Heart of the OHR Contest 2016

[Spoonweaver]

DragonChaser
concept : 0/2
graphics : 1/2
content : 2/2
gameplay : 1/2
Presentation : 0/2
TOTAL : 4/10

Quodia
concept : 1/2
graphics : 2/2
content : 0/2
gameplay : 1/2
Presentation : 2/2
TOTAL : 6/10

Grapnes 2: Kepnalcide
concept : 1/2
graphics : 0/2
content : 1/2
gameplay : 0/2
Presentation : 1/2
TOTAL : 3/10

Sour City
concept : 1/2
graphics : 1/2
content : 1/2
gameplay : 1/2
Presentation : 2/2
TOTAL : 6/10

You Need a Hero
concept : 1/2
graphics : 1/2
content : 1/2
gameplay : 1/2
Presentation : 1/2
TOTAL : 5/10

[guo]

You Need A Hero

I definitely don't think I'm the target audience for this game, but I'll try to be unbiased. I don't *get* furries, and the humour was rather juvenile at times, but it had it's moments. Writing was competent but the dialogue wasn't quite up my alley.

Score: 4/10

+Some ok graphics
+Nice use of music
+Quite a decent chunk of content
+Really liked the moments where you enter a room and can have conversations with your party members
+Main characters were likable enough & interactions were thought out

-Confusing, out of context situations & encounters
-Some really lazy graphics
-Storyline & dialogue (however this is a manner of taste)
-Battles were unbalanced and awkward - eg the catlady boss was easier than the random encounters in the same area
-Some useless skills & abilities, Freya & Damien were easily the most useful of the 4 heroes.
-Items were inconsistent eg boxcutter was worse than some character's default weapons
-Inconsistencies with wallmaps and doors.

~~~~~

While not my cup of tea, I encourage you to keep working on this game. It would definitely have an audience out there, but is in need of polish.

[Feenicks]

Quodia by Froginator

It's an Earthbound ripoff.

...

Okay, I'll say more.

0: You wake up on an island. Your dog is there, too. After that you go do random things, up until the end of the demo where you lose to 2 amphibians because you don't actually get any healing items. This sort of opening is pretty boring, and moreover sets you up for failure going forward.

Look at your source material: Earthbound starts with you investigating a strange meteorite with your cowardly friend and his somewhat useless brother, come across a being from the future who tells you about your destiny and sets you on your overarching quest, and finally - and for the purposes of this, the most important bit - are attacked by one of the direct underlings of the antagonist. This intro does some heavy lifting - setting up the overall tone of the game, giving you a hint at's what to come in terms of what spells and foes you'll be facing a good bit later on in the game, letting you get a feel for multi-person parties without the extra complexity that brings up, and letting you see how much of a jerk one of the main characters of the game is - but it shows what is at stake in Ness's adventures should he fail [the victory of Giygas and the bleak future that results in], while still fitting in well with the rest of the game.

Only after giving you a purpose does Earthbound let you loose into Onett, and the game's intro is a lot stronger for it. Would Earthbound still have worked had you walked out of your house and just sauntered into town without all that setup? Perhaps, but you'd have very little impetus for exploring the town and generally continuing through the game.

Meanwhile, Quodia starts by you waking up, trying to find your way off some island, and almost immediately has you go into a cave because a bat is stealing some village's food. There's also a blueberry that mentions a generic threat, but said threat doesn't seem to actually exist, at least in the context of the demo. Really, it's just an excuse to go into a cave 5 minutes after you wash up on a beach, because you're an RPG protagonist and that's what RPG protagonists do.

Go into caves and beat up stuff.


1: One thing I can say is that you've definitely got a nice graphical style going on. The graphics are relatively simple and cartoonish, but in a way that's appealing, as opposed to lazy. The main character does the Earthbound-like raised foot walk, which is befitting the source material. I definitely like the player battle sprite[s?] when they're not covered up by the mostly-pointless battle messages, so good job on that. The battle backgrounds are also in the general Earthbound vein, with Pokemon-like circles displaying the current terrain adding some differences from Earthbound's purely abstract backgrounds.

Of particular mention are the water and mud tiles, which both give you special fitting graphics and, in the case of the mud, has the effect of slowing down your movement. It's a neat little effect, but I just wish that this mud didn't comprise the majority of the first cave.

The music is nice too, and generally fits the theme you're going for. There's the faux-voices thing going on with some of the characters, which is admirable but in this instance it just ended up being annoying.
Minuses: either the foot offset on all the maps feels way too high, to the point that you're right on top of the various cliffs, or the cliffs bottoms are themselves walkable. I really can't tell, which is very much an issue; either way, whatever's going on there seems awkward and should be fixed. Some of the battle backgrounds didn't fit the areas they were in, which is far from the hardest thing to fix.

2: Battles are a slog, in the way that Dragon Quest-esque battles really shouldn't be. Every offensive skill save the main character's Interpretive Dance has a drawn out "____ tries to attack..." "...and does!". It's worse when it misses, or just fails to show the second part. Even if all but one of the battles are 2-on-1 affairs with your advantage, they still manage to drag on longer than even slow ATB battles do, and that's almost impressive. There's your Undertaleesque talk options, which just end up being Agree/Disagree, but as far as I can tell they are useful in only one battle. If they're useful in the amphibian battle as well, then that's

Thankfully, enemies are on the field, which should lead to them being avoidable, but due to both the OHR's fondness of activating touch NPCs when you're anywhere near them and the surplus of unavoidable battles in the game's one dungeon that's not as big a boon as it should be.

You're supposed to get various healing items out of boxes, in the cave and elsewhere, but as those don't actually work I couldn't ever heal up. There's a whole bunch of NPCs that have no dialog whatsoever, so this might just be a case of not actually going through and seeing if things worked as they should have.

Also, both heroes' start out with hamburgers as their default weapons. Might want to change that.


3: As far as I could tell, the demo ended with the two amphibians, as I F7'd my way through that battle after losing to it once and was greeted with them vanishing and nothing else happening: I then checked to see what other maps there were, and in the process of doing so discovered that you could walk behind the amphibians, skipping their boss battle entirely.
The goggles you get from them fittingly don't seem to do anything at this point.
My overall impression so far is that of a game that doesn't really know what it wants to do or where to go. That's a problem with a lot of things, and I don't want to see the graphics you've done for this go to waste. Figure out a proper intro, figure out where your plot is actually going, and come back again.

Rating:
4/10 for not even being 30 minutes long

[Pepsi Ranger]

And for my last trick, I will review the final two official entries. Grab your popcorn and your favorite chair; this is gonna get good. (Or, at least be more of the same.)

Grapnes II: Kepnalcide:

Disclaimer:
I have not played the original Grapnes to make any sense of where this is coming from. I also don't know if it matters.

Synopsis:
Gary is a rectangle with legs who wakes up one night to the threat of war and steps outside to watch his father get murdered by Kepnals (whatever those are). He tries to exact revenge, but gets mowed down pretty easily and taken as a prisoner. Twenty years later, he makes an attempt to escape and venture out into a new land. What follows is a minimalist adventure through an arrow-based, mapped out world that tells the player where entrances are, but closes most anything off that doesn't funnel the hero through the pre-scripted story. There are also robbers to fight. There might be more, but I couldn't defeat the first boss, so I don't know.

General Opinion:
Well, I like the game's soundtrack and general audio presentation. The author picked all the right sound effects for his characters. Kinda reminds me of the old Banjo-Kazooie class of sounds, which is not at all a bad thing. And I could justify ripping the soundtrack and playing it on iTunes while doing work. But, that's about the limit to my enjoyment of this game. The characters are okay, and the dialogue is fine. But there just isn't much to the maps, and even though I like the color wheel system (my favorite part about battles), it lasts only as long as the berries last, and when the right color berry runs out, basic attacks basically seem too underwhelming. The second hero is also waaaay below average when it comes to general usefulness. His attacks are useless, and his healing power costs too much energy. And really, the stat balancing is just poor all around. Items are either too expensive, or battle rewards are too stingy, or there just aren't enough battles for any of it to matter, and the ones that do happen take too long to resolve, even with berries properly color-coded and dished out with a capital V for Vengeance spinning around on their hurtling blueberry flesh. I wish the game was better balanced. I'd probably enjoy it more.

Pros:
-The color wheel system is a good idea. They probably don't need to be so far apart from each other on the battle menu, however. Anyone who's ever taken an art class *should* know which colors contrast each other, so the clunky mechanic may not be as necessary as one might think.
-Soundtrack keeps the game from becoming too dull. Just barely.
-Sound effects are fun. Reminiscent of Banjo-Kazooie, and the more recent Samorost adventure series.
-Even though I'm not crazy about the gimmicks or the puzzles the game implements (like the boulders falling over the bridge), I think they at least work well and force the player to pay attention to what's going on.
-The writing is okay. Characters are quirky, which is a bonus in my book.

Cons:
-Battle balance is poor. Berries are necessary if you want to finish off a battle quickly, but they're also limited. Money and experience might be dished out fairly during victories, but battles are too sparse to get much benefit from them.
-First major boss battle (the bandits at the camp above the mountain village) takes too long to fight and is too hard to beat (not impossible, I'm sure) without a long grind ahead of time, and thanks to the infrequency of battles, and the utterly poor stats given to the secondary character, even that's not guaranteed enough to payoff well, certainly not so well that the player might be eager to move on.
-Maps are boring. There's not really much to see. What little there is to see doesn't add much to the game, so far. I don't think this is due to poor planning, however. There's evidence of world building here. I just don't think enough time was spent fleshing out the maps. Underwhelming.
-Berries can be found on bushes in minimal clumps (five here, three there), which is a good start, but buying them individually costs too much. They shouldn't be bought as individual pellets. They should be bought in packs of five or ten. Likewise, bushes should have a bunch of them. I wouldn't care so much if normal attacks were better, but the player needs something in his favor.
-The player is given an open world at the start, but after some exploration, it's obvious that he has only one place to go.
-The story has potential, but I haven't seen much of a persistent narrative yet.

Suggestions:
Honestly, I think the most important thing to do right now is to put more thought into the game's design. Maps don't have to be bigger, but they should do more to immerse the player into the game's world. Visuals don't have to be great, but they should provide evidence that the world is a living, breathing place. The bird shrines help with this, but their bread-feeding mechanic either doesn't make sense, or doesn't indicate a proper payoff for feeding them all (I didn't feed them all because bread costs too much, and I don't want to waste it on something pointless). I also think the berry bushes help, but they yield too few berries. Again, this matters because most enemies still require at least two or three berries to defeat (and twice as many hits by the sword). Adjusting battle balance is another major need. Random enemies shouldn't take so long to defeat. The secondary character (the bird kid) needs to hit harder. He's pathetic, and I don't care when he falls. He's good only for absorbing hits. Make him better.

Rating:
4 out of 10

Labyrinthilium:

Synopsis:
Hyvera, a demon lord, is rescued from her prison by Palion, her servant? friend? rescuer? (I don't know), and the two embark on a three-dimensional journey through a labyrinth to find out what happened to the other demon lords and why their numbers are so few these days.

General Opinion:
Let me start by saying this is not the kind of game I usually enjoy. I've never been a fan of the pen and paper, 3D style of RPG, and this game has not brought me over to the side of fandom. BUT, I do appreciate the work that's gone into this one, and I definitely think it does what it sets out to do competently (save one big story problem). It's not perfect, but for what it aims to be, I think it's pretty close. That said, it doesn't escape criticism. I'll give my pros and cons here in just a second, but I want to make it clear that my cons may not be con-worthy for every player, and I think it's important for players to make their own judgments about this one. Because this is highly specific audience-centered, my cons may be someone else's pros. Keep that in mind when you keep reading. That said, it didn't take me long to get bored. But I'll explain why in a moment.

Pros:
-The system works. It's unconventional for the OHR--far more unconventional than Surfasaurus, even though this is more RPG than Surfasaurus--but that makes the game all the more impressive. It's figured out how to recreate the classic pen and paper experience, which not many games have done on this engine.
-The art looks good. Characters are highly visual, and even with names I'll never remember, I'll still remember them by how they look.
-The gameplay is challenging without being impossible or even annoying.
-The 8-bit sound works well, even though it's a little dark for the kind of tone the game is going for.
-Dialogue is well-written. Everyone's personality is well-defined.
-Immersive atmosphere.
-The maps work. Icons do a decent job orienting the player.
-The town is menu based, so there isn't much wasting of time doing unimportant things.
-Items and hot springs (the restoration fountains) are expensive, but somehow manageable.
-Victory screens are way better than the OHR's default victory screen. It also tells you how close your characters are to leveling up. (More games should follow suit here.)
-Defeat just results in a warp back to town and a loss of half your money. It does not result in game over. I wish more games would do this.
-An in-game coordinates system helps you know how close to the edges of the map you're getting, which can be helpful sometimes.
-Boss doors are marked, so you'll know when you're about to get hammered, and you can prepare for it adequately.

Cons:
-The game looks good, but it's still claustrophobic, and I don't really like how its 3D space feels. This game would be a great contender for HD, as that would give you more room to draw bigger pictures and fill in the main window better.
-I like that cure finds the hero with the least amount of health, but I don't like that the game picks my attack target for me. Maybe it's a convention of the 3D labyrinth RPG, and if so, then keep it. But I'm not a fan.
-The protagonist is a demon, and demons aren't heroes, so I find it hard to care about the protagonists' goals.
-The story is underdeveloped. I get that the demons have been captured and locked up, but isn't that a good thing? I'm not sure why I should want Hyvera to reclaim her army (or her demon clan, or whoever she's trying to find). Hyvera is a lighthearted character, and that definitely makes rooting for her easier. The trick to making unlikable heroes likable is to give them an endearing quality, and this game definitely does that (by making her a weakling and a flake). But the story's goal doesn't do enough to make me interested in continuing. Rooting for a demon succeeding is basically like rooting for evil winning. Why bother, especially when we're to assume the people who captured her and her kind are the classic armored heroes that we naturally want to side with? There are ways for Hyvera's character to save the foundations of the story, but it's going to be an uphill battle. Getting your audience to root for a conventionally evil character (I say this carefully because Hyvera doesn't seem evil, even though she's a demon, which by design is evil) requires some high-level story skill, and I don't think this game demonstrates that yet. The only way it tries is by suggesting the adventurers are evil, for they captured and imprisoned Hyvera. But again, nothing in the story actually shows us how they are the bad guys (just the opposition, though heroes are supposed to oppose villains). Telling me that Hyvera is good and the adventurers are bad (the exact opposite of what conventional storytelling conveys) is not at all enough to convince me that she's someone I need to root for.
-The game is designed well, but the maps themselves don't make a lot of sense. They twist and turn into dead ends, or have consecutive loops for paths. It's a labyrinth, so it's also expected. But the weird shapes in path design don't make it any less blah from an immersive point of view. Different visuals from time to time might make the pointless dead ends less ridiculous. But it also helps to know why these areas are labyrinths. It's not something I'd want to just accept. Again, it's a nitpick, and if it's a convention of the 3D labyrinth style to have areas that zigzag for no reason, then it's not a big deal, but I'd still like some background on the places I'm supposed to travel. It would help me to appreciate their labyrinthine designs more.
-The spell fragment system isn't explained well enough. I never really used it but once, and whatever I did didn't seem to affect anything. Maybe it's unfinished? I cloned plenty of enemies to get the ingredients, but what does the crafting give me? A new spell? Didn't see one. I do like what I think it's supposed to do. I just didn't see it work, or notice the difference if it did work.
-Stairs don't automatically light up when you enter a new floor. This means the map won't display it, unless you go back up the stairs. This is very minor, but if you go all the way back because you see an untraveled area you don't recognize, and then get there to discover that it's just the entrance, then it's a big problem.
-Just to echo my point about the labyrinth itself, the visuals are so repetitive that the most interesting thing about the game becomes the pen and paper map itself, not the setting or the visuals, and the visuals should be part of the appeal. This is ultimately what caused me to get bored of the game rather quickly. I spent most of my time looking at that rudimentary schematic, far more time than I spent looking at the beautiful pictures you drew.
-Even though I like Hyvera's personality, I think her quirkiness and conversational tone make the game less of an adventure and more of a bubblegum visual novel or soap opera (her banter with other characters perpetuates this feeling), and it's tonally off-putting for the otherwise dark theme of the game. I concede that this is personal opinion, however. Others may consider this a pro, and I respect that. Having her likeness pop in and out is a nice touch, but it also contributes to the visual novel feel, and I don't know that it works for a game like this. I'd consider this more of a mixed opinion than anything else.
-I assume the game saves your progress automatically, but there's nothing telling me that it's safe to quit wherever I am.

Suggestions:
Unfortunately, I'll never be the right audience for this game because I don't see the point in making a demon into a hero if she's going to keep doing demon things and try to rebuild demonkind (they're villains by nature). I think Hellboy works because he just wants to be a normal dude in the world, detached from his demon roots, and fight evil when it gets a little rambunctious against humankind. But Hyvera has less heroic goals (well heroic for demons, maybe, but again, demons are always the villains in conventional storytelling, and her heroic actions are being used to free villains, so it's not heroic at all), so this story doesn't work. I'm supposed to root for Hyvera, and I can't. This is no easier to swallow than making Santa Claus the object of desire for a romance novel's heroine. But that said, assuming the story won't change, my biggest suggestion is simply to make the main map searchable, if that's possible. In other words, I'd like to be able to use my arrow keys during map mode to move around and see where I've already traveled. As it stands, I can see only about 30 tiles out from my current location. Also, you might want to open up the secret menu in Custom and change the screen settings to a much larger graphics setting (maybe 1280x720). I don't know how your backgrounds work, but this would help eliminate the claustrophobic feeling--not to mention it would also allow you to draw even richer characters and backgrounds. I suppose the battles might be affected, though. That could be a reason not to do it. But you should look into it if you know how to access the secret menu. I also think the game needs multiple landscapes or at least wall patterns to minimize the repetition of each maze. I couldn't wait to get to the end, and when I did, I was glad it was over, and I didn't care about whatever is coming next. I shouldn't finish a well-developed, high-quality game with that attitude. This game should demand I stick with it into the next demo and beyond, but it doesn't. Make it less repetitive! And give me a reason to root for the "heroes."

All in all, the story, the weird tone, and the lack of change to scenery are the biggest problems I have with the game. Most of my other cons are nitpicks, and while they're still cons, they are for the most part okay. The stuff that works, works really well. The stuff that doesn't work ruins the game for me. That said, your work still deserves a high rating for all the positive marks it achieves.

Rating:
8 out of 10

And that does it for me. If I get a response from the author of Fruity Quest before September 1st, I'll do a review of that. Otherwise I'm discounting it from the contest, as no one else seems to care about reviewing it, either. Probably for the best.

[Feenicks]

1280x720

Do you have a death wish for me or something?

Beyond that, though, I mostly get what you're saying. I'm probably going to do a bit of rewriting of what I have before pressing on with things, I'm probably going to put in an actual tutorial for the spell fragment system [seeing as you seem to have completely misunderstood it and other people didn't know what they were doing before blindly going into it], and I'm definitely going to add in some more wall/floor types to the dungeons to make them a bit less repetitive.

As for the general role reversal: that gets shown off a bit later. Needless to say, there's a lot more going on within the setting than is revealed in the demo.

[Pepsi Ranger]

Do you have a death wish for me or something?

Sometimes art requires sacrifice. Just kidding. You could probably get the same effect with 480x300. The visual window is so compact that it's hard to get a feel for the place. That's all. Whatever gives the player more room to see what's going on. I thought the battle backgrounds were fine.

Beyond that, though, I mostly get what you're saying. I'm probably going to do a bit of rewriting of what I have before pressing on with things, I'm probably going to put in an actual tutorial for the spell fragment system [seeing as you seem to have completely misunderstood it and other people didn't know what they were doing before blindly going into it], and I'm definitely going to add in some more wall/floor types to the dungeons to make them a bit less repetitive.

As for the general role reversal: that gets shown off a bit later. Needless to say, there's a lot more going on within the setting than is revealed in the demo.

I'll probably give the next demo a fair shot. Like I said, I think the gameplay is near perfect. If you have plans for the story to make the protagonist more heroic, then this should end up being an awesome game in my opinion (not just a good one). What you have so far is still pretty darn good, in spite of my feelings about the story. Please keep at it.

[Nathan Karr]

So far Successor's Legacy is my favorite, but one of the puzzles is really smashing my face.

Fruity Quest was a blast for me until around the 2/3 mark when it tossed an enemy that took over five minutes to beat and supplied zero threat...just a big white ball with insanely high defenses and HP. So I started just cheating for the rest of the game and ceased paying attention to the dialog.

[guo]

Apologies, I don't have time for full write ups right now but I have played all the games. I'll give my scores and a brief rundown and can provide more detailed feedback if the respective authors would like.


Grapnes 2:

+Some endearing characters
+Decent music & sfx
+It's fairly bug free & internally consistent

-Uninspired design
-Lazy graphics
-Battles are slow & boring
-Story etc cliche & nonsensical

4/10

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Sour City

+Portraits, tiles look cool. Unique art style
+Cool minigames
+It's like a combination of Beavis & Butthead, Repo Man & Pulp Fiction (on drugs)
+Nice city

-Bugs galore, wallmaps missing etc
-Battles and random encounters are ... obnoxious. The game would be better as an interactive story with minigames only.
-Tasteless/cheap gags (this might be a plus to others )

6/10

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Labryinthilium

+Great graphics
+First person dungeon crawler in the style of old golden box games, dungeon master, might & magic etc
+Battles have interesting mechanics
+Good balance

Music, while ripped, fits well

-Environments are very repetitive, rather bare
-Dialogue is a bit hammy


7/10

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Surfasaurus

+Interesting use of internal time clock
+You are a surfing dinosaur
+Great game for your mobile, love checking it each day & progressing
+Characters have charm
+Graphics (especially when surfing, as well as the costumes) are decent

-Had a bit of a hard time figuring out how to progress
-Sometimes you have little to do except wait for the day to tick over

8/10

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Quodia - 5/10

Successor's Legacy - 5/10

Dragon Chaser - 7/10

Thanks to all who participated - there was plenty to like about every game and I hope you all continue working on them.

[Pepsi Ranger]

Thanks for the votes, guo. Remember, you can (and should) vote for your own game. Just be honest how you feel about it, even if you feel it deserves the highest marks. Scores are based on averages, and by omitting your own score for it, you could be negatively affecting it. Don't do that.

To everyone else who wants to vote, how soon can I expect them? Today is the last day of August. I could keep voting open longer, but I'd rather close it down as soon as possible.

Thanks to those who have voted so far.

[guo]

I think it's hard to rate my own game, especially at this early stage, because I don't see it the same way others would. I see what things are going to be like later, and how certain segments and aspects fit into the bigger picture.

+Graphics
+Atmosphere
+Worldbuilding
+Original sound & music

-Pacing
-Might be a bit of information overload at such an early stage of the game
-Combat is too simple, not enough variety in enemies.

For me personally the game is, as it stands, a 7 - but alongside more polished entries such as Labyrinthilium, Dragon Chaser (which I loved), and Surfasaurus it should be lower.

6/10

[RMZ]

I think I got like 2 or 3 more to go then I can submit votes. Should be done by end of the weekend.

[Foxley]

I'm too much of a wreck to play through and score games right now. But I'll still be giving prizes (Steam or Amazon gift cards) for the 1st, 2nd and 3rd place entries.

[Pepsi Ranger]

Technically, voting is open until September 30th, based on what I've outlined on the front page. This deadline was set in order for players to have time to get through longer games (like Dragon Chaser). I want to end it much sooner since the majority of games are not that long. However, I can still leave it open until September 30th if I need to. I'd rather give as many active members in the community a chance to vote than to shut it down prematurely, if the majority of active members in the community can be bothered to play them (and vote). So, I'd certainly like to know how many are out there who plan to vote but just haven't had a chance to get to the games yet.

[Nathan Karr]

I've got to play about two or three more games, I think. I was going in alphabetical order so I think Surfasaurus and You Need A Hero are all I have left.

[Spoonweaver]

I'm going to finish the games and score them. I won't need till the end of September to do it though. Let's say, Sept. 15th?

EDIT: played another game

Labyrinthilium
concept : 2/2
graphics : 2/2
content : 1/2
gameplay : 1/2
Presentation : 1/2 (took a point off for ripped music)
TOTAL : 7/10