Heart of the OHR Contest 2020

Make games! Discuss those games here.

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Nathan Karr
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Post by Nathan Karr »

TutOHRial and Vikings of Midgard
Breaking from what was otherwise an alphabetical order of review to tackle these two last and together, because a lot of the things I have to say about either leave me with an irresistible urge to draw comparisons and contrasts with the other. So I'll preface that by saying I think Vikings is the better game, helped by its decade and change development cycle and constant revision, but I think TutOHRial is the better tutorial/example for newbies, or will be after I give its excessive textual tangents a tremendous trim and robust round of revision. I think Vikings can comfortably share a score of 9/10 with Axe Cop for a different combination of reasons, since I'm rating it mostly as an RPG, and not as a beginner's guide to RPGs and making thereof.

I believe TutOHRial deserves an 8/10 from me due to a number of small issues all adding up. This was due to me rushing its development to a span of five days with probably less than ten hours of revision in the time since its initial release to the gamelist; I've taken every criticism to heart, and there are a few things I'd like to do to fix the issues and inconsistencies; basically, I was just about burned out by the end of that week and, had I been getting feedback right away, I'd have been continuing to alter it for a few days afterward. Due to its intentionally tangled nature, it's difficult to test and edit in just the right way to leave it in exactly the same state of incompleteness I intend the new player to start with. I still plan on doing so, it's just going to take more doing and isn't my highest-priority project right now.

So since I've just put the scores at the start before describing the body of each game, I feel I have the room to dissect my views on Vikings more thoroughly and give a lengthy, anecdote-laden explanation of TutOHRial's development and my state of mind during a lot of the decisions I'd made for it.

Vikings of Midgard's development started back in what was it, 2006? James made a thread on Castle Paradox, saying he felt Sample.RPG, NPC-tag.RPG, and PSTutor.RPG weren't the best introductions as far as how to actually use the engine, noted that a lot of early developers would edit Wandering Hamster and even steal its art assets, and proposed a project called Welcome.RPG that would provide a brief but complete example game with free art assets for said new game makers to use for themselves in their own projects. Within the thread, this turned into a "soft contest" for a while, but everyone else who was considering making a competitor to Vikings decided Fenrir's art was too good looking and dropped out for that reason; never mind how well any of these other hypothetical games might've actually played or what their characters might've been like, Fenrir was drawing sprites that legitimately looked like something out of a professional SNES RPG and that was enough for them.

This was pretty shortly after I'd first made my explosive debut in the community; if anyone thinks I come across as abrasive or lacking in social skills now, imagine how that might've come across when everyone all around was fifteen years less mature, I didn't have any experience in the workforce, and the only friends I'd had growing up were my own siblings and handful of cousins. I'm also probably autistic, but have at any time since suspicion of this was first raised been lacking in either the time or the funds to visit a trained professional and have my abnormal psyche evaluated. I'd get into flamewars through a combination of being an ignorant teenager, being right but not polite at all in how I presented it, and being correct and polite towards people who were already antagonized from a combination of the ways I'd argued elsewhere or from the fact that their own beliefs were founded on untruths and thus primed to be opposed to the actual truth when it's laid out. Thus, when the Welcome.RPG project got started I was in one of my numerous long but temporary exiles; I was probably doing some combination of reading about juicy internet drama on Encyclopedia Dramatica, scrolling and posting in 4chan boards pretending to be disgusted by furry art, and seeking out support for certain unpleasant addictive online habits that haunt me to this day but only being told that my problem wasn't really a problem because my failures to exert self-control were weeks or months apart.

To stop beating (around) the bush, the fact that right around the time I was turning from eighteen to nineteen years old I was also just beginning to become addicted to internet pornography ties back importantly to my life cycle as a game developer and my interactions with Fenrir and his body of work over the years. During my pre-adulthood teenage years, I was completely spotless of sexual sin, a combination of taking my religious beliefs very seriously and a mild disinterest in the subject. I had no special fondness for scantily-clad female adventurers in my videogames - a little appeal was fine I figured, but it honestly frustrated me to see designs like Katt from Breath of Fire 2 (humanoid but literally no pants; just a sports bra and a big pair of boots) or the female version of the Warrior class in Dragon Warrior 3 (wide open exposed belly to turn her breastplate into a bikini; boob-shaped breastplate would've been fine, but I felt it completely ridiculous for a warrior intended to be taken somewhat seriously to make such a big practical compromize; if the guy was a literal shirtless barbarian drawn without a breastplate that'd have been parity). Then after a bunch of exposure to borderline-untasteful cheesecake in real games, I played a few of the games Fenrir made before Vikings - in FFH and FFR, quite frank discussions of sexual body hair and nudity, and in at least two games of the Cale Saga trilogy, actual furry porn bubbling to the surface of the background noise of horny energy. I was offended partly at the content itself, and partly at myself for a combination of enjoying some of it and letting my curiosity override my self control to stop seeking out more. I can't say with complete certainty whether the first pornographic material I saw was IN a Fenrir game or in a Newgrounds animation, but both lead me to the pipeline of Yahoo! searching "What's a furry?" after seeing the term used in those places and my own character designs referred to as furries, reading the heavily-sanitized Wikipedia article on the fandom, and coming falsely to the conclusion that I was "one of the good ones" and Fenrir was "one of the bad ones whose excess horniness gives the fandom a bad reputation"; it turns out we were both just addicted to the same poison, him I would speculate probably having gotten into it at a much larger age and gotten used to large doses quicker.

So pretty early in my addiction spiral, when I was still rightly disgusted or horrified at basically anything other than completely vanilla female pinups and monogamous male/female pairings, I got into yet another self-righteousness fueled slapfight on the forums. Fenrir's response was to me basically calling him a mitosis professional and monger of mitosis professionals was to dismiss any indictment I could make against his older body of work by saying "The porn in Timestream Saga was hidden in such a way you couldn't unlock it without following the walkthrough so it's your fault if you saw it" and that his newest game Vikings of Midgard had no inappropriate content in it.

So while Fenrir was making the early versions of Vikings of Midgard, I made Nintendo Quest - a rather direct, satirical mockery of the OHR community as a whole. A game in which a righteous paladin is ordained for the purposes of excising lewdness and obscenity from the world of videogames, and which purports morals such as "Thou shalt not steal" while using ripped music and graphics; this in part was a dig at the community's considerable complacent tolerance for and even championing of using music and sound effects stolen from commercial works still under copyright while crusading against the use of visual assets stolen from commercial works at the exact same time. After about an hour's worth of content using some of my favorite commercial games like Sonic, Mega Man, and Dragon Warrior as a base for characters I decided to get a little more blunt and made an entire dungeon built around the OHRRPGCE discussion community, including directly referencing other OHR games and users as various minibosses; once this was finished I mysteriously lost all passion for Nintendo Quest, and in hindsight realize that's because once I was done taking a jab at the OHR community in so direct a way, the project had fulfilled its emotional purpose.

I think the first completed version of Vikings of Midgard was great - it lived up almost exactly to the original vision set out by the "Welcome.RPG" thread with a small addition of an intro and ending cutscene using heavily noted plotscripting to add one more dimension to the tutorial. The game wasn't balanced very well - optimal option was firmly "three physical fighters and the missionary" - but it accomplished all its design goals; a family-friendly basic RPG that could be completed in about half an hour, looked nice with explicit permission for other people to re-use its assets for their own projects, and so on.

Once the decision was made to flesh out the characters and add more depth to the story though? I think the project kinda lost the plot. As Vikings has gone on, its graphics have gone from looking like a budget SNES game to a high end SNES game or a PS1 sprite-based RPG, about as good as the engine can handle without a ridiculous overhaul like replacing the existing 20x20 walkabouts with taller 20x30 characters (to clarify: please don't! I know you already don't want to and I don't think it'd add any value at this point). But anytime I try to play the game now, ever since these changes started, I've felt the injection of extra personality somewhat deflates the original purpose of the heroes to be generic and re-used by other game designers. They now have names instead of class titles and more than the single dialog of personality when selected at the game's outset. I feel the scripting of extra features, too, has gotten out of hand - scripts to teach the heroes spells at certain plots or sidequests, scripts for very specific cutscenes that play out during the course of the adventure...it feels with the addition of each new flourish less like something welcoming a newbie to edit it to make his own story and more like any other RPG out there.

And when these changes first started happening, how did they first manifest? Replacing the character select at the start of the game (one of the main gimmicks Fenrir started the game around to demonstrate how he did it in FFH) to a cutscene of all the heroes being missing and the thief pickpocketing the panties right off of the character select cursor girl. Because of course it was something sexual. The game was never intended for actual children, but more for teenagers and young adults who thanks to our lewdness-saturated mainstream culture, are expected to be used to this sort of thing well before then. In his description of the latest update, Fenrir said there was an F bomb somewhere in the game; I haven't played long enough to see it, but he seemed to note it an accomplishment that he used so much restraint as to use only one obscenity, rather than that he should have used none for a project of this intended purpose.

I can look back to the sprites I made in 2006-2009; many of them honestly still hold up with my newer work, the difference was me taking the time to put attention into the good ones. The first two heroes I drew for A Newbie's Quest and the old man with a cane, the hero of RetroRPG.RPG, the battle graphics for Nate/Nayte from Nintendo Quest...all of these are good sprites, some of them still usable in my more recent games with barely any modification. In fact, if I had put in time, care, and effort into making a competing Welcome.RPG back in 2006 instead of indulging my baser impulses, if I had resisted the siren song of fake affection and stuck around in the RPG making community during those months, Fenrir and I probably both would have put out much better projects and formed a friendly rivalry.

Remember how people somewhat liked Maces Wild back in 2009? The game's writing was born out of my self-loathing at my own addictive habits; Ken was intentionally written to have basically the same addictive personality type I have (his stats and character profile in the readme both state that he suffers increased effectiveness of the downsides if he takes alcohol or tobacco based consumables in battle or if monsters use sexually provocative status moves on him; I didn't get around to actually implementing these things, but that's also why he hits on random NPCs) while still having an overall deep-rooted dedication to law and justice; Ken is more relaxed and a lot more brave than I am in real life, but the latter is nearly a requirement for a playable character in any videogame.

Remember the Say It Ain't So contest? That was 2011 - a decade ago. A comic I made about going the entire lenten season without going to any furry websites had a single line explode as a meme within the OHR community back then (Tendo's frenzied broken English imploring of his wife Aine to abstain from her desire to swallow him whole at the time - "NO EAT!"), and I decided to roll with it. I half-jokingly feigned interest in the contest, and when there were enough entrants to actually run the thing I decided to double down and not back down, considering making my game based around the vore fetish and focusing more on the romantic partnership between an established husband and wife which happened to feature nudity but not sex to be "trolling" the theme of the contest. I can't say I regret No Eat in the slightest - it gave me a chance to iterate and improve on the design principles I'd started really honing with Maces Wild and Weegee.RPG. And nine years after its release, it also attracted my current girlfriend to me.

Also for the Say It Ain't So contest, my perpetual unknowing rival Fenrir made his sex game: Raep Dungeon, later renamed to Lustyrinth (and for the better). In contrast to my game about expressing monogamous love with casual nudity and a trip through the disgusting insides of the gastrointestinal system, his was about an orgy taking place in a world where everyone is horny all the time and getting abducted/brainwashed by a sex demon and need to fight each other using fairly standard furry fare like sex toys, piercings, oversized genitalia, and bondage gear. Definitely better drawn, both games center around anthropomorphic canines, but polar opposites in tone and focus. I feel a lot of the development of Lustyrinth has leaked back into Vikings of Midgard after the fact as he's developed the Vikings revamps in parallel with the fetish game, and No Eat has made seemingly permanent changes to my body of work in the decade since and not always for the better.

Basically, the kinship only a rival can feel is why I was so disappointed when Spooks & Summons added gratuitous frontal nudity of Hati when it got a big update, and why it disgusted me so much when Puppy Adventure had the scene describing one of the infants shoving a rolling pin into the rectum of a defeated boss and another infant commenting that this was "hot". That what could've been much better games were undermined with these horny additions for their own sake; they weren't games like No Eat and Lustyrinth developed very firmly from the outset to be work-unsafe content strictly for adults only, but otherwise near-normal games and good examples of their minor spins on the genre with the millstone of thirst around their necks.

I have a number of unreleased games where I had some sort of minor innovation or what I consider hilarious writing, undermined by my own libido; games I can't share with my closest friends due to their lewdness. Games with real artistic expression of art, writing, and game design that have seen very rare release on a handful of furry Discord servers and DMs to interested friends (or former "friends"); this audience has been thoroughly unproductive for feedback, as I should have expected. Furries are barely literate enough to leave a comment on porn or read the dialog of a porn comic, much less critique a game in any way deeper than saying "I want to think less while fighting and get more of [fetish]". Even as I self-deprecatingly denounce the furry fandom as a collective I fall within as full-fledged member, I still have full intent of making future projects strictly for adult audiences and will not rule out full frontal nudity and very disturbing descriptions; this, mostly, for the purposes of satire and arousing disgust and loathing of the villains in the audience.

I'd been working a simple, humble fast food job from March of 2012 until July of 2020. I put in my two weeks when a new hire who'd been a manager at some other company tried pushing me around as if he was a manager there as well, then threatened to follow me home and batter me after work because I hurt his feelings by standing up to him, and the managers took his side and punished me. I was, at first, going to make an allegorical game about this and the feelings it caused in me for this year's Heart of the OHR, but wound up dropping the project because I got a better idea. Bonecrush the Demolisher might get an adventure some day, but it won't be that and it won't be soon.

A few months ago, I became wistful and nostalgic for the PlayStation 1 version of RPG Maker and its sample game Gobli. Gobli had a meta narrative about being the story of a generic fantasy RPG random encounter goblin who wished to be seen as more important, and tries to become the boss of the game. In this, the random encounters are treated as sort of entertainers, there to slightly deplete the player characters' HP and consumables, then hand out experience points and money. I watched a Let's Play of said sample game, then watched the same person Let's Play the editor mode and make a game on camera while commenting on his decisions and showing his work. I realized how much the restrictive nature of that RPG editor compared to ours makes it so much easier to actually make something and get feedback on it; its limitations, in a sense, were a strength. Before Vikings of Midgard as a sample game, the OHR editor would open with completely blank graphics, completely blank textboxes, some generic stat names, and mostly expect newcomers to figure out how to make every element of the games for themselves.

I realized also how now the editor allows you to take screenshots, not just the games, and how you can select Test Game and edit the game live as you play it, really see your work in the editor change the game world; this was a strength RPG Maker lacked. I made TutOHRial in one week, mostly driven by an altruistic desire to make something to teach new users how to make games. I carefully selected for a lot of the most generic sprites from Fnrrf's 8-bit graphics set (a real lifesaver to me because of my love of 8-bit graphics and constant temptation to redraw all the generic assets again every single time I make a new project) and a few distinct leftover sprites from OHRodents and as-yet-unreleased projects. The stats I set by default on Natalie and the generic heroes started with 30 max HP at initial level because this was hardcoded into RPG Maker; something I didn't like back when I was actually using a real PlayStation to make my own game was being unable to set characters' initial maxima to lower levels like the characters in early Dragon Warrior games tended to have (HP in the teens, not the thirties); it still seems like a good round starting point, and given the actual nature of this engine actually can be changed by a player who so desires.

A common temptation I keep facing is that to add more and more original sprites of my own to TutOHRial, and a wider array of those from Fnrrf's sprite library, but that temptation could quickly lead to overwhelming new players with too many options. I've expanded it a little from its initial release, but have to tell myself to stop. Linking to both the full graphics pack and Vikings in the readme and reminding players that both sets of graphics are completely free to use is plenty; I may wind up releasing some sprites of my own as a package and linking to that as well at some point. K.I.S.S. - scope creep is exactly what's ruined Vikings for me, and even makes Fnrrf's graphics set a little hard for me to use at times; I have to resist my impulses for once even when it's for something good and not self-indulgence.

Had I taken another week or so to refine my design document for TutOHRial before I started making it, I might've for example put in a few more attack animations and put the monster sprites together in a better organized way. Had I spent another week or two editing the text I'd likely have cut down a lot of the cruft and toned down the self-loathing deprecation a bit. Whatever the case, I think I did an admirable job with the game, but a one week slapdash tutorial can't compete with games that have had fifteen years of refinement or been made by people with legitimate professional experience at this point; TutOHRial was not going to be as good or ambitious as Vikings, but I say without hesitation it's a better primer for newcomers, and not to Fenrir's fault at anything (some features I used in TutOHRial simply didn't EXIST when Vikings first started so he couldn't possibly have used the live editing and screenshotting of Custom tricks) aside maybe from trying harder to make it a better and more fun game and a small slip of the pants here or there. Urges I myself feel towards a game I made specifically NOT to bog down with scope creep.

I don't make it too clear because it gets lost in describing the thought process behind Claire and Wizardbeth in Trytuges and a bit of game history trivia about the origin of the Cleric class as a whole, but I specifically wanted to tutorialize players on both regular MP and Level MP, to actually show how the more difficult system works. I also made an active decision to not alter the default font in any way, even with my usual changes I make for basically every game (adding a book/scroll/orb icon or two for spell-teaching items, widening the blade of the sword icon a little, moving hands/claws/whatever around a bit within the font to put everything equiped to a certain slot litterally adjacent).

Basically every weird textbox has a reason it wound up the way it did - being tired and not refraining from my tendency towards tangents and over-explaining needless details to the point of forgetting important ones, occasional breaks for bits of historical trivia that don't directly help the subject at hand but could be fun to know, or self-deprecating humor just to make the whole thing a bit less dry and mechanical. It's very intentional the times I encourage the player to explore facets of game making I myself have never become adept at, such as plotscripting, or where I state my preference for/against something and demonstrate intentionally making it different from that to show them my preferences aren't "the right way" even by my own opinion.

Short on sleep and high on finishing up the first release of such an ambitious game, I took to browsing Castle Paradox's old dead threads looking for fun nostalgic memories and chanced upon James's original thread asking for the community to bring about the Welcome.RPG - a game preferably about 30 minutes long, with good graphics, existing to provide free assets for new players, and not using plotscripting. I looked this thread over in astonishment, also seeing things like one of my personal favorite developers (msw) specifically requesting it tutorialize features like Level MP, which Vikings never did. I was ecstatic - going on my own desires to show people how to make simple games, I had post-hoc with no knowledge of this particular thread, actually made a rival to Vikings as the Welcome RPG - becoming a years-latecoming competitor, and entered my game for review in another contest, the very one in which the finalized version of his example game would run, the final Heart of the OHR Contest. I'm not sure how my posts made in this excitement came across to anyone else, but I've never felt so vindicated before.

Were I to do it over again, I'd include FEWER optional sprites and songs in TutOHRial, shorter lessons, and a lot fewer tangents and jokes. I'm not going to overhaul it that far; I'm going to refine what's there in a largely additive way.

Pornography has proven deleterious effects on cognizance, memory, and self-control. It rewires your brain to become only more likely to give in to further temptations, including more of itself. It demands constant escalation. It impairs attention span and concentration. Where am I going with this? My best games so far turned out this way IN SPITE of me struggling with or giving in to pornography addiction, having my memory and concentration spoiled, and inhibiting my self control. Fenrir has made some very good games during this time, and he's been on the same drug for longer.

Now imagine what either of us could accomplish if we stopped thinking with our slimes and took some good time to detox and focus on making games. Does this essay sound strange coming out of the recent me, the way I've been for the past five years or so? Like a return of the old Nathan Karr from 2005, but a bit more wisened and scarred by experience? This is me after about two and a half weeks of avoiding furry porn and evaluating my life choices.

Not even other perverts liked me while I was indulging my id because I still had some semblance of resistance to the rest of their worldview and the really WEIRD stuff I'm into beneath the surface is physically off-putting to anyone who isn't damaged in the exact same ways I am ("HOW DARE YOU INJECT MORPHINE, THAT slime'S BAD FOR YOU?" *snorts some cocaine*). If I'm to be hated no matter how I act, how I conduct myself, or what I make, so much the better to be hated because I love justice, truth, and chastity than because I love graphic violence, maladaptive escapism, and eroticism. You might not like it, but this is the beginning of what peak Nathan Karr performance looks like.
Remeber: God made you special and he loves you very much. Bye!
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Spoonweaver
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Post by Spoonweaver »

Nathan,
Thank you for your reviews. I value any and all input and I'm glad to see you enjoyed Tim-Tim 2 for the most part.
I'm glad you are a part of this community and cherish your community involvement.

Keep up the good work!
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The Wobbler
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Post by The Wobbler »

Nathan - I hadn't heard of anyone encountering the stuck menu text since the older demo back in the summer, can you confirm the date of the file you used?

The Continue button does indeed connect to an auto save system that's there in addition to the manual saves. The game auto saves in a separate slot that you can't overwrite manually whenever you enter a new map, finish a battle, open a chest, or complete a cutscene. I prefer manual saving but it's there for anyone who prefers that, forgets to save, loses power, or anything else abrupt.

Burpin Bros wasn't really intended to be played on its own, it's connected to a bunch of scripting in Walthros. You can find its arcade machine in the second town you visit.

Thanks for checking it out, I hope you have more time to finish playing later!

Edit: I wasn't at my computer so I couldn't post this screen earlier, but I actually did fix the issue with heroes not fitting in some menu screens due to engine issues, it swaps out their graphics with small cutesy ones when you open the menu now. This is implemented now but wasn't ready in time for the demo.
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Post by Fenrir-Lunaris »

Nathan - I appreciate you taking the time to share your thoughts on Vikings, but I do wish you spent a bit more time explaining why the game was deserving of the score it got!

Spoonweaver - TimTim2 is the best platformer I've ever played on the OHR. The "floatiness" is a perfect fit for navigating the game's passages, and being able to "hover" while scraping a gnome's head against a rock ceiling is an experience that nobody in this contest should go without. I do wish the game could be controlled solely with a gamepad, and found myself needing to use a weird combination of keyboard and gamepad. The only suggestion I would make would be to consider remapping the "spell" effect to UP and ATTACK like in Castlevania games.

Wobbler - The battles in Walthros Renewal seem almost like an afterthought, but I also know you're not really a "number crunching" guy. And that's fine, because the rest of the game just has so much charm. I play your games for the stories, and for the character moments.

[s]Oh right, almost forgot to vote. It's not from laziness, but I truthfully haven't had much time to play games recently.[/s]

All entries - [spoiler]The stage design is terrible and the puzzles make no sense, 9/10.[/spoiler]
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Spoonweaver
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Post by Spoonweaver »

Fenrir-Lunaris wrote:I do wish the game could be controlled solely with a gamepad, and found myself needing to use a weird combination of keyboard and gamepad. The only suggestion I would make would be to consider remapping the "spell" effect to UP and ATTACK like in Castlevania games.
Gamepad functionality is coming soon. It's 3rd on my to do list.
I took out directional attacking at an early stage due to bugs and how I found myself playing the game. Jumping over enemies and throwing rocks down at them seemed wrong. Some of that functionality is still in the game.
You can directionally aim while on a ladder with some things.
and when you jump the knife attacks down. (I'm currently planning on putting the knife in an easier to get spot.)
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Spoonweaver
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Post by Spoonweaver »

Nathan,
Your post has shown a lot of people how you feel, which is great.
I think a lot of what was said was perhaps best said on a different thread.
I invite you to join the discord channel and join us in talking things through.
We are all a family here, and I'd really like it if we could make an effort to mutually understand one another.

https://discord.gg/9EGT2acV
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Post by Pepsi Ranger »

Okay, the winners have been notified. Now for the rest of you.

Here are your champions from worst to best in ranking order.

Remember, I'll post the scores and accolades when my site goes live and the Heart of the OHR page is ready for viewing (in a month or two).

Before I actually list these, I want to reiterate that the competition was very tight this year. Some positions got shifted around pretty easily with each new vote. The top eight games scored exceptionally well, and pretty much every game but the bottom two scored better than average. So this year's contest was anyone's game.

But again, I'll break down the insights when the site goes live later this spring.

Anyway, here you are. Prize holders, feel free to contact your winners whenever you're ready.

15. Alliterative Abbreviated Adventure
-Nathan Karr

14. Slimes World
-Matokage

13. TutOHRial
-Nathan Karr

12. Christmas Stars
-Kefyrra

11. Gay Savage and the Enigma Rip
-Eonhetwo

10. Blood Ledger
-Artemis Bena

9. Tough Girl Gina
-PJBebi

8. Xoo: Xeno Xafari
-Willy Elektrix

7. Tim-Tim 2: The Almighty Gnome
-Spoonweaver

6. Forget-Me-Not
-Prifurin

5. Walthros Renewal
-The Wobbler

3. (tie, six-point voter spread) Katja's Abyss: Tactics
-Kylekrack

3. (tie, four-point voter spread) Vikings of Midgard
-Fenrir-Lunaris

2. False Skies
-Feenicks

1. Axe Cop
-RedMaverickZero

And there you go.

Was it exactly as you'd suspected?

Are you disappointed?

Well, as I said, everyone placed 13 and up scored well. It was just an unbelievably hot race. So congrats to everyone who participated, and thanks again for making this year go out with a bang.

I'll let you know when the Heart of the OHR page is ready for viewing.
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RMZ
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Post by RMZ »

I've had the news all day and it still doesn't feel real. I thought Katja was going to win.

In regards to everyone voting what I regard my magnum opus, thanks for the votes and the kind words. Everything I had went into that game. I don't even know how I did it. The win isn't mine alone though, whether I hired people or not, the win also goes to everybody who worked on it. Especially Soda Piggy who was my partner through it, and is still working on art for the post release content. So many of the community helped make this game possible, Spoonweaver for the minigames, James Paige (minigames) and TMC on the countless code help. Where would the game even be without Feenick's supplemental art help?! He did two whole dungeons of tiles and tons of other art. Rue tested the game extensively to make it what it was. The game might belong to RTG, but all of us kinda made it possible. Thank you.
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Bob the Hamster
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Post by Bob the Hamster »

Congratulations to RMZ!

Great work everyone! This was a really nice batch of games! Y'all should be proud!
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Acceptance Speech

Post by Eonhetwo »

I am stunned and honored to have received 11th place in this prestigious, fifteen entry competition. I can barely fathom the words I could use to express my amazement and appreciation. You know a lot of high achievers, iconic pedestrians whom we all strive to emulate, claim that, from their pedestals of prestige, they feel like frauds. Being finally so situated myself, I can now say I fully understand their sentiment.

Who am I, a first time game creator, whose submission was days late at that, to have placed 11th in such a contest?

I want to thank God first and foremost. *kisses fingers with closed eyes before pointing them towards the sky* He's my muse in all respects, the source from which all inspiration, creativity and determination flows. I wanna thank my family, without whose ostentatious absurdity I would have had no such ease in making parody thereof. Finally, I wanna thank the OHR community, whose insight, critique, and example have been nothing less than the engine, compass and guiding star of my ascent into the heavenly echelons of gamedev status and affluence.
Last edited by Eonhetwo on Tue Mar 09, 2021 6:29 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by Bird »

Many good games were entered this year. And Jay Savage was the most crazy one of them. Unfortuneatly it was too scrappy to place better! But hopefully, lazy Jay gets her bum up to finish the investigation of the meteor!

To all of you, thank you for making a lot of fantastic games. Plenty of them were interesting to play.
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Nathan Karr
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Post by Nathan Karr »

Woah, I got both dead last (no surprise) and 13th place (my favorite number) for my respective games? Strange, what are the odds? I definitely see the reasons a lot of the other games placed higher and can't fault anyone else for their votes, to say the least. 5s and 6s are completely deserved scores for the Natalie Game, which seem to be fairly common numbers with well-reasoned reasons.

Special congratulations to RMZ and Axe Cop!
1 Corinthians 9:24 wrote:Know ye not that they which run in a race run all, but one receiveth the prize? So run, that ye may obtain.
Everyone tried, but there can be only one winner.

I was afraid I might've been coming off as needlessly hostile in some of my reviews, and revised some of them a few times even minutes before posting; I crunched myself for time really badly. Mostly, though, I think I just have completely different opinions from most users regarding the value of spectacle to impress fellow OHR devs that non-developer players won't notice or realize ("Wow, that must've taken a lot of plotscripting! I'm giving it a high score because it was clearly a lot of work!") and having the game just feel satisfying and fun to play. Most games I hovered around giving one point lower at times, or in some cases two points higher before hitting into something that completely killed the experience dead in its tracks for me (Slimes World and Gay Savage were both gearing up for sixes until the abrupt dead ends I ran up against in my reviews).

I'm very glad to see the forum/thread itself didn't erupt into a flamewar. At this point it still feels completely arbitrary as to whether it will or not from basically anything I say, leading to a spiral of me avoiding talking about things at all in certain spaces.

In this contest only two games actually hurt me to play, and one was one I made myself. That's a high quality Heart of the OHR! A. A. A. was a literal example of me failing to exhibit impulse control - both in how many different, unrelated things I was tossing together carelessly and with me not going with my gut instinct to say when asked if I wanted to enter it "Sorry, but while I'm open to feedback on the game I don't think it's high enough quality for the contest vote. It needs to be refined a lot more." It basically did almost everything I felt another game also did wrong - incomplete and insufficiently tested with too many options vs. how many are good options like Slimes World, lack of compelling combat or characters, wildly uneven difficulty, inability to find and hold to a coherent design...the only game I rated as lowly was one with a completely different problem - graphics that literally hurt me to look at and an over-emphasis on highly animated original sprites.

I might comb back through the thread and dump a block of quotes about TutOHRial in the development thread I already have assigned for it. I think I can turn it from a merely adequate and somewhat exhausting-to-read guide into something extremely useful for newcomers, the best "how to start making an RPG" guide to ever exist as a game itself.
Fenrir-Lunaris wrote:Nathan - I appreciate you taking the time to share your thoughts on Vikings, but I do wish you spent a bit more time explaining why the game was deserving of the score it got!
I think it's THE big OHRRPGCE Community RPG - while I feel it stepped very far astray of its original purpose as a sample RPG with the more thorough plot and characters, I find a lot of the additions charming and every graphical revamp was a good one. I think the heavy heavy proliferation of community in-jokes and characters referencing other games is both a blessing and a curse, making it both innately more impressive to community veterans (myself included) but also potentially a bit alienating or confusing to the very new users intended as its main audience.

The battles feel more satisfying than the updates between the old "no personalities" version and the contest version, especially when using Styrge. I still don't feel like mages other than Frumpy feel all that useful compared to just using more warriors, and while I can't pin it down exactly I've just never found Hilda to be very fun to use in combat in any version; my go-to party of four anytime I feel I have the real choice is Kitt, Olaf, Styrge and Frumpy and these being my favorites in terms of personality also helps; in the old releases I'd put the item that turns Night into Hati on and replace Kitt in my party, despite finding the offensive magic not as useful as more HP and physical attacks just because I liked how she looked. I might wind up making heavy use of Renard and Freki if I ever get far enough to unlock them.

I'm also going to say it. I think giving the option to turn off random battles shows a serious lack of confidence in the balance and design of the maps, random encounter difficulty vs rewards, being certain of how low you wanted the encounter rate to be, and possibly the concept of the random battle feature itself. Going whole hog on the idea that random battles are supposed to sap HP and MP while exploring and navigating to the boss and occasionally break up the walking around gameplay or on the idea of planned NPC-triggered battle encounters both make sense (even if one is a lot harder to implement than the other) but just designing the game as if it were the former and being able to flip a switch to shut off a major game feature? Just feels kinda messy, honestly, like the feature is from indecision about how frequent random fights should be in the first place. But before I let myself sound like a butt about it, I also understand why it's there - real professional RPGs tend to have ways around random encounters you're overleveled for (monsters sensing your strength and fleeing more often if you outclass them, Mother games' auto-win without even changing to the battle screen, repellent items) and the OHR doesn't have the best options for trying to implement those things.

I'm glad you've basically finished the game. It's been a long ride.

I definitely meant to say a lot more about the substance of the games themselves (including, yes, direct comparisons between Vikings and my own game and possibly small nods as to reasons why I ranked yours higher overall).
Spoonweaver wrote:Nathan,
Thank you for your reviews. I value any and all input and I'm glad to see you enjoyed Tim-Tim 2 for the most part.
I'm glad you are a part of this community and cherish your community involvement.

Keep up the good work!
I look forward to more OHR platformers being this smooth and responsive to control, and to playing more than the first boss of this one. I'm still always confused a little by this kind of project, but when it works, it works.
The Wobbler wrote:Nathan - I hadn't heard of anyone encountering the stuck menu text since the older demo back in the summer, can you confirm the date of the file you used?
I don't remember when I downloaded it, but could've sworn it was more recent like at least early autumn. File says...1-9-2021.
The Wobbler wrote:The Continue button does indeed connect to an auto save system that's there in addition to the manual saves. The game auto saves in a separate slot that you can't overwrite manually whenever you enter a new map, finish a battle, open a chest, or complete a cutscene. I prefer manual saving but it's there for anyone who prefers that, forgets to save, loses power, or anything else abrupt.
A very good feature, you've always been good about game saves. You were very right in 2003; save points are ridiculously restrictive.
The Wobbler wrote:Burpin Bros wasn't really intended to be played on its own, it's connected to a bunch of scripting in Walthros. You can find its arcade machine in the second town you visit.
Hahaha, if I'd realized that I wouldn't have reviewed and rated it separately, that's for sure. It was fun to play for a few minutes, since I was still in the first town when I saved and quit. I wouldn't have seen or played it in time for the review. This also explains its simplicity, as it's a minigame, and makes it more explicitly clear that the characters are Bob and Salom. For a bit I thought someone just made a super high effort Walthros fangame and snuck it into the contest without fanfare; well, I doubt there's anyone a bigger fan of Walthros than you are.
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Post by The Wobbler »

Nathan Karr wrote:I don't remember when I downloaded it, but could've sworn it was more recent like at least early autumn. File says...1-9-2021.
OK, good to know. That does explain it, the stuck menu fix was released on 1/14. But for Heart OHR judging purposes, it's perfectly fine to have looked at the older version.
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Post by Idontknow »

Congratulations to everyone who entered, really good showing this year!
Working as intended!
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Post by SwordPlay »

Congratulations!
It was a heated contest, with some unusual entries as always.
Well, it was entertaining! You should all be proud of yourselves.
Thank you all for representing the community... it is by these standards we know the worth of the OHR.

AND CONGRATS to the top 5, especially :kamina: :kamina: :kamina: AXE COP!!!(insert vuvuzela sounds):kamina: :kamina: :kamina:

You lucky 5 get a prize from me: a steam game of your choice, up to $10/£10, or equivalent value prize*!
I will try to draw art or poetry for some of the winners as well. I hope you like feet.

*might take a month to put everything together, but if you're like, really broke this month, just message me and i'll see what i can do.
If you have a preference for the prize, let me know, I can try to accomodate you.
Last edited by SwordPlay on Wed Mar 10, 2021 9:10 pm, edited 6 times in total.
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