I'm livestreaming HotOHR games (1/18 & 1/20)

Talk about things that are not making games here. But you should also make games!

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Baconlabs
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I'm livestreaming HotOHR games (1/18 & 1/20)

Post by Baconlabs »

It's been ages since I made a new thread anywhere on here. Hi, I'm Baconlabs, known on Twitch as achinlabs, and known elsewhere as Matt. I couldn't find the time to make a game for the 2020 Heart of the OHR contest, so instead I want to contribute by livestreaming every entrant's game. It'll be purely first impressions this week as I spend roughly 10-30 minutes on each game. I'd like to offer live criticism and praise as I go, so if any of you game makers want to hop in and ask/answer a few questions or just chitchat, feel free.

I'll be starting tonight around 7 PM CST here: www.twitch.tv/achinlabs
And then I'll pick up where I left off on Wednesday night at about the same time. (I know these are weird days, but that's when I have my days off.) Might continue into next week if I can't finish all of them.

(To break the mold a little, I'm going in reverse alphabetical order, so IIRC Xoo Xeno Xafari will be my starting point)

After this is all done, I'll play the games some more then cast my vote, and the top 5 winners will be livestreamed in full on my channel at some point later this year. Probably summertime. That's all for now.
Last edited by Baconlabs on Tue Jan 19, 2021 6:57 am, edited 3 times in total.
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Spoonweaver
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Post by Spoonweaver »

You should jump on discord while you stream. plenty of people there will watch if you let them know while you're doing it
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Baconlabs
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Post by Baconlabs »

I wish I knew how that works :???: All I could do was post a notification.
Also my ISP is apparently trying to sabotage my efforts because I'm experiencing major connection instability
Edit: I tried for a solid half hour and things never got any better. If things don't improve by Wednesday I'm going to have to reschedule, or worse, put my entire channel on hold for an indefinite amount of time. This has been a regular problem on my end since last week and I'm really upset about it.

Edit2: 7 PM, connection looks like a sawblade. 8:30 PM, connection looks as straight as a slice of cheese. I can't explain it, but I went on with the show after all. Had a good time with (some of) the first 5 games I played! Walthros and Vikings are going to be a lot of fun to finish, I haven't touched on them in like 8+ years.
Last edited by Baconlabs on Tue Jan 19, 2021 6:36 am, edited 2 times in total.
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Baconlabs
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Post by Baconlabs »

bloop

here's the archives if anyone missed me playing their game and wants to hear my thoughts

Part 1: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/896340267
  • Xoo Xeno Xafari
    Walthros: Renewal
    Vikings of Midgard
    TutOHRial
    Tough Girl Gina
Part 2: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/896346972
  • Tim-Tim 2 "The Almighty Gnome"
    Slimes World
    Katja's Abyss Tactics
    Gay Savage and the Enigma Rip
    Forget-me-Not
    False Skies
Part 3: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/896354871
  • Christmas Stars
    Blood Ledger
    Axe Cop
    Alliterative Abbreviated Adventure
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Nathan Karr
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Post by Nathan Karr »

Interestingly, mine start at almost exactly 1hr 30min in videos 1 and 3. That's quite a coincidence (especially as numbers consisting exclusively of 1s and 3s are my favorites).
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Post by Nathan Karr »

TutOHRial still needs another round of polish; I revised the way the earliest lessons presented themselves a few times midway through development. Its tangled and intentionally unfinished structure makes it hard for me to test and edit, which is why I haven't released an update with the last round of criticism integrated yet; I think of it as my greatest game dev achievement even if I wouldn't call it my best game.

The game doesn't need to be reset at every lesson, there's only one or maybe two hard resets in the entire thing, and these are stated when they happen. Glad to see you realized on your own eventually that the game is edited live at all, but I'm not sure how I could make that any clearer.

The target audience are complete newcomers who find the entire suite of features and empty sprite slots as intimidating as I did back in 2002. It looks like one change I could make that none of my testers (including actual newbies) suggested could remove the clarification that the < and > keys are also , and . - there's probably a lot of over-explained text like that. I was inspired mostly by looking at and playing around with RPG Maker on PS1 again, noting how certain fixed attributes (minimum max HP of 30 for player characters) and lack of options made it easy to churn out something playable, so I wanted to make something highly structured and easy to edit. My love of giving players more options than they're likely to need was an ever-present threat, eventually leading to me providing a plotscripting tutorial and entire folders of alternative sprites.

The lengthy tangents about things like the history of the RPG cleric archetype and the proper names for different pieces of armor were intended mostly for humor; I'd prefer to shorten these rather than remove them entirely.

It was completely intentional to have the game say at several points what my general preference is, then tell the player to do something else anyway so seeing things like you editing the font to distinguish O from 0, change Natalie's palette, and giving unlimited free heals by using regular spell MP, is completely in the spirit of how it's meant to be played, hahaha.



AAA's over-designed mess of minor tweaks stacked on top of each other is worthy of an entire article of explanation, and it's got so many convoluted systems and subsystems crashing into each other that even I tend to forget at least one of them is in play when I revisit it. I laugh that it's still not my worst game to be released.
Remeber: God made you special and he loves you very much. Bye!
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