Heart of the OHR Contest 2012

For further details see The Cave of Immense Riches review in issue 54 of Hamsterspeak: http://superwalrusland.com/ohr/issue54/index.html

Deadline comes knocking. How does the game look?

Sadly, I got a nasty throat disease over the weekend. I think it is the sorest my throat has ever been. The short of it is that I had planned to do a last-weekend push for the finish line that just didn't happen. The game is theoretically beatable at this point, but three of the four dungeons are unfinished (one of them is mostly done, but the other two don't have any content at all besides the opening screen and shop), I just barely finished the scripts, and nothing is tested. So the game is complete in a blindfolded-dartboard sort of way.

But this is actually not terrible, all things considered, because the main storyline is finished and completely playable (at least in theory). With that particular deadline behind me, I'm turning my eye towards the game's balance.

My goal is to make the game pretty hard. Now, before that turns you off, let me state a few Super Penguin Facts:

Getting a party wipe sends you back to town with no penalty, aside from having to wait until tomorrow for more dungeon-diving.
Getting a game over (as in Recettear, received because you don't have enough money when payment is due) gives you the option to retry. This sends you back to day 1, but you retain all your ingredients, recipes, equipment, restaurant level, and contest level.

So you can't actually lose the game in the long run: if you play it long enough, you will get enough money to beat the game. And if you are actually winning the contests, then you will get enough money very quickly. (There are more contest tiers than there are contests in the scope of a single run, so on a retry, you will make a very large amount of money through contests.)

But I'm balancing the difficulty around a single, no-retry run. So here I'm staring at a spreadsheet that tells me that with a perfect score in the restaurant every single day of the game will net you at least 13,000 and maybe as much as 16,000 -- that's about 1/3 of your total debt over the course of the game! A more modest score of 75% each night will land you about 9,000. Using these numbers, I can set up the contest reward tiers so that a no-retry run will probably require you to win all of its contests in addition to doing at least decently in the restaurant. I can also adjust the numbers to make sure that it's possible -- even if very difficult -- to win a no-combat, no-retry run.

If you don't care about challenge and just want to enjoy the game, then the retry feature is for you. You can't fill your recipe book in a single run anyway (though you can keep playing after you win and complete it that way).

Mega Tact v1.1
Super Penguin Chef
Wizard Blocks

Post some of your scripting problems in a new thread on here somewhere. Be it a technical problem or troubles figuring out how to make something work, I'm sure someone will be along shortly to help you out.