Heart of the OHR Contest 2012

Playing through Super Penguin Chef: I'm pretty certain the scoring bug that was highlighted in the screenshot a few posts above has to do with reversed variable displays. "Team Penguin" is reporting the combined score for "Team Food" and vice versa.

Having said that, I really like this game. I'm tempted to stop now and vote just so my experience with the completed version can be purer. Though, I do want to play more of it, so we'll see. I think I've played enough to weigh my vote fairly. (I'll be giving more detailed feedback in my ongoing voting post further up the thread shortly.)

A note about the voting deadline: Tomorrow morning is the official close of the voting period, but as I mentioned a few days ago, I won't actually ignore your votes until after I start compiling the scores, which I don't believe I'll have much time for before Sunday. So, if you keep playing and keep updating your votes, I won't yell at you or put your newest scores on ice. This should give some of you who really want to vote on more games but just don't have much time a little bit of breathing room. This isn't to say that you should stop commenting and scoring after the fact because I'm sure the authors would still appreciate as much feedback as you can give them, even after the scores are locked. I plan to continue to give feedback as I continue to play, even when the contest is over. Feel free to keep posting in this thread with such feedback.

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Place Obligatory Signature Here

I never actually made a feature request (I don't think), so you don't owe me anything. If I did make a feature request, I still don't want you to pay me, but I do want to know what that feature request was.

Pepsi: Thanks, that's very helpful. I look forward to your full comments.

And more generally, thanks to everyone who's commented and reported bugs. I plan on doing a bug fix release before the full release, but I might squeeze in a little content, too.

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Mega Tact v1.1
Super Penguin Chef
Wizard Blocks

Reign of Grelok (Misac)
Quick Notes Through 50% completion
-Why won't any of the people at the church talk to me?
-Oh shit, there's rats around the church?
-Wait, how do I save?
-HP restored on lvl up good design choice for early game
-Why do I walk BEHIND the tufts of grass?
-Lots of textual errors, but the game plays fairly smoothly; it'd be nice if battle speed were a bit faster
-It says I found a "cristal" orb, but I don't see it in my inventory...?
-BUG: no wallmap when exiting church
-The intro backdrops for each map change were kinda neat at first, but should be 'skippable'; rather than a set wait time, I think it should be a 'wait for key' or something so that the player can move on quickly if desired
-Ability to 're-ask' where to go is a very nice touch
-Entering of tower was really jarring
-Haha, after getting sword fixed, the blacksmith goes back to being a jerk

Quick Thoughts After
I only completed 50% of the game??? I talked to everyone in the town, and successfully found the book that allowed me to 'beat' Grelok without a fight. Was it because I didn't try to talk to enough of the zombies?

Okay, this game had a lot of simple issues. The text is bad, although never indecipherable. Battles were too slow, and also became monotonous rather quickly. Even a single ability would have been nice (especially if it were a 'speed-up' spell). There were a handful of maps that were ridiculously large for no reason (cave within mountain). The plot was vaguely follow-able, but rarely interesting and certainly not moving. I'm also not really sure how I came by a sword that would work with that 'cristal'. And why can't I save my game???

All that said, the game suffered from no truly fatal flaws. Gameplay was boring but smooth in the sense that it was never overly difficult to either win battles or to figure out what to do. The battles themselves, while terribly slow, were actually reasonably balanced in their own simplistic way, together with the 'restore HP on level up' mechanic. I never died, but I did come close a couple of times. All of this leads me to giving a rating giving the benefit of the doubt.

RATING: 4

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I am Srime

Silhouette (Mystic)
Quick Notes Through ~30min
-BUG: some of the [exit] choices in the submenus don't exit
-Panicked after first battle, then was surprised that health was restored
-Battles are fairly quick, but total lack of randomization makes them feel like a chore while exploring
-Equipping setup is very cool
-Gameplay is not my style

Quick Thoughts After
This game seems pretty professionally handled. The graphics and music are good for what they are, and all of the design aspects seem pretty solidly built. The story seems interesting.

However, this game is definitely not for me. It really feels like more a puzzle game than an RPG. Each encounter (and they are carefully controlled area by area) is entirely deterministic, which means that if you fail the first time, you have only to try switching tactics, or equipment, and then try again until the correct method is found. From that point, all those same encounters (and there will be a handful if you don't know where to go, so need to explore) will be played out in exactly the same fashion. This isn't my style of RPG. Despite all of the wonderful options for equipping your orbs, this results in making gameplay feel surprisingly one-dimensional to me.

Still, I cannot give a game that is so technically solid a poor rating.

RATING: 5

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I am Srime

I had your request written down as "Easier shop customization? (too vague)". I will put your three dollars to other good uses :)

I do have some ideas for shop customization, but they are all dependant on a large amount of shop data and code cleanup.

My feature requests were done? Sweet.

Well, one of them was, and you only get a bounty for one. Removing the "ITEM" menu in battle is already possible in the current nightly builds. Your other request was "Taunting" but that needs more explanation, so I am not sure what my plan for it is yet.

Auuugh I missed the deadline. Well, in case you're still compiling, here are my scores for posterity (for the few games I played)

Dungeonmen: 8/10

Addictive excellent game reminds me of the distant, nostalgia-filtered past combined with modern game design ideas. Music is great.

AR-PUH-GUH: 6/10

I really tried to like this, but the game seems to refuse my every advance. It's not bad and pretty charming, but could use more work

Universal Wars: 3/10

I would give this an even lower score except that I kept playing the game even though I hated every second of it. There is something beneath the terrible graphics, the boring battles, and the awkward dialogue. This is a diamond that needs a lot of polishing.

Cool Guy Bob Surlaw: N/A, didn't play enough

I just wanted to say that this game has an attitude and I like it. Gonna keep playing more and update this later, maybe.

The K'hyurbhi Lands: 8/10

Fantastically polished with excellent, catchy dialogue. Feels like a combination between Mario RPG and Dragon Quest. Love it. I suppose the only reason I wouldn't give it a 9 or a 10 is because I wasn't absolutely blown away. I'm not sure what would actually get a 9 or a 10, though.

years and years of work...

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

I don't expect to start putting the scores together until Sunday, so you should have time to sneak in additional votes if you feel compelled to edge your way to completion. As I said before, I'm not gonna refuse your votes because you missed the deadline. I'll only refuse them once I start figuring out who won.

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Place Obligatory Signature Here

Yes, this is a bug in the SDL_Mixer library that the OHR uses. Sorry about that. You can avoid it by using the music_native or music_native2 backends instead, but they have lots of other bugs.

Hey guys, two things. At the end of this post I have a message about voting, so if you get tired of reading what follows here, at least scroll down to the last paragraph and read the important contest business matter I've addressed before moving on. But for now I wanted to briefly talk about one of the more ambitious games released in this contest and discuss why presentation isn't enough to make a game great.

BMR's Legacy (which I just completed my mini-review for) is a visual feast full of impressive presentation and audio goodness. It strives for realism like few OHR games ever bother to attempt. I admire that greatly. Even the dialogue trees, which can be cumbersome to get through at times, feels like a great idea on paper. In short, everything about this game should've blown my mind.

But it didn't. In fact, I found it pretty boring all the way through to the end of the demo.

Now, I don't think it has to be this way, nor do I think it would require significant changing to improve the fun factor for me (and judging by most of your scores, I think you'll all agree with me). My mini-review in my massive player's post a few pages back talks a little more about what can be done to improve the experience, so, if your name is BMR, I do hope you'll get something out of it. But while the boring details remain, the game will never quite live up to what it wants to be.

To be clear, I'm not devoting an entire post to single out Legacy as a missed opportunity (so far). Instead I want to point out how disappointed I was to find a dull experience wrapped in an awesome cover, even one that does almost all of the things that I like to see in a game. This has happened with other OHR games in our history, even high profile ones, and I wanted to discuss briefly how that can be avoided in the future, with new games and with the continuation of Legacy, which I do still look forward to seeing, especially once certain issues are addressed.

Before you deck your game out with eye candy, atmospheric sounds, deep conversations, flavor text, and so on, first make your game with Magnus-level graphics, and then see how much you enjoy it. One of the ugliest games released for Heart of the OHR 2012, Super Penguin Chef, was still loads of fun to play and scored favorably among the voters. The prettiest and most ambitious game of the decade scored a middling 4-6 on average with the voters. Why? Well, if you take away the awesome visuals and sounds, you're left with a sprawling dungeon spanning several maps with little happening in any of them (except for boring battle after boring battle after boring battle), and a few NPCs that talk more than twice as long as anybody I've ever designed (and I'm notorious for making and appreciating "talky" NPCs). If Legacy were made with single-color cartoon graphics and block shapes, how would people respond to it?

I think that's what we need to do with our games when we set out to begin them or, in the case of Legacy, to continue them: design them with awful graphics first and fine-tune them until they're fun to play, and then go back and do the fancy graphics and sound thing.

Something else to consider, and I'm sure this could apply to most elements of game design, but I don't want to post something longer than it needs to be with ideas that should be obvious by now, is that each piece of the game should be treated like one would treat a piece of artwork or a novel. To reiterate what I had written in the review, a novel needs to keep the reader's interest at every line. I think the same should apply to each element in a game. For example, if you're going to include flavor text in your game, something I've been a fan of since Day 1 and wish everyone would include, please make the text interesting. It is possible to make exposition interesting if you work at it. Focus on the details that people will want to know about. Merely highlighting common or self-explanatory information in flavor text is the literary equivalent of writing: "The apple tasted fruity." Really? Really? Look for ways to keep every detail of your game interesting to the reader. A stack of boxes in the corner could have one that's tipped on its side and attacked by rats. Any player that's paying attention will subconsciously make up his own story about the fallen box and what it contains that has drawn the rats to such frenzy. In Legacy the book about clerics could spend less time focusing on who they are and more time focusing on why they might be dangerous (honestly, if we're gonna talk to clerics or recruit them, let us see for ourselves what they can do when we fight alongside of them, and that would be more fun than reading a textbook description about them).

My biggest complaint about Legacy was not so much about the bugs, though I could've focused on that, or the things it tried to do but fell short of success. My complaint had to do with the fact that I could only play it for a few minutes at a time before feeling utterly exhausted with it. I shouldn't feel that way. A game like The K'huyrbhi Lands didn't try to do that much, and yet it was a lot of fun to play. Why? I think the author considered player response to game play before he worried about looks or features. Yes, I think it would've been more fun had more enemies dropped money, or if there had been more treasure boxes lying around that gave money (I'm a little bitter that I'm exploring the abandoned town with obsolete armor because I haven't been able to afford upgrades from the first weapons shop even after twenty turns in battle), but the author can learn from the complaint and accommodate the player so that the experience is even better.

I realize I'm the last person here who should be conducting a discussion on game play -- I'm the other guy who makes his maps three times bigger than they need to be and puts in NPC characters that most people wouldn't even think about. But it's those same issues that I hear most of my players complaining about in my own games. As the creator who knows my games' secrets, I don't feel like my maps are that big. And truthfully, I'm not bothered by Legacy's map sizes, either. In fact, that's one of the things I appreciate about the game. But, if they're monotonous, then that's a problem.

Anyone have thoughts about this?

Also, a note about voting: I'm not going to average in decimal scores (eg 4.7) to the total. All decimal-based scores will be rounded up or down, so if you want to go back and change them to whole numbers before I do that, please do.

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Place Obligatory Signature Here

Heyyyy... who you callin' ugly?

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Mega Tact v1.1
Super Penguin Chef
Wizard Blocks

Hey guys now that the game's out have some early Super Penguin Chef art


I love these guys I'm glad you made them.

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Super Walrus Land: Mouth Words Edition