Attack of the 48 Hour IRC Games!

Things have been a little slow IRC recently. A few of us got bored and started a 48 Hour contest before anyone could think better of it. Shockingly, this one moment of exuberance has lead to 5 entries, with TMC bringing a possible sixth in any time now. Here comes the bad part...

We were in such a rush to make games, we forgot to make any rules for the contest outside of the 48 hour time limit. So, what I'd like to ask of anyone willing to play along is to look at these games and try to guess what the rules of the contest would've been had there been any.

Would it have been okay for someone to enter 4 hours late? I sure as hell hope so, because I'm the only one outside of perennial tardy-man TMC who had trouble with the deadine this time.

Without further baloney, here's the entries. If you feel like voting, vote. If you feel like penalizing them arbitrarily, be my guest. If you're upset that nobody posted anything on the forums and you didn't have a chance to enter, don't be. We'll be springing another one fairly soon.

Eggie's "There is No Exit

Pheonix's The Actor's Daughter

Idontknow's The Towers of Love and Energy

SDHawk's Look, but Don't Touch

TMC's Blockworks

and my own belayed Karate Fight

Thanks to everyone who participated and sorry we didn't think to post on the forums sooner!

Here's my entry. Yeah, I'm six hours over the deadline. I didn't really concentrate on the game during the first day, found out 2 1/2 hours after the start, and just was stuck in a car for 2 more hours. So I think six hours isn't so bad.

I'm planning to release an improved version of this in a few days.

Blockworks

Edit: On actually visiting some of the maps for the first time I noticed that lots of blocks were replaced with air. Most amusingly NJ fort, which was nearly entirely made of sandstone, and the cathedral, nearly entirely made of stone bricks, both turned into thin air. Trivial fix.

Just played Blockworks therefore it wins all my votes for now.
The scripting is impressive but there doesn't seem to be much to actually do. It does however make a lovely companion to the OHR minecraft craze.
I give it 2 thumbs.

Thanks. In order to make it easier to get around, I planned to let you destroy blocks, and place blocks directly below you (to gain height) and one step in front (to build bridges). In fact this should only take a few minutes to add, but I uploaded as soon as it worked at all. I also want to let you click on chests and signs to view their contents. Basically, the idea was for it to be just about exploration.

I am astonished! My mind is blown! This is utterly delightful

why cant i run it on mac

Hawk's 48hr Impressions

The Actor's Daughter

This game is real pretty (great to see feenicks actually put his art in a game!), and I dig the heck out of the premise even if it isn't explained whatsoever. As far as 48hr RPGs go this has a reasonable amount of content and it certainly tried to make battles interesting.

Sadly, it doesn't quite work out. One of the biggest reasons is that the game doesn't caption any of the enemy's attacks so you tend to be left rather confused as to why things are happening to you. The 'stance' skills you get certainly sound interesting, but since they drop your speed like a rock to minimal obvious benefit I ended up never using them. As a result I plowed through both boss fights primarily by buying a ton of healing potions. There was also the time I used the obvious weakness spell against an enemy and it consistently missed until I had levelled up more (I suppose that agility stance would have been useful here if it didn't drop my speed so hard that I couldn't potion heal fast enough while still attacking). I also got plenty of mileage out of the multi-target attack.

So while wildly missing its target for making battles interesting, it still has more variety than what you get in a lot of OHR games. It's a bit of a shame that most people will stop playing this game shortly after they see the sky-high encounter rate, but they aren't missing _that_ much either. (Also, Bloss is a great pun enemy name)

The Towers of Love and Energy

Wander through strange towers with easy battles with a minor shop upgrade thing going on in the background. It's hard to hate this game because at no point is it really painful- the floors move quick and the battles are mostly trivial. The strange environments you wander through keep up your attention though there's no real pay off which is unfortunate.

If I had to pick a theme for this contest so far it would be "multi-target attacks are awesome."

There Is No Exit

I am torn between being ecstatic that Eggie has made his triumphant return to the OHR while also being saddened that it's his biography in joke game form.

Maybe the theme was "female characters". (the dog in Towers was probably female?)

Karate Fight

The triumphant return to Santa Goes Xtreme is finally here over a decade later, with a side dish of King of Gourmet. I suspect this would be an amazing tech demo if Giz had the time in his 52hr contest to add proper kung fu sound effects, but as is one can only gape in amazement that Giz made it.

In all seriousness, it's neat to look at but the core fight system here feels really luck driven with the seemingly high emphasis on miss chances. Maybe I'm just mad because I went pure 100 attack the first game and never touched the master, and then rolled him with 100 dodge and no defense the next match. I think you need a more complicated battle system to make custom stats interesting, Giz.

Giz probably wasn't following whatever the theme was since I can't find anything similar to the rest of the entries here.

Blockworks

Gosh darn it, TMC.

I have little doubt that he used nightly wip build features, so you might need the latest nightly mac build (or TMC could try exporting a mac app bundle of the game... or I could do it if TMC doesn't mind)

Based solely on screenshots, it looks like the theme of this contest was "spend more time on plotscripts than the rest of the game combined."

As an outsider to this contest, I can only say that it is bewildering and wonderful.

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Mega Tact v1.1
Super Penguin Chef
Wizard Blocks

I have to admit that my last comment was *slightly* facetious, as the last time I checked with TMC there was no fully functioning CUSTOM for OSX! However, I did manage to get the game to run and, my goodness! What a feat!

This is true for half of the entries and false for the other half. So perhaps it was a contest with two themes to choose from, "spend more time on plotscripts than the rest of the game" and "don't use any plotscripts". Maybe the two themes are going to go head to head in a grudge match?!

Are any of these RPGs? If so, and if you can scour 30 minutes or more out of them (without being forced to grind for 28 of those 30 minutes), you're invited to enter them into the Heart of the OHR contest free of charge. Because they were made and first released within the contest window, you can still count them as a new release.

The option's on the table if you wanted to extend their lives further.

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Play 'em and find out, man!

Well, each author has to make that decision to enter. It isn't automatic. Just saying that they should consider it if they've got something that qualifies, or could qualify before the deadline.

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Ha ha ha, wow, this is so strange. I'm an OHR user who played minecraft, then built something on the server, and then explored it in an OHR game. I love recursive experiences like this.
Did someone mention voting and/or scoring these? Maybe not, but I feel that giving something like this a numeric score would be a bit pointless. It just, well, it is what it is, right? I'm not an especially clever man, so I can't think of many applications for this kind of coding.

I'd like to note nonetheless that when I was exploring Mt. James via Blockworks and got lost inside it, I felt like I was going through that abhorrent "three-dimensional maze" from Super Mario RPG all over again. Thanks much for adding in a collision sound and giving us a quick, easy teleport button, TMC. Overall I thought this was terrific.