This was going to be a reply to the review thread going, but I moved it here because that thread's already off track enough (and I'd rather see future posts there be new reviews, rather than replies to Charbile's review of... Pepsi Ranger's review of Okédoké.)
Gizmog wrote: Fnrrrf:
I wish you'd reconsider on the blog. It was a very good post-mortem that explained and confirmed a lot of things about the game. Knowing that the reason the first part feels so disconnected is because there was no long-term plan is valuable insight into game design and a lesson to learn from! Nobody else makes long games like this and sure as hell no one else documents the process, your Okedoke articles were game design gold. If you didn't want people to know more about Okedoke, why did you ever post it to start with?
The post he linked to was a "quick and lazy" version of the full story behind Okédoké. The part he quoted was a quick and lazy excerpt of something already quick and lazy, trimmed down to appear even quicker and lazier.
The original post was intended mainly for people I know in real life who don't make games to know a little bit of the process of what led to Okédoké as it exists today, and possibly for some random Internet wanderers who've never heard of the OHRRPGCE to see some screenshots and read some descriptions and think "hey, I might want to play this Okédoké game." Which has happened, by the way--I'm aware of at least a handful of people who have stumbled across my outside-OHR-land posts about Okédoké and played it as a result. It wasn't "for the OHR community" and was not up to the level of detail I would've gone into for, say, a Hamsterspeak article on the subject (if such a thing was still possible) going into as much depth as possible on the design and history of the game.
For example, reading over it again I realize I almost completely left out one step in the "who's the bad guy" area of development... it's only at the "Alternate Universes" listing at the end where this was even mentioned. There was a time, before I decided on adding real-life politicians into the game (or sort of real-life in the case of Cheney--in real life "D!ck" isn't short for "Dickolas," but that's what it is in the world of Okédoké) but after I'd already decided not to use Ma-Du Nebozu as the final villain, where I had thoughts of the main villain being a generic shadowy "the public doesn't even know he exists" spy-movie-villain type guy who would have been the real mastermind of the "take over the world with a giant robot" plot within the government. This would've been the guy who climbed into the cockpit of the robot for the final battle rather than Sarah Palin.
But I thought a character like that would be... kind of boring, honestly, and having such a "serious" character show up at the very end of a mostly silly game seemed off to me. Even if he is just the planning, scheming type who can't actually fight so he needs to jump in a big robot to do anything, the final villain being "pure seriousness" seemed wrong for the game. I suppose I could've made him silly in some way to fit the game better, but the plan for him being in the game didn't last long enough for me to think of that.
Someone similar to this character may still exist in the world of Okédoké as it is today, now that I think about it--none of the politicians you fight is the one who actually came up with the plan in the first place, after all, and that's hinted at in the game (like how Bush is the only one of the three politicians that Alejandro recognized from 20 years ago when he was looking into the situation for the first time, for example. Cheney and Palin probably weren't connected to the plan at all back in the 80s when it first got started; even Bush probably wasn't part of the original group who came up with the idea, though he had joined up before 1988. Palin in particular wasn't even affiliated with the government back then.) Which now that I think about it, kinda leaves things open for a sequel if I ever felt like making one (I currently have no plans for a sequel, by the way, just saying the possibility is there)--yeah, the Alaskan base and giant robot are gone, and so are three of the political figures involved... but there's still this shadowy guy (or group) hiding out within the US government that cooked up that plan in the first place.
The blog isn't gone, by the way, just set to "private" at the moment. It'll most likely return to public when/if Charbile removes the link in his post as requested, or when this thread falls off the front page or two of these forums and gets lost in the jumble of years-old posts that nobody replies to and few people read anymore... whichever comes first.
Gizmog wrote: Had El Garbanzo's hometown been a rich cultural tapestry, selling homemade burritos with love, ice cold cerveza and artisan tequila as healing items, it would've been funny when he goes to America and finds that Taco Bell, Dos Equis and Corona serve the same function.
The bit about healing items is pretty much a description of exactly what happens in the game.
You go from one guy running a homemade taco stand in Chapter 1 (there is no Taco Bell connection here--I noticed in one of Pepsi Ranger's reviews that he somehow got the idea that the stand is connected to Taco Bell, but it isn't, it's just a little wooden stand labeled "Tacos"), to a restaurant built into a hotel in Chapter 2 ("Hotel del Taco" in Wrongside), to full-on Taco Bell and Burger King fast food by the time you reach Chapter 4.
The only thing that could make it much more obvious is if you started finding national-brand-name beer and liquor items in the US (rather than the non-branded Cerveza and Tequila) along with the Coca-Cola and Mountain Dew.
Gizmog wrote: I'm still not sure why Okedoke wants me to think a 6 year old girl pooping herself to death is funny.
...It doesn't. Even in a silly game, not everything is a joke.
People dying of awful diseases is a thing that happens. It's part of the history of that area--if you talk to the ghosts in the Ghost Town after getting Señor Death, you find out that the town was settled as part of a gold rush and then wiped out by an outbreak of that disease. Most of the gravestones are jokey, but that gravestone in the first town is just there to make a connection between those two towns--one forgotten town from the past that was wiped out by disease in a time before modern medicine, and a small but healthy town located nearby where the last reported death from the same disease happened.
Gizmog wrote: Even outside of the humor department, I remember bein frustrated in my first playthrough to have to be fighting more ghosts at a haunted house after there'd already been a ghost town level.
You can get to Chapter 3 without ever having seen the Ghost Town--it's not a required area. Señor Death shows up and joins you after the border crossing if you didn't meet him there.
Plus, the Ghost Town only had miner skeletons and tumbleweeds and scorpions and such--the ghosts there are just NPCs, you don't ever fight any of them there. The Haunted House has Frankenstein's Monsters, ghosts, vampires, spiders, possessed teddy bears, etc... the full Halloween monster lineup. And no tumbleweeds, scorpions, etc. there at all.
I can see what you mean about having two "haunted" areas only separated by one chapter, but in terms of what enemies you're fighting, there seems to be a decent amount of variety to me.
FYS:AHS -- Swapping out some step-on NPCs for zones + each step script
Puckamon -- Not until the reserve party is expanded.[/size]
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