Heart of the OHR Contest

Whoops! Never noticed that... probably because I never thought of trying to open the menu during the intro.

I just tested it out, and it looks like it's not the intro itself but the Chapter 1 title card immediately after it that allows menus. I was mashing ALT all through the intro and never got a menu to open, but as soon as the last part of the intro faded out to black (and it switched to the title card) I was able to open a menu.

I'm guessing I forgot to put a "suspend player" in the show-title-card scripts. Shouldn't be too hard to fix; I'll probably upload a version without this bug either later tonight or sometime tomorrow. Let me know if you find any more bugs.

Eternity Fragment is the best DW1 style game on the OHR. Played it all night and finished it. Gonna PM more comments on it.

EDIT:

This is weird because I did everything in my power to make sure it doesn't look like a GBA game, where GBA games universally have crappy color palettes.

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<TheGiz> oh hai doggy, oh no that's the straw that broke tjhe came baclsb

I wrote a reply to this thread yesterday, but I was at work and didn't copy my text before my lack of cookie killed it, so I'll do my best to say again what I said yesterday (and more):



Would the game have been on time if not for hardware failure? If so, I'll see if Inferior Minion is able/willing to make another shirt.



Yes, please do. And tell Puzzle that I'd like to see that Celtic game make an appearance if it's ready by then. I'm quite interested to see how it turns out.



Seconded. And I think all games that have any kind of narrow corridor should make this a design necessity.



Actually, the T-shirts weren't my idea. You can thank Inferior Minion and Fenrir-Lunaris for that one. IM was so pleased with the idea behind the Heart of the OHR contest that he wanted to throw a prize of his own into the pot, and that's what he decided on. Fenrir actually designed the logo for the shirt, and I liked it enough to brand it the official logo of the Heart of the OHR now and forever, or until inspiration drives him to create a new logo. But the discussion about the T-shirts and its design took place back in June, so I don't think so. Sorry.



I wrote something similar yesterday, but alas the cookie thief stole my chance to show it to the world. But yeah, I had no idea why my player wasn't moving until I looked to the bottom right of the screen. My eyes' focal point was on that chair in the western room, and because the game was so dark, and the chair so cape-like, I thought that was the hero.

Speaking of Apophenia, I found time to play some of the games Thursday and Friday. I'm still playing through them, and I will most likely post some Slime Salad reviews on each of them throughout the month of December, but here are my early impressions:

Apophenia:

I think it's a clear sign that I've played too many shooters in my life when I knew exactly how to defeat the assassin before I fired off a single shot. Regardless, I thought it was a great mechanic, and it left me wanting more. My only criticisms so far are the camera issue plaguing the intro, and the extreme darkness of the palette. Unfortunately, my monitor is temperamental and doesn't always handle dark games with care. It's the primary reason why I won't play Bloodlust. If I can't see the game, I can't very well enjoy it. That would be a concern of mine for the future of Apophenia. But otherwise, it's a fine game, if not incredibly short at the moment.

Skyfall:

This game really surprised me. Not that I should've been surprised, but I thought it was put together very nicely, and I really liked that you had the player return to the cavern with newer, stronger people. I don't know why, but that second visit was more appealing than the first. And I agree that battles were very nice to look at. My only criticism is the lack of detail to the cloud city. I hope you spend the bugfix period filling it out. But yeah, I will be looking forward to future installments of this game. Please keep working on it.

Chronoboy's Adventures:

I already gave a mini-review of it on Castle Paradox in the dedicated thread for it. I still like the idea that money can come from jobs as much as it can come from battles. And the time system is neat, if not sometimes impractical. I tried it at 2am, and of course, all the key people were asleep. And my screen was too dark to really appreciate nighttime exploration anyway. But still, it's a neat system when used well. I had an idea for something similar a couple of years ago where you had to solve a crime in 30 days, and you could only gather certain pieces of information at certain times (in real life). I'd still like to design it someday, as I still think about it a lot. But I'm glad that someone else gave me the chance to see whether that idea would even fly.

Eternity Fragment:

I barely touched this so far. I walked around the castle a bit, waited on those NPCs in the tight corridors, and eventually fought and lost to a random enemy. I played something else after that. I will go back and play more, but my attention span is short, so game overs tend to knock me out of interest for awhile, especially when they happen in the first five minutes. I thought the NES cartridge opening was awesome.

Virida Ch. 2:

I've been waiting a long time to play this game, and for some reason I get the idea that I'm still waiting because this is, after all, chapter 2. But I really like the design here. The equipment tent was ingenius. I think you've given me a great idea for hero upgrading here. And the battle sequence, while long and ultimately futile--as I lost--was well designed, and mostly fun. Like I did for Eternity Fragment, I quit after the game over, but I will try again soon. I'm really eager to see this one finished.

HERO.RPG:

One of only three entries that I finished so far, I think it has the makings of a good RPG in there, but extra care needs to be made into presentation. Interior rooms should be centered, not left-justified. Dialogue should be split by character, and not bleed into new lines with words that aren't even finished. Also, when I say that I finished it, I'm only guessing, as I did all that I could find. I rescued the drunken flirt from the cave and didn't really know where to go from there. I also thought too many NPCs said the same thing, and I tend to cringe at lack of variety. The good news is that most of the things it needs are easy to fix. I do hope you work on presentation a bit for the bugfix session, though.

Side note: Am I the only one who finds it strange that two HotOHR entries share the same RPG file name? Do You Want to Be a Hero also uses the filename HERO.RPG.

Motrya:

I intended to save this one for last, but last night I decided I couldn't wait any longer. I had to see what the hype was about.

Let me just say right off the bat that the Lyte Snap game, while I'm still trying to figure it out, is one of the best additions to any OHR game I've played to date. In my opinion, this makes a great game stellar. And I love that the player is rewarded for defeating his classmates at the game. This inspires me to get more creative with minigames. Excellent job. I can tell that the scripting for it must've been a nightmare, and I'm glad you muscled through it. I'm still forming my opinion about the game itself (it has a strong resemblance to FUABMX V4 if I recall), but so far all the ingredients are in place. It was 4am when I played, so I didn't get far yet, but I'll try to finish it today. Certainly the most polished of all the releases this year. And even though you had more ducks in Duck in MJ 2, I think the lack of ducks in Motrya so far is forgiveable. And a note to your co-designers: the graphic design is pleasant and the music really takes the game to a higher eschelon for me. Good job to both of them.

I'll play the others as soon as possible. But I really feel like these games capture the old days well, and again I thank each of you for making it a success. I'm quite happy with the results.

On to other matters:

Be careful when giving scores to the games in this thread. The voting system for this contest will rely on scores, not necessarily on rankings, so you may not want to get attached to your scores until the 16th.

Also, I contacted IM the other night about the T-shirts. At some point, if he hasn't already, he'll be asking all the on-time entrants for addresses and shirt sizes. If you don't hear from him soon, let me (or him) know. Mogri, I told him about your situation, so you should be among the ones contacted. If you aren't, let me know.

Lastly, I wrote this earlier in one of my edits, but I haven't heard anyone discuss it yet, so I'll ask again here: Would any of you be willing to create a youtube trailer for the Heart of the OHR games? I think it would be nice to have a short compilation of what this contest was about. Also, if anyone would be willing to score it (musically, not numerically), that would also be fantastic.

And just to throw my own game into the discussion, I am still trying to put the newest Powerstick Man XE trailer together, but Windows Movie Maker has got to be one of the buggiest programs on the planet, and I keep finding myself losing significant changes to the presentation thanks to its constant unwillingness to work properly. Granted, what I have so far is pretty ridicu-awesome (in my opinion--you all might think it's stupid), but the moral of the story is that it's taking me far longer to finish it then I had realized. I still plan to finish it soon so that it can have relevance to the Heart of the OHR name, but if Movie Maker continues to hammer my skull with headaches, this possibility will become less likely. Second moral of the story: buy a functional movie-making program.

Also, I've noticed some dialogue problems with my game, and I'll try to fix some of them today. I haven't decided yet if I'm gonna upload a fixed version or not, though. Since this is a preview copy, I'm not sure if uploading a new version would make any sense, as the official release will have major changes in some areas anyway. Does anyone insist on seeing a fixed version between now and the 30th, or can you wait until this summer when the finished version will *hopefully* be released?

Also, if anyone could be so kind to send me a list of bugs you've encountered in the preview, and/or things you really liked about it, I'd be quite grateful.

Okay, that's it for now.

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Place Obligatory Signature Here

Pepsi: I can assure you that Motrya is absolutely nothing like FUABMX, at least in terms of gameplay. At least not the FUABMX I remember where I spent like 10 hours grinding to beat some rat in a cellar.

I am glad people seem to like the card game, but not that surprised since the testers seemed to unanimously love it.

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My website, the home of Motrya:
http://www.jshgaming.com

Chronoboy has done a great job putting together the video reviews - maybe he should be the one to work on the contest trailer? He already has a bunch of footage to work with...

Just a quick status update. I've been pretty busy lately and my work on fixing Tales 2 is progressing a bit slowly. I've rebalanced a couple things, and fixed a couple issues where some NPCs were still walking away from the player while their textbox(es) were displayed. But I'm not sure I found all instances of this, so if anyone encounters this (or any other seeming bug), please let me know!

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I am Srime

SDHawk has found a lot of typos today that people somehow missed... I've uploaded some minor fixes and will probably continue to do so.

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My website, the home of Motrya:
http://www.jshgaming.com

Just uploaded a bugfixing update to Okédoké. Forgot when the bugfix time window is (Dec. 15th?), but hopefully this is still within it.

Anyway... the December 4th update fixes:

* A scripting mistake that let you open up menus on the chapter title cards and the Game Over screen
* A tag problem that let you fight the thugs in Chapter 1's desert area twice
* A pushable-NPC error in the Cavemen's Turf in Chapter 2 which made it possible to box yourself in and get stuck
* Some minor tilemap/wallmap problems here and there in Chapter 4
* One of the critical hit attacks was missing the "Critical Hit!" message
* The Grand Poobah of the Amish was missing the "boss death" sound effect

And also, I expanded the inventory size to 129 slots (because 60 was too easy to fill up during Chapter 4's "find the parts for the van" section.) Unfortunately, this means the return of the scrollbars which look very out of place on an NES-style game... wish there was some way to make them only show up if you actually needed them (after filling up the first 60 inventory slots.)

Of course, the Castle Paradox gamelist doesn't have this version yet since my Internet connection at home doesn't get along well with CP's uploader... so this version's only on Slime Salad for now. I should have it on both gamelists Monday, though.

Thanks for the video Chronoboy, I hadn't even picked up on that bug, and I found the rest of the annotations helpful and interesting.

I might have a better demo released before the grace period is over - however, due to the amount of extra content, I understand that it cannot count as a submission to HotOHR. That's ok

guo, technically your game is short of the 30-minute requirement, so if you can get it to 30 minutes during the grace period, I'll accept the additions. Besides, you already have the maps available to the public, so I don't see it being that significant of an upgrade. Fix what you need to, to get the minimum requirement.

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Place Obligatory Signature Here

Thanks PR,

I'll do just that. How much longer do I have?

Before December 16th.

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Place Obligatory Signature Here

Thanks, I will not squander this opportunity.

There's a few things I'd like to fix in EF before the end of the grace period.

-Rebalance
-Dialog Editing
-Different Music
-Sound Effects
-Sprite Replacement (mainly the golem, kraken, and leviathan)
-Ending Cutscene
-Additional Player Commentary

I know that it's been stated that we can't "add another chapter," but I'd like to have a definition of "chapter." I have all of my content in place, but I'd really like to add maybe a dozen dialog boxes and more in-game glitching. Is this within the guidelines?

Seems I've run short of time for working on Viridia this weekend, so I played a few of the other entries and wrote quick haiku reviews with general impressions.

Legendary Heroes
Blandish but charming,
green man looks like Battletoad;
fire is killing me.

Skyfall
The heroes are neat,
they have much to talk about.
What is this green rock?

Chronoboy
Something about this
is very discouraging.
I feel unwelcome.

A real-time clock in an OHR game? Sounds great on paper, but it just didn't work out for me.
I'm can't adjust my schedule just to play this.