FBC Discussion & Voting

OKAY OKAY. The contest is over, and here are the entries:

Momoka: Mostly Involving Robots
http://www.slimesalad.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=72599#72599

shakeyair: there is nothing left
http://www.slimesalad.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=72529#72529

RMSephy: Arms Race
http://www.castleparadox.com/gamelist-display.php?game=1033

Gizmog: Don't Push the Button 2011
http://www.castleparadox.com/gamelist-display.php?game=1034

That's four entries! Count them: there are four of them. Here's what you do:

Play the games. All of them. There are only four; it shouldn't take long!

Reply with your votes. Give each game a score from 1 to 5, where 1 is BAD and 5 is GREAT.

That's it! Do it!

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Mega Tact v1.1
Super Penguin Chef
Wizard Blocks

Momoka: Mostly Involving Robots 2/5
The opening wall of text said I couldn't just heal and win the battle, because what's his face would get stronger. Yet that's exactly what I did. Bonus points for Still Alive.midi

shakeyair: there is nothing left 5/5
Best of the best. You could've won the Halloween contest with this easily, and it's doubly cool how effective it is with just the fight option.

RMSephy: Arms Race 4/5
This was the most strategic of the entries, but the (seemingly?) random order of battles can lead to a particularly easy or difficult run. I also didn't like doing nothing for half of the final boss battle, doing stuff is fun.
Dripping is the coolest concept.

Gizmog: Don't Push the Button 2011 2/5
Kind of wish the voice acting plan had come through. Without it, we've just got a generic knockoff of a concept everybody's already seen twice, which might explain the deja vu I experienced during the entire creation process. Oh well, at least IRC'll leave me alone for a few days.

There's some order to the battle orders (i.e. you get some sort of healing enemy every four battles) but they are still sort of random. That's why I tried to err on the easy side whenever I could, but I guess the RNG still finds ways to screw the player over.

The final boss attacks a little bit faster every cycle, which is supposed to punish the player if he waits around too much, but I guess it wasn't punishing enough. I'll think of something worse for the next fight game contest.


EDIT: Oh, and my votes!
Agree with just about everything Giz said.

Shakeyair: 5/5 The best game and very scary. Every second I spend playing the game makes me feel uncomfortable like some sort of high school shooter. I'm going to have nightmares about freakish clay cannibals later, I'm sure.
RMSephy: 3/5 I was going to give myself a 5 but I gave myself a 3 instead because Shakeyair's game is that good.

Momoka: 2/5 I can see this working well as part of a bigger game, but it's hard to have that much stuff thrown at you at once. And like Giz said, healing works.

Gizmog: 1/5 Tick tock.

Momoka: Mostly Involving Robots 3/5

shakeyair: there is nothing left 5/5

RMSephy: Arms Race 3/5

Gizmog: Don't Push the Button 2011 1/5

Momoka: Mostly Involving Robots 3/5
- Really quite something, conceptually. It works but then again on some levels it doesn't work

shakeyair: there is nothing left 5/5
- Fantastic, This one cuts right down to the soul and the gameplay is innovative too!

RMSephy: Arms Race 3/5
- I found it fast and confusing but the gameplay was solid indeed.

Gizmog: Don't Push the Button 2011 2/5
- 1 for TICK! and another 1 for TOCK!

Thank you everyone for the kind words and ratings

Momoka’s Mostly Involving Robots: 3/5

I think what Momoka is going for is really nice, but the numbers are off. Like, this could have been a really fun fight if the balancing was better. I like how the robots sort of have their own routines and are only capable of doing one thing. Also, it took me a minute to figure out what the song was on the map, but I chuckled when I realized.

Gizmog’s Don’t Push the Button: 2/5

I feel like this is a joke that I’m not in on. The tick-tock effect is really nice, and its incredibly unnerving. From looking around a bit, I get the feeling that this game is a response to certain people pressuring you, but I think in the end it falls flat.

RMSephy’s Arms Race: N/A (2.5?)

Froze most recent Mac version of OHR, and I don’t have any other operating systems available to me.

ShakeyAir’s (thats me!) There is Nothing Left: N/A (2.5?)

I am torn with rating my own game since I don’t think I really accomplished the main aim of this contest, in that the fight in this game is not one which can be won. (unless you count the ‘good’ ending as winning, and that is not really anything new, a similar style of battle was in Mother 3, which I really hope everyone here has played) As in, the game doesn’t even try to pretend its an RPG battle at all.

On the other hand, I believe that the greatest compliment anyone can make about any sort of creative work is to say it has affected you, especially if its in a lingering sort of way. I spent a lot of time on my entry trying to get the atmosphere to be the way it is and tried a lot of small things to maximize the effect, and seeing that it worked is pretty awesome, especially this being my first finished game. (I cannot for the life of me get high scores working in Tetris)

And also because the game doesn’t affect me the same as it would a player. So I’m a horrible judge of whether it works or not.

shakeyair: Well, that's obviously not supposed to happen. Can you tell me when it freezes? Right after the title screen, or in the middle of the battle? I have a hunch what might be going wrong.

All I get is a white screen and music. Again, I am using a slightly obsolete version of the engine, and I would assume your game is not at fault.

I loved "there is nothing left" although I couldn't beat it. I was never able to get any further than the second wave where they have teeth.

Shakeyair, TMC updated the Mac build yesterday. Can you try it and see if RMSephy's game still has the problem?

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/16291524/ohrrpgce-macosx-2011-02-07-wip.tar.bz2

I second "There is Nothing Left"

James:

The new Mac build runs "Arms Race" fine for me. I was having the same problem ShakeyAir was with the previous version.

Now, the voting:

There is Nothing Left (4/5):

Short but sweet. The visuals do a great job of conveying the atmosphere, and while there really isn't much 'game' to it, it does what it set out to effectively. Perhaps a little melodramatic.

Arms Race (3/5):

This is the one I sunk the most time into, and I ended up very frustrated. I couldn't beat it without opening the .rpg file itself and cheating myself into tons more HP. I believe I had the basic strategy down: Have some high attackers to take care of the bruisers, some low attackers for the helpful enemies that die quickly (mushroom, wisp), and go nuts when dripping shows up. If you're lucky enough to have buffed dodge on a character, use him to attack the trap, though this happened rarely, and even when I did have some dodge the trap seemed to hit more than miss anyway. Am I doing something wrong? (those guys, far and away, were the toughest to deal with.) Also, even a character with two legendary swords and a sniper scope couldn't take out a fairy! What gives?

Anyway, as evidenced above, I at least put a lot of thought into this game, and that's worth something. Better balancing would've made it something really neat.

Mostly Involving Robots (2/5):

This has the opposite problem of Arms Race: it's way too easy. The intro explanation suggests that there needs to be some strategy used to win the battle, but it seems impossible to lose. Unfortunately, I find games that are too hard more interesting than games that are too easy. With better balance, this could've been great.

I also like that there appears to be a full-fledged town just past your brother.

Don't Push the Button (1/5):

Why bother?

Camdog: Appreciate your comments. I planned for the game to be hard enough that people wouldn't be able to beat it on their first tries, but easy enough that the player would never run into an enemy order that makes it impossible to finish the game. That said, there's probably still some RNG shenanigans to work out.

I did a few tests on dodging probabilities before. 1 point of dodge on a hero should let him dodge counters about 30% of the time, and 2 points of dodge should let him dodge about 60% of the time.

Asides from that...

1. It's much better having just a single attacker rather than splitting your ATK between two or more heroes. In the long run, you're still going to deal about the same amount of damage each turn.

2. ATK doesn't really count against the fairy, only AIM matters. You need to hit it three times. It heals far more HP than any other enemy in the game, so I had to make it a challenge. (Though thinking about it... I might've made it a bit too hard to get AIM.)

3. Consider having a useless hero that you can just sacrifice against the Traps (especially in later rounds). You can stand a chance against the final boss with three or even two well-endowed heroes.

If you can't find the 'good' ending in my game, this might help you.
The waves are endless. For a while, they keep getting more distorted, and saying more messed up things, but they never stop coming.

You only have one command in the game. But you have 2 choices...

(obviously, Item doesnt count)


I will get on to testing Arms Race and updating my score soon.

EDIT: I am interested to hear if you felt the music in my game was effective? That was probably the main thing I struggled with.

Ah, I was wondering if that was it. I did get both endings.

(edit) I got to the waves where they deal 10 damage per scream, which I assume is as far as it goes.

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Mega Tact v1.1
Super Penguin Chef
Wizard Blocks