the forums was talking about shooting games and it got me all curious. Probably one of my best scripting jobs since the original OHR Basketball. A lot of my experience with this was useful in the clown game thing. I don't remember the differences between 1.1 and 1.1.5 but the description says it was the addition of guided shots and I'd believe that. 1.2 was going to be "There's walls and the enemies can't shoot past 'em" but I got distracted trying to figure out why my scripts worked weird one way and not the other. In that respect, Who Let All These Clowns in could be counted as TankTut 1.2.

Clown Game:/b] This is terrible! It was my first crack at the "Who Let/Left All These Clowns" contest prompt, and the idea was a maniac mansion like. I was using the default walk commands and passability like a jackass and it was really easy to get stuck in the walls. The code that keeps an item's entire name centered on the screen worked kinda well, though. I don't have the design talent yet to manage a puzzle-heavy project like this would've been... not that my alternative worked out better

OHR Screensaver 3: Basically just a port of Lode's Tutorial on the subject only with the added embarassment of not doing the colors totally right. Kind of neat but could be way better. When I first got it working I didn't even notice because the difference between the darkest and lightest color was way too subtle. There's one setting I had for it way back when that was super cool and blocky and retro. Need to use this in something.

SliceSpeedTest: Essentially another OHR Screensaver and another port of that tutorial from earlier, only this time with a more complex pattern and the proper sexy color cycling. The slice speed test aspect was to help TMC debug something and it made a HUUUGE difference. The guy's a genius! Without this optimization, it's possible Fridge Racer wouldn't be possible (Too many rectangle slices!) and yet thatwasn't ever what I was directly building towards. Weird how it works out!

Poison Ivy: Dunno why I gave this one the fancy name, it's basically OHR Screensaver 4/5 whatever. Instead of ripping off a tutorial, I ripped off Wikipedia's article on the Bresenham Line Algorithm. It draws a bunch of lines with rectangle slices and then repeats. James saw it and thought TMC had implemented line slices and that was worth a giggle. Drawing a line turned out to be hugely useful to Fridge Racer's speedometer.. but again that wasn't what I was trying to do when I did this. Year just unfolded that way.

Black Hole: Aka reinventing the bitmap.hss. It's a combination of the ThirdParty.hsi sine functions and the bresenham line algorithms to make this weird spinning wheel thing. Then, just to make it a little kinkier, I draw Samus as a series of rectangle slices (which was tedious as hell to script) and rotate the slices to rotate Samus. Had some really weird failures with this and some very interestsing successes. Will NEVER use the technique again, though. Too hard to do the graphics for not enough effect.

TG3D Demo: Apparently TG stood for TheGiz and not Transylvania Girls. Will I ever have 3d vampire boobies?! PRobably not. It's just a development state of Fridge Racer, kind of demonstrating that equation TMC had tried to tell me about way back in Screensaver 1.1. It's part of a pattern that I sometimes upload stupid slime because I was fooling with it and mentioned something in IRC and felt like I'd be a cockteaser to not share it with them. Maybe it makes me kind of a show off? I guess you're an slimehole either way when it comes to game development stuff.

Knockin this slime out of the way while I remember it. Still playing Festivus and XMas War. Initial impressions of both are favorable, though Festivus' inventory kind of annoys me and my first battle in XMas War took forever 'cause I didn't know what I was doing. Really hope I'll get the chance to finish but right now it isn't looking too promising

[TMC]

These retrospectives (and reviews) are great! (In other news, I'm pleased to see the deadline is the 20th, not the 15th, so maybe I'll actually submit something)

Turns out there were a few of Giz's demos on the screensaver gamelist page that I hadn't seen! May as well throw in some one-line comments of those plus some others I had played before, though I have no idea which were released in 2015.

Screensaver X: An exploration of different star-field mechanics. Makes me really want to write my own, as a space fighter game. Maybe with grains of dust instead of stars.

Clown Game: Didn't see this. One of the first games with mouse-based movement. Interesting to see the start of a serious game here. Also, don't parent the mouse cursor to a map layer.

Black Hole: As deeply mysterious in intention as any piece of art. I'm jealous Giz beat me to showing off sprite rotation.

OHR Typewriter 3: The GUI for this is nice! Maybe Giz has a future as an app developer. Although there are some bugs and missing features. Also I guess it would be worth exposing the hidden feature of text slices to display a editing cursor.

namegenerator: Including the Tactics Ogre portraits works wonders. As for the names I guess the trick is that they're short. Long strings of nonsense looks much more like nonsense than "Ox" or "Qmm". Too bad I didn't see "Giz" or "Tmc". (Saw "Upmou", "Upmouse" I guess?)

SliceSpeedTest: Really neat. Interesting non-square 'pixels', but it would run much faster with regular square ones (rect slices without borders).

Summary: Giz has racked up a string of OHR "Firsts" with these tech demos.

Oh and thanks, Giz. Just now while playing a couple of your tech demos I discovered two new engine bugs plus a third that I'd mistakenly thought had been fixed.

[Gizmog]

Summary: Giz has racked up a string of OHR "Firsts" with these tech demos.

Oh and thanks, Giz. Just now while playing a couple of your tech demos I discovered two new engine bugs plus a third that I'd mistakenly thought had been fixed.

Glad to help find bugs, TMC! But let's save those firsts for the guys who actually put the slime into a game. Anyone can slam dunk in practice.