Heart of the OHR Contest 2018

This is a custom status screen for Viridian Dreams, with temporary artwork courtesy of a friend of mine. Right now it's just auto-filling all the relevant stats, names, and icons. The icon in the top-right represents someone's weight class, which determines what types of weapons they can use. This game will track each character's weapon ranks, which naturally increase with each completed mission depending on what equipment you set out with. Increasing your weapon ranks will unlock new abilities to use in battle, though I haven't implemented any yet :P

I've already run into a problem with this menu, but I'll post in the Q&A in a minute about that. Nevermind, I keep forgetting menus have bitsets now. My problem - an unwanted window of player input between {free slice} and {open menu(0)} - was solved by turning on the "Allow gameplay & scripts" and "Suspend player even if gameplay allowed" bits.

I still haven't put in a bug request, have I? I think a feature I'd get the most mileage out of would be some sort of new "custom spriteset", whose parameters (size, number of frames) are set by the user. These would be used by sprite slices and plotscripts that use them to make sprite animation easier.

That might be a little outrageous to ask for - I think I made a similar request in 2012, and it wasn't considered feasible at the time. I'll think of something else if it is too much.

Sorry, I'll be doing that very soon anyway. Please request something else instead.

Ah, that's great news! I look forward to it.

Well, next on my hit list would be more audio options. I'd specifically like to do "vertical layering" of music tracks, in which I play multiple songs (or sound effects) with the exact same length at the same time, and make them loop. Then, with plotscripts, I change which individual songs (or sound effects) are audible at any given moment. So, functions like the following would be good.

Hmm, only two months to my self-imposed deadline for delivering early requests! Fufluns is the first priority though, and I have to do the stuff I said I'd do soon anyway, too.
Still missing requests from nine people!



Finally looked into this, and you're correct! It used to show the custom shop-thing name on both the left and right sides until James completely rewrote shops from scratch in Callipygous (commit r5987).
But, should I change it back to how it was, keep it as it is (which lets you recognise what the item will be called in your inventory, and gives you more freedom in the "long name" something), or do something else (again, as part of more settings for what to display in shops)? Both old and current behaviours have merits. But I can't actually remember anyone ever making use of the ability to set the display name of a shop thing.

Anyway, stat visibility it is.

Oh, and I should have said this earlier, but your game looks, from screenshots, like something I can look forward to! The graphics are very nice; my only comment is that the blue sky looks very empty... and blue. Even a gradient would add something.


At last, someone who cares!


It isn't possible to set the level cap above 99, actually. No good reason. Just because hero stat editor would still only let you set stats at 99, so letting you pick >99 (or even <99, honestly) would be false advertising!
So will it actually be possible to reach levels > 99 in your game? I don't remember seeing anyone do that before.


It's pretty cool that someone is entering multiple games! (Well, I guess maybe you didn't actually intend to enter the first two). I agree, definitely looks cute. And that's good. (I think only the mushroom looks like it's lacking shading.) Monster hunting is a nice mechanic.


Sound effect volume control really is badly needed. (Both via script command and volume adjustment in Custom.) I wanted to let you emulate directional sound too, by adjusting left/right balance. (So, a command to set direction and distance). And, related, playing the same sfx twice at the same time.
Unfortunately it's not feasible right now to play multiple songs at once - the SDL_mixer library we use by default just doesn't support it. But as you said, you could use sound effects instead. (Unfortunately, SDL_mixer will decode a whole file to a raw waveform when loaded as a sound effect, which can easily cause a noticeable pause. However, the OHR will keep the sfx loaded in memory unless you play lots of sound effects, so the delay would only happen once if you play it twice. Also, for this reason we have a limit of 1MB on sfx ogg/mp3 files. But I think we should just remove that limit, because we're not going to be restricted by SDL_mixer forever, and the pause isn't *that* bad that it needs to be avoided at all costs)

Oh, and great status screen! Too bad that image is only a placeholder! That weapon class system hints at a game that's going to have some interesting mechanics. What's the big E next to the sword mean?

I fuzzily remember something about this.

I think that change when I redid shops may have been intentional (although I certainly should have document it as such, which i guess I didn't)

When I was originally implementing shops in the old QB version, I remember shoehorning buyable items and hirable heroes into the same file format. I included a 16 character name, because I had not thought out the fact that I could just always fetch the name of the item or hero at display time, and that the name did not need to be copied into in the shop stuff data at all.

When I was updating the shops for Callipygous, I probably remembered that (fuzzily) and treated the shop stuff name as a descriptive caption, rather than a replacement for the name.

Ideally I suppose it would be nice to have a shop bitset to toggle whether you want to see the caption or the real name in the list.

Baconlabs
Where do I go to find out how to do custom menus like that where I show off a large version of my character? Because that is seriously awesome!

Nah, the actual leveling-up is handled by the built-in method, only the stat gain and spell-learning bits are scripted... so 99 will most likely be the highest level possible (unless I decide to go back later and set the cap lower than 99, of course.)

I only stumbled across levels > 99 when I was fiddling around with the "new character joins, increase their level to match the rest of the party" script and decided to see how triggering it dozens of times in a row would turn out -- I was mostly checking out the randomized stat growth and making sure it wouldn't make things too high for characters joining later in the game, but I ended up accidentally discovering that you could raise the level past 99 in the process.



Thanks! And yeah, the sky is actually just the basic water tile repurposed as a sky background for that outdoor mountainous area between caves. I've been adding a few things that weren't in the default version of my 8-bit tileset here and there as needed for the game, though, so I might end up going back and adding some darker blues going off the bottom of the screen or some clouds to break up the solid wall of blue at some point.

Oh, and here's some more screenshots. I've finally gotten the game to the point of actual plot-stuff happening... specifically, the first two little quests (which lead directly into both "little quest #3" as well as the game's "big" quest) are pretty much completely done as of today!


Who's this mysterious pale person in the purple robes? Good question. You'll find out a little bit about them during the first quest, but not their name.

They say you'll probably never see them again after this, but of course you know that you are going to be seeing them again later in the game.


Ambassador Goukenhawa is a pretty important secondary character early on in the game -- he's a key part of the first quest, the second quest is related to the feast mentioned here, and the third quest has you sailing across the ocean to visit his homeland.

His name is also kind of an inside joke that I wouldn't expect anyone here to get. Or anyone anywhere, really, aside from my dad and maybe a few people I was in Boy Scouts with as a kid.


The name works even for people who don't get that it's referring to this website's name. I mean, if you make a fruit salad by mixing a bunch of different fruits together, why wouldn't a bunch of different-colored slimes be a slime salad?


Yep, there's a confusion spell. It even makes enemies flip around when affected! You'll have to take Shiz back over the mountains to the starting town's magic school to learn it... but it's probably worth the trip, especially since the same magic school can also teach him a spell for replenishing his arrows mid-battle rather than needing to make a trip back to a shop to buy more.

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FYS:AHS -- Swapping out some step-on NPCs for zones + each step script
Puckamon -- Not until the reserve party is expanded.[/size]

Check out the slice collection editor! You can make and position rectangles and text slices and arrange them the way you want. You can use a backdrop sprite to display a large version of your character. Once you have everything positioned in the slice collection editor, you'll need to use plotscripting to load the collection and assign values to the text fields.

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My pronouns are they/them
Ps. I love my wife

Looks great, Baconlabs. You could easily convince me I was looking at screenshots for commercial NES game. How does your confuse spell work?

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vvight.wordpress.com

I, uh, I think a lot of people mistakenly wrote "Baconlabs" above me when referring to someone else.

Does this mean I can't request something along the lines of "sound effect volume control/balancing" for the contest?

My artist friend says thanks.
My plan for weapons is as such: every character can wield any weapon appropriate to their weight class, like knives and magic tomes for lightweight fighters, and lances and hammers for heavyweight fighters. Some weapons fit multiple weight classes, like maces, which can be used by lightweights and middleweights. Characters will be able to build proficiency with the weapon types they use the most, which will unlock new skills to use in combat. So, in the case of the character "Krish" from the screenshot, he comes with an E-rank proficiency in long-swords, which lets him equip a life-draining skill called "Dawning Strike". I'll go ahead and demonstrate its effect with this gif. Please note that all the sprites are placeholders. And before anyone asks, yes, I've been drawing some inspiration from Fire Emblem: Heroes this year.

Fnrrf: considering that you've got another 5 months, but a lot of other big projects... is this going to be a pretty big game? Might it actually be finished by the end of the year?

Baconlabs: Oh wow! This shall be impressive! I'm not familiar with FE:Heroes, but I know tactical combat on a small grid can be very interesting. It seems to cause a fair difference in the tactics that can emerge (with the right game design)


No, that would be fine (and great). I meant that it's only specifically playing multiple songs (not sfx) simultaneously at once that's not feasible yet.

A lot of counterattacks and transmogrification!

Shiz's Trick spell has its own elemental bitset, and enemies vulnerable to confusion counterattack it with an attack that transmogrifies them into a second copy of that enemy with the flipped graphics and ally-targeting attacks. All but the dumbest enemies (wasps, ants, slugs) will also counter physical hits with an attack that has a chance of reverting them back to their non-confused state.



I haven't really been working on any of my other projects since I got started on this one -- I still definitely want to finish FYS:AHS and Teekee (and Puckamon, though that will have to wait until the reserve party gets expanded), but during the contest period I'll probably focus entirely on this one.

I won't bet on it being completely done by the end of the year, but I suppose it might be possible considering just how much time I have and just how fast I've been getting stuff done so far (having most of the graphics for the entire game already done ahead of time really speeds things up! The most time-consuming thing graphically was probably making the hero battle/walkabout graphics, since I decided to use characters from an older game idea and none of them resembled the default 8-bit-graphics-set guys closely enough to use those.)

But I'm planning on it being pretty big when it's finished, yeah. If I keep up the same pace I've had so far, it will definitely be a several-hour-long demo by the end of the year. It's already up to an hour-and-a-halfish play time from beginning to end, between the early-game wandering and the first two "little" quests you start out with. Today I'm working on a town where you can get an (optional) third party member, and after that it'll be on to the third "little" quest, which leads into the world being opened up a bit more and makes it possible to get started on the game's main quest and a bunch of optional areas.

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FYS:AHS -- Swapping out some step-on NPCs for zones + each step script
Puckamon -- Not until the reserve party is expanded.[/size]

Come on, you don't need to wait for expanded reserve parties. You can just make a fake array of slices, script up a way of reading/writing hero data into it, and shove all the heroes/monsters that would be in the reserve into there!
It's what all the cool kids are doing! You want to be one of the cool kids, right?

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https://twitter.com/ffeenixcks

I guess I'm in. My game is a mystery story set around a pair of ordinary high school students uncovering the cause of a series of murders in a small town. I realize that sounds kinda like Persona 4, but it's not like that, it's more like a D&D module than anything else. It's more about exploring, finding things, and talking to people than fighting. You're going to get more experience doing things other than fighting for the most part. Actually fighting is mostly going to end up with a game over in two moves.
It's probably going to be called Vampire Erotica, but that's a thematic name, really.

Pheonix the palette master. Any more info on your project? It looks intriguing.

Morpheus, your walkabouts remind me of pixel art I saw for a fashion catalogue. I'll try and find the image when I get home. The competition in this HotOHR is shaping up to be the stiffest I've seen so far.

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vvight.wordpress.com