Heart of the OHR Contest 2012

NO!!!!! ME WAN ME tea-SHIRT! GUAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR!!!!

Actually, I'm fine with it. I find it a little amusing that T-Shirts were even given out for this contest, before. It's a shame that we may not be getting them this time, but perhaps we can fashion our own iron-on type things or something.

(The real reason I wanted in on this contest was to get the word out about AR-PUH-GUH! some more)

---

dOn'T MiNd mE! i'M jUsT CoNtAgIoUs!!!
Play Orbs CCG: http://orbsccg.com/r/4r6x

REIGN OF GRELOK



Made some graphics and added some Potraits and backdrops. The game is finnished but some backdrops are still missing. havefun with this!

---

"I can't buy food with glory"

Not sure what you mean by that, but I noticed I was missing some things I had planned on adding. I reuploaded with the shiny new stuff. Enjoy!

Final Dragon Legacy

---

Hey, I just met you, and this is crazy... So here's some lunchmeat... Sandwich, maybe?

Hey all.

I've been trying to keep my game under wraps: I thought it would be a cool surprise to just release and not talk about it.

But I've got a couple of major bugs that I need to work out before release. The game in its current state is almost unplayable unless you suppress scripts, and even then I don't know what could happen.

I've basically got two choices here. First is to try to fix what I can and release that mess by tonight so that I can say I made it in time. Alternatively I can not do that and instead try to fix everything and have a finished product be the first product.

I feel bad missing the deadline that so many others made, but I would feel even worse having a public release that doesn't reflect the game or my abilities at all.

I guess I'll decide by tonight if I have fixed enough to make a release.

well, you have about 4 hours or so until it's no longer the 30th. or something like that.
So I guess you may want to hurry.

---

dOn'T MiNd mE! i'M jUsT CoNtAgIoUs!!!
Play Orbs CCG: http://orbsccg.com/r/4r6x

hurry!~ release all the things!

This is a lot of games. I assume this thread is also house to discussion of said games?

Stuff I've played so far:

No More Villians: Part of me wishes the contest results themselves were more integrated with the game part. But on the other hand, it's pretty hilarious to just list them offhand at the end like an afterthought.

This game is pretty okay! Given the focus on unique gimmick battles, I think making the battles a little more puzzle-oriented would have made it cooler. Partially my own fault there since I played one of the betas and grinded up in advance of the surlaw fight in fear (which ended up perhaps unnecessary). I wonder if it's more interesting with a less power house of a party (I went Gahn/Vlad/Mu/Slith, which was quite self-sustaining).

I feel like the part at the end is rather misleading since you can't read most of the villian graves, leading you to miss the plot-critical ones. Not a huge deal to save reload but felt like a strange omission.

Dreg Sector: This being the first time I was a non-primary contributor to a game, it's real weird to talk about something I contributed to, but still feel like I'm talking about it like a normal player. I didn't have a chance to spend a whole lot of time playing this during development unfortunately. But I sunk an hour into it last night, and I'm enjoying the heck out of it.

There's a lot of real smart design choices tucked away in here. When I first saw trading integrated into the regular OHR shop interface I was afraid it was going to be a nightmare to keep track of how much I paid for stuff to make a profit, but thanks to the constrained 25-100 value of goods it's pretty easy to keep track of it without resorting to paper. In general I love space exploration games, and the textual descriptions here make the world a joy to explore.

My only real worry so far is that I've about mastered blue space, but passed up on most of the quest opportunities along the way. I'd like to go ahead and finish those up, but it's kind of annoying plowing through easy-but-slow random battles on the way through. Not really the game's fault though, I'd simply suggest to new players that they start to take on the missions sooner rather than later.

I also really like that this is a game that takes advantage of the stop-time-on-player's-turn feature, since most OHR games still haven't really taken to it yet. This is pretty key to me enjoying this since most OHR battles move so fast that I don't have time to process them fully.

So long as you get yourself in the mood for slower battles, and reading lots of text, there's a lot to like here.

-

Hoping to play more hotohr soon, but figured a little partial feedback for the authors so far would be nice.

But he presented parodies of the games in the order of the results, last place to first.

Yes. But...it's not exactly the suspense of a results show, of characters reacting to shockingly results. But it is something.

You actually have nine more hours. Again, the deadline happens at 6am EST, or approximately the time that November 30th is over worldwide.

Mystic, I don't know if you saw the last post I had written, but I remembered that I had allowed late entries in 2010 at the cost of the late people receiving the entry prizes. If you don't mind forfeiting your bug bounty (and possibly your T-shirt, if that's still part of the prize pot), then you can release for the first time any time before the bugfix window ends if you insist on keeping the game under wraps before you release it. I'd rather you release a placeholder copy tonight and a fixed copy sometime in the coming week so that you can be fully eligible. But I'd also hate for you to miss the contest completely, so if you have to take advantage of the late release policy, then I'd rather you did that than skip release altogether.

This goes for anyone who's still racing the 6am deadline.

---

Place Obligatory Signature Here

I just played through Kinvesard. It's fun and has some good ideas. I dig the customizable party and the ability to play monstrous races. The lack of random encounters is cool and the dungeon feels very concise with lots of interesting features and very little wasted space.

Darn shame that the demo is so short though. Spoonweaver, I sent you a PM with some suggestions and bug reports.

I've got a couple more hours. I think I can get something.

What's the view on what a "placeholder" game is? Should I wall off sections of my game? You know, with "Under Construction" NPCs or something? Or just let the player run free through untested waters...

Neither solution seems elegant and I wish it wouldn't leave a bad taste in peoples' mouths.

Oh well, we'll see. I apologize, in any case. Especially because some of the games here seem to be, ah, better versions of the game I've been working on in the first place.

I'm sure your game will be great!


Just upload your game as is, don't spend extra time making it fancy for the upload if you plan to update it in like a day or two

we'll all understand

Ah yes, thanks for the pm of bugs. I love that sort of thing.

I'm glad you liked the game. I plan to update it a bunch over the next couple of months.
Legendary Heroes will most likely not get another update till
Heart of the Official Hamster Republic 3: Hamsters in Time

Officially I'd like to state that I would have liked to cover as many games in the entire history of the Terrible Games contest as I could, but simply ran out of time and had to settle on the few that there are mentioned in it. The general idea is that the first few "games" are really demonstrations of how each individual character performs in combat, and grow progressively more difficult/complex as the main game proceeds. In essence, it plays a bit like you'd expect an ACTUAL RPG should in that it gives you time to learn how the game's rules are set up, but by the time you're allowed to actually swap out your party members and play around, the game's pretty much over. JUST LIKE Final Fantasy XIII and Xenosaga with their hour long cutscenes with 5 minute sprinkles of actual gameplay. If there's a joke to be made about modern console RPGS, this is it. At least in this game, the cutscenes are generally pretty darn hilarious, and the main characters don't do nearly as much complaining and whining.

Going back to the rushing through content, I originally planned for the villains to each confront and fight their respective heroes, which likely would have doubled the amount of work that went into it. By that time, October had just finished and I realized I had far too much to cover before the contest would have ended, and I had resolved NOT to have another unended game on my hands. The fact that the villains only ACTUALLY fight half the heroes and just cheese their way through the other three is pretty hilarious in my opinion, but was also ultimately a conscious decision on my part to shorten the length of the game and keep it under an hour or so. There's a FEW parts where some of the old "this could be a 5 hour OHR game" still peek out in the free roaming areas, but for the most part the length and amount of actual content are wholly a result of time constraints and not wanting the game to get dull before its time. Incidentally, if you skip some of the content, most of its optional and has ZERO effect on the endgame, except for a whole whopping total of TWO things you have to do to progress through the game. In fact, you could probably completely ignore all the shops.

Gahn/Mu/Slither/Vlad is probably the ideal party combination since all their abilities play off each other, but for the most part every Villain's moveset is roughly based off of Final Fantasy XIII's job classes again. I'd imagine most people used that one at the endgame, though maybe someone swapped out Vlad for Billy once they discovered Billy's secret 20-hit Fist of the North Star combo.

The only character who DOESN'T fit into the whole party mechanic is Cthulhu, but the game outright says over and over that "Squid are Different". Case in point: you can PROBABLY win the last battle with ONLY Cthulhu in your party. In retrospect it seems to fit, because he's the only character who doesn't have any obvious party combinations with any other characters.

And really that's where the whole puzzle-battle mechanic dies, is when the player can simply change their party around until they find an optimal combination that works every time. When the player is limited to only one or two commands that actually allow them to advance in a battle, a puzzle works, but when you can sit back and pump up a character whose actions trigger a boss's counterattack, eventually you can just one-shot the boss and brute-force your way through whatever the developer throws at you. The alternate way around this is to simply give the bosses more health, but that's really only a way to drag out the length of the fight and NOT make it more interesting.

---

To friends long gone, and those I've yet to meet - thank you.