OHR Multicart Compilation

Giz: Thanks for sending me that menu. Thanks to your notes, it makes more sense than I thought it might! Although it's still mostly over my head. It's also much more finished than I thought it would be. All I really need to do is plug the game names and file paths in.

I'm confused by which command actually loads the .rpg file. I see where the files are defined as strings, but I don't quit understand at which point they are opened by game.exe. I feel like that is the key to the puzzle I'm missing.

---

The next step for me is to get the other menus and create an .rpg file that selects randomly from the completed menus. Then I need to implement a script in each game that opens the menu.rpg when the game closes.

The "run game" command.

So each menu will be a separate .rpg? Is it too much bother to put them in the same file?

Line 386 is where the RunGame thing is located. It's crazy how something as simple as "RunGame (2)" can do something so powerful. As for putting the menus into one file (Which would be the sensible, professional thing to do) I don't know. I did some pretty stupid stuff with reusing script names, some pretty stupid stuff with making scripts way too specific for one particular task. I really thought I'd have time to curate all of them, with a masterfile to call the menus, an invisible lickety-split menu of menus to randomly summon one.

Still working on the plain menu right now, it's different in ways I don't fully remember. Like...



I'm sure that was really clever and made a lot of sense 3 months ago? But now I'm confused as hell and all I can remember is that it has to do with over-and-under something else, like the bread in a sandwich.

Probably not. For some reason, I just didn't think of it. Although Giz is right, it would hard to reorganize them for that.

I'll keep working on the way-unfinished ones, but progress will be slow. I'm going to try to keep to the same standard the first two are, where if you want to add or subtract games all you have to do is change a number and add a title+filename to the list. Was really, really, really stupid of me to drop all of my personal projects and try to be some kind of weird family-managing machine and I damn near drove myself crazy doing it. Gonna try to strike a balance, I guess.

I'm still sitting on unfinished work on the 'run game' command. Whenever I get around to it, I'll also try to make it smoother, seeing it I can cut down on the loading interruption when switching games.

Reused script names shouldn't be much of a problem, but importing all the resouces into one game and updating the scripts would definitely be a pain.



It sounds like you really overdid it, but putting family first ain't stupid.

Made some good progress figuring out on the menu today.

Typically to close a game, the player presses ESC on the title screen. In the multi-cart, I would like the game selection menu to re-open in the player quits one of the games. It seems like the way to make this work is like this:

1) Disable title screens on every game.
2) Create a main menu on every game.
3) Have a main menu option that runs a script to that runs the game select menu.

Is that true?

I combined Bob and Morpheus' history concepts. Here's the result.

1999: Megallennium 5-in-1 Mega Cart

Megallenium Software was founded in 1988 as a subsidiary of Megallenium Race Track Services Limited, a Canadian manufacturer of analog scoreboards for horse and dog racetrack venues.

In an attempt to diversify, Megallenium hired Charlotte “Civil” Milton and her husband Percy Milton to develop coin-operated gambling video games for racetracks. Instead, the Miltons spent their development budget to create a game for the Nintendo Entertainment System.

This NES game was a consumer-friendly multi-cart featuring five games for the price of one. During development it was called 1999: Megallennium 5-in-1 Mega Cart – The New Millennium of Video Entertainment. This was later shortened to 1999: Megallennium 5-in-1 Mega Cart.

Civil Milton programmed the 5 games on the multi-cart. Percy, not limited by his illiteracy, designed the games and created the graphics and music. One game was an adaptation of the 1936 film Reefer Madness. After a licensing dispute, Percy redrew the graphics and the game became Owlbears instead.

In 1989, after 8 months of development, 1999: Megallennium 5-in-1 Mega Cart was finished. The Miltons demonstrated the completed multi-cart to Megallennium’s owner Todd Bonzalez. Bonzalez believed the Miltons had been working on a coin-operated gambling video game. The Miltons were fired immediately and the multi-cart was never released. Coincidentally, Bonzalez died in a Slip ‘N Slide accident just over two hours later.

Following their careers at Megallennium, the Miltons designed and sold a line of unisex lingerie. They had seven children and never developed another video game. In a strange twist of fate, Percy and Civil both died in the year 1999—Percy from cancer at the age of 41 and Civil from “old age” at the age of 39.

In a 1999 deathbed interview, Bruce Kazantazakis of Gaming Hot Blast! magazine asked Civil if she had any lingering regrets. She responded, “I killed Todd Bonzalez,” but refused to comment further.

1999: Megallenium 5-in-1 Mega Cart was lost until 2017 when a treasure hunter found a floppy disk of the game buried on a Vancouver beach. This disk was sold to a private collector for $21 CAD. Its contents were released on the Internet later that year.

I'm not at all a fan of the idea of all the games in this thing being made by a married couple. Something like a ragtag band of weirdos would work way better in terms of believability. Also the developers of Action 52 were a bunch of high school grads who had no idea how to make games.

How are you going to reconcile or explain one guy having made all the music if it all sounds totally different stylistically and skill-wise? That would only work if all the music in this thing were done by the same person.

I think the backstory as it's written is going well past the point of overselling the release, and IMO it's not really adding anything of value. Then again, I'm not about to try to write something better on my own. Don't really have the time or motivation for that. So I guess I'd just ask that this whole fake backstory thing not be at the forefront of the multicart. Like, maybe in an included .txt file or something?

1 seems undodgeable, 2 and 3 seem a bit more negotiable. There's no reason 2 needs to be a fancy main menu (though it'd be nice!), default OHR title screens are pretty barebones. Likewise, 3 wouldn't need to be a menu option per se (Though if you've got menu options, quit is usually a good one) you could just trigger the run menu game thing when you hit escape.



History kinda disagrees.

@Willy:
I like parts of it, and other parts I don't like. I like the title having 1999 whilst one of the games has 2000, that seems like something a NES developer would do. I don't like the change to the Lovecraft reference nor the chosen movie. Granted, the movie does seem to be a sound choice, since while the movie was in the public domain in the US and there wasn't any way to contact the rights holders. (IIRC) While in Canada the loophole in the US copyright at the time was not used, ergo, it was unusable by Canadian law.
But Foxley's right about the music, ol' Percy would have to have multiple personality disorder in order to craft the music for all the games. I know my music work sounds nothing like the stuff in Xeno or Ultra Frontier.

I've actually had a backstory in mind for this game whose name wasn't supposed to be revealed yet, but I hadn't gotten around to it due to laziness. I'll PM the details.

---

<TheGiz> oh hai doggy, oh no that's the straw that broke tjhe came baclsb

Disagrees with what exactly? That a hodgepodge of weird games like Action 52 was made by a group of people with no game design experience, as opposed to a husband and wife team who consistently put out graphical adventure games for most of their careers? The Sierra example isn't really relevant.

Married couples can be bad at developing games, too.

---

<TheGiz> oh hai doggy, oh no that's the straw that broke tjhe came baclsb

Sierra's output in 1981 alone would make a great "WTF Is This?" mix-tape of games.

EDIT: I do agree though, I think making the in-universe explanation being one or two people does stretch believability a little. Unless there's some kind of internal logic like "Oh, this was the first game in 1981 and then in 83 they made this thing a little more complex and after a five year hiatus this one came out and it was crazy good" or fall-out with different fake developers who get hired and fired as the general quality rises and falls.