OHR Arcade

I've been thinking of making a new site for the OHR community. The name of this site is OHR Arcade. This site would be made to appeal more to the players of our games here at the ohr community then to the developers.
In no way am I making this site to replace Slime Salad or any other site in the OHR Community. I simply feel that there is a niche in the community that this site could fill. This site will not feature a forum, and will be more of a game database, like The Hamster Wheel.

If you would like to help in any way, please let me know. I'm currently looking for people to help code the site, as well as people to help design graphics for the site.

Sounds like a cool idea.

This website should probably feature a lot of features that SS or CP doesn't have. As suggested in the other thread, this site should use some more sorting systems. A tag system would be nice, as it could narrow down searches. Simple, generic tags would work. Some possible tags could be:

RPG Style: Duh.
Non-RPG Style: Not every game is RPG styled, as seen in some games.
Zombies: Games that focus around zombies, zombie apocolypse's, zombie viruses, ect, would fall into here.
Modern: Games that would seem modern. They're set in times that would seem to emulate our current real life present.
Post-Modern/Futuristic: This is futuristic. This is like hover cars, laser blasters, ect...
Space: Futuristic doesn't nessecarily mean Space. These games are set in space.
Middle Ages: The traditional RPG setting, with its swords and magic spells, and knightlyness and wizardry...

See my idea?

User submitted tags in addition to allowing a game's author to add/remove tags is a good idea. Some people will probably use this system to troll authors they don't like so have fun moderating it!

Also, if you do a rating system just do a simple thumbs up/down for users to click.

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Super Walrus Land: Mouth Words Edition

More tag ideas!

Silly: These games are humor focused.
Joke Game: These games were solely created to be terrible. These games were never mean't to be serious.
Contest Entry: Games with these tags were entered in a contest.
Scary: For games that contain frightening content. There are indeed a few released games around that can be scary. Try playing Bloodlust, or Tilt with the volume on.
Christmas: For games with a Christmas related setting.
Halloween: For games with a Halloween related setting.


Add 1 to Sarcasm.

I think there should be no review/ratings. Just straight posts.

I think a like/comment system similar to youtube would work best.

I definitely agree with this.

On tags: The site should have a set of basic ones but allow users to submit anything they like. As the site grows, people will begin to use common groupings.

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Super Walrus Land: Mouth Words Edition

My one misgiving with the concept is that it's One More Site, when there's already hardly enough lifeblood to go around. Given the slow rate of releases (a handful a month), what's going to make people come back to the site?

On another note, the name indicates that it's OHR-only. Was that your intent?

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Mega Tact v1.1
Super Penguin Chef
Wizard Blocks

That's definitely a good point. The site will need to be built for just about any user on the Internet can use it to search and download a cool RPG game. If releases are too far apart, the site can lose interest by the general public. YouTube keeps users as there is always something to see on YouTube. Perhaps the site can have more than just a gamelist, but perhaps a blog targeted at the RPG genre in general, as RPG gamers are the main target audience. If the blog is OHR central, it may not appeal to every RPG gamer, they would want to hear about other games too. Perhaps doing weekly game reviews for not only OHR games, but other indie titles, and perhaps even the odd commercial RPG. This community has a large knowledge of RPG games and we should have no problems reviewing those type of commercial games.


It seems so. Although I'd opt for site that would target a larger audience to keep interest in the site(besides mainly OHR devs/gamers). Currently the other game lists in the community serve the needs for OHR devs and gamers, but if a regular gamer would pass by the site, they may visit once, depending on the content they see.

I was working on a new game list last year, the project halted as I was becoming too busy in developing my game at the time. Seeing these points that Mogri has, it makes me wonder if creating a game list would be worth it for anyone but the OHR community. Advertising to the rest of the worlds RPG gamers is going to be the tricky part, and making the site appeal to those gamers. Advertising can be done on many indie forums around the net, as there are going to be plenty of indie gamers there.

Another problem I see with attracting new gamers or developers, is the the name of the engine is not really that searchable by search engines. The game list will need to have the proper HTML META tags in order for search engines to see the site, not as an OHR community site, but as a site for RPG gamers to get their fix. There are many great titles in this community, which have a commercial quality to them(both story and graphics wise), these should be the first titles to be available on such a game list.

On the note of game titles, I'm not really sure the game list should have unfinished projects, this can turn a gamer away. Considering how many unfinished/unpolished games there are, this will only make the site look bad in the end. Sorry James, until you can finish Wandering Hamster, it shouldn't be on the new list. Perhaps now we can see a finished Wandering Hamster title.

The current slime salad META tags could use some updating, it's too general and needs more keywords:

keywords=games,game design,free games
description=Game design discussion

I see the word "game" in there many times, although relevant. Since many other sites are going to have similar META tags, it will hinder the site from being seen in general search results. Also, the more links to the site the better, as it crawler will make more hits to it. There are webmaster tools out there to check the site and explain what can be changed to optimize search results.

It's hard to get most people in this community to contribute one review a year, let alone a week.

A list of finished games only would be like ten games long.

I like the comparison of this to The Hamster Wheel, which I was sad to see die.

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Super Walrus Land: Mouth Words Edition

Well, I agree that the slow rate of release, let alone the slow rate of release of GOOD games, may turn people off from the site. However, I don't see how that's different from now. Hopefully the new site will bring in lots of players and the developers will see this and be more motivated to make games. Otherwise, the site will struggle with a lack of new content.

I like the idea of the blog to go with the site, but I'm leaning towards not doing it. It doesn't really fit into the picture of the site I have in my head.


Yes. If it was to host something like all indies games, then it would really be no different than a site like Yo Yo Games, or GMarcade. However, I could see the benefit of having a site like that. More variety would mean more players, which is what we're going for.
But if the site is going that route than I don't even see the point. It would be better to just, as a community, start posting our games on one of those sites that already exist.


The main purpose of the new website isn't to simply branch out and get more gamers though.
OHR Arcade is meant to be an attempt at making a more showcase styled centric website for the community. Slime Salad simply doesn't give off the feel of a site that specializes in the OHR engine. It in fact hosts games other than OHR games and it's the main site of the community. The actual main showcase website of the community is the wiki imo.
Perhaps OHR Arcade will turn into a project to simply put a nicer looking game list on the wiki.

Well, after talking about it with a couple people I've decided not to make waves in the community by making "yet another site".

I do think using some of the ideas here at slime salad might be cool. However, I guess these things are completely up to mogri.

New name I know it's your site and you can frankly call it whatever you want. We'll still all continue to come. But this is also the front lining site of the community. It would be cool if it had a more ohr name.

Thumbnails for the game list They could be fairly tiny and go right where those slimes are on the left.

Thumbnails next to the games on the right of the front page. basically the same as the idea above this one.

smaller game ads on the front page. Right now only the first one can really be seen without scrolling. It would be cooler if they were a bit smaller. Simply auto adjusting the pictures would prolly accomplish this.

Repeat games on game of the month. a bit off topic, but I think letting games win game of the month more than once will keep some great old titles alive. Maybe if you just let games that havent been game of the month for like a year be GotM again? The current method is turning going to start spot lighting some pretty obsure games imo.

3-4 new ways to sort the games. keywords were mentioned, but I don't think you need to go that far. Maybe if you just let people weed out the tech demos and graphic packs. Or look only for those. Also, the default sort of having the newest edited game on top is a bit strange. But I don't have a good idea for what the default should be so never mind I guess.


Anyways, it would be cool if 1 or 2 of these things could find their way on to the site. I think OHR Arcade is basically dead. Making a site for the community without community support would be dumb.
I'd comment on the rating system but given my history with it I'll keep my mouth shut on the issue.

Should rename this thread into "Taunt Mogri"

I'll comment on the rating system for you. Here goes, I'll try my best...



But there is when voting. Which is more metacritic than facebook. Metacritic aint fun for game devs, if you've read any about it.

Which brings an interesting idea, a "share" link, for facebook and other social networks. It's a great way for people who enjoyed a game to advertise it. The Facebook API for sharing/liking is fairly straightforward with connectors for PHP which Mogri could use.

Alright, I'm totally going to do this again.

This time I'm focusing on 2 things.

1) Kickstarter funding

2) A open game database that allows users to sell their games.