OHR 2018 One-Room Contest

Make games! Discuss those games here.

Moderators: Bob the Hamster, marionline, SDHawk

User avatar
Foxley
Metal Slime
Posts: 832
Joined: Sat Nov 09, 2013 5:54 pm

Post by Foxley »

Alright, here's the last one. Observations playing Flow:

"This game seems very inscrutable, even though you get a little tutorial at the beginning. Well, guess I'll just go with the flow and do my best in any case. Har har.

Even though the bugs and erratic behavior took me out of the experience regularly, I quite enjoyed looking at the different shops and trying to hatch a scheme on how best to supply the different merchants with their needs so they could produce more lucrative goods for me to pawn off.

The Coal and Iron are clearly mixed up with eachother. Trying to buy one plundered the stock of the other. This messed up my scheme a fair bit, but I think I can still recover.

I got the craftsman shop guy to make some Buttons but the merchant who buys those didn't seem to want to actually buy any. C'mon man, don't play me like that.

Seems my scheme didn't work out so well. The nail in the coffin was when I bought a bunch of Ovens, which were $100 each, figuring I could sell those for a handsome profit. Turns out none of the other shops want them, and they can't be sold to the outside world either. Game over man, game over.

Summary: There's a lot less to say about this one, to my understanding it was thrown together in a day or two. It's very glitchy and difficult to understand how to play effectively, but is a pretty impressive tech demo and a cool idea nonetheless. I'd love to see a polished version of this make its way as a side attraction in a bigger RPG. Could be something kind of like Silk Road for Famicom, that game was actually pretty damn fun."

Edit:
I got distracted and left the game running for like half an hour and the music is great!
Last edited by Foxley on Sat Feb 24, 2018 4:41 am, edited 1 time in total.
User avatar
Foxley
Metal Slime
Posts: 832
Joined: Sat Nov 09, 2013 5:54 pm

Post by Foxley »

And since everyone else did it, I'll do the ranking too of which ones I enjoyed playing the most:

1-delinquent.rpg
2-Flow
3-Space
4-No Exit
5-Phos
User avatar
TheLordThyGod
Slime Knight
Posts: 218
Joined: Thu May 14, 2015 9:18 pm
Location: Muscle Shoals, AL, USA, Earth, Solar System, Milky Way, Known Universe
Contact:

Post by TheLordThyGod »

Ranking:

1. Phos: Solias (review)
2. delinquent.rpg (review)
3. The Flow (review)
4. Space (review)
5. Snowshoe Forest (review)
...spake The Lord Thy God.
User avatar
guo
Metal Slime
Posts: 749
Joined: Fri Dec 04, 2009 9:12 pm

Post by guo »

Notes (taken as I played, not exactly structured):
space:
poor english, text colours hurt my eyes. frames are pretty as is main walkabout and portrait. door feature is nifty but needs tweaking. bugs with layers. resting did nothing. tells me i have nothing for composter then adds a new party member out of nowhere? make the camera pan faster! nice atmosphere, battles felt unnecessary.

flow:
nice walkabouts, interesting seeing in a higher resolution & tick rate. some things didn't work , eg i would sell "coal" but it would increment stone. received no money for kilns. fun, but needs a motivator. i quickly grew bored. still, very technically impressive and much potential as a future system - especially if integrated into a "fully fledged" rpg.

paradise:
that title screen is burned into my mind's eye forever. is this the music from the sausage keyboard scene in freddy got fingered? froze at the "rape/murder/feed/nope" ... thing. portraits were kinda cool. got a few endings, with no forewarning or foreshadowing of the consequences of my actions. felt like i was reviewing someones sunday school homework.

no exit:
i like the idea, because i love text based roguelikes, but the combat is just too unbalanced and janky for it to be fun. i died and had to restart 5 times in as many minutes. theres no indication of what areas are more dangerous.. and even after fighting enemies doing 1-2 damage i suddenly was fighting enemies doing 10-15 damage in the very next fight, same area. i dont need to be handheld, but would like some feedback for a wrong action that isn't just a "game over" screen. punish me, but allow me the opportunity to withdraw and try another path. Don't force me to trudge through the same repetitive areas and dialogue time and again. this could be a great little experience with some polish and tweaking.

showshoe forest:
whoa, footprints! the graphics look... familiar. nice to see someone putting the free assets to use and focussing more on "game". not sure what is original or not, but everything looks decent. map is well constructed, fun to explore. combat is fun despite it's simplicity. i felt bad for the vole, i had to let it go. the badger is a ... chocobo? he pummeled me good. fake battlescripting, yes please!
i like the character swapping! the animation itself is neat too. ended abruptly, but obvious thought was put into the gameplay loop.

delinquent.rpg:
looks professional, music is great. animations are fantastic. some layering issues, but very impressive otherwise. actually a standalone game! felt the most "complete". the characters had charm, and information was presented in a "familiar" way without resorting to exposition. battles were fun, enjoyed figuring out what was effective and who to target first, by trial and error. take note, "no exit".
Last edited by guo on Sat Feb 24, 2018 10:41 am, edited 1 time in total.
vvight.wordpress.com
User avatar
Feenicks
Metal Slime
Posts: 696
Joined: Tue Aug 10, 2010 9:23 pm
Location: ON THE AIR IN THE AIR
Contact:

Post by Feenicks »

I could talk about it in a different context, but:
delinquent.rpg ended up being I used to experiment with a few things I haven't done/done much of myself. In no real order:

-The text boxes weren't too difficult to set up, but I like how they turned out. They're obviously missing a lot of the stuff the built-in textboxes have [setting of tags, giving of items, and so on] but seeing as I'm already scripting out everything involved with them that isn't that big a deal.

-The serious amount of turning on and off of map layers that this involved was a pain and probably not something I'd do to such a degree outside of a contest setting, but it's something that I already have other uses for [having side areas in dungeons be hidden until you go into them, ala FF1/the NES/SNES-era dragon quests, for instance].

-Autosaving. Sure, it resulted in one save-ruining bug getting through, but I feel that otherwise it worked fine. In another sort of project I'd likely pair it with proper saving, with autosaving being more of a temporary thing such that significant progress is never lost due to a bad battle happening.

-The non-mandatory battles in this weren't random, but in fact were based on how many other [non-mandatory] battles you'd faced before. It's far from a complex system, and indeed it'll probably require some changes if I was to use in it some other setting, but in something where there's no real order to things outside the first and last scenes it works fine.

-The 3 characters and their attacks were me playing around with how you could have variation in attack types while keeping them on the same level as the default attacks, relative both to each characters own attacks and each other's attacks.
  • Nasse, being the protagonist, has the usual attack, as well as an attack that lets her skip a turn for more damage [up to 3 times the usual amount].
    Mary, reflecting her weeb/chunnibyou that I intended to flesh out more, has an attack stat 5 times as high as Nasse's, but really lousy percentages on her attacks. Lunge gives a chance for slightly more damage, but tends to miss against speedier foes, while Spin hits every enemy for even lousier damage.
    Bordes ended up being built for situtations that never actually appeared in this game: her base ATK is lousy, meaning her attacks are badly affected by the presence of any real DEF, but there's no hugely defense-heavy enemies with which her Twinstrike would help deal more damage against. Wipe Out's a bit more relevant, as there's two attack-boosting enemies to use it against, but even then it's not hugely useful against either of them. Hmm...
-I had the variables set up for tracking losses and the like, as well as a list of places to check on the menu screen that would've got crossed off as you checked them out, but as the deadline came and those weren't fully done I ended up cutting them.

Anyway: I kept things pretty easy for this, as otherwise I'd have to do a more thorough job of balancing things out and I completely ran out of time for that [for reasons totally unrelated to me buying and excessively playing a game that weekend].
User avatar
Foxley
Metal Slime
Posts: 832
Joined: Sat Nov 09, 2013 5:54 pm

Post by Foxley »

Here's my post-mortem:

* Using a Trello for project organization was a really good idea and I'm definitely going to do this every single time going forward.

* My original vision for a one-map game that immediately came to mind was one that was wide open and you could wander around, there'd be NPCs and mini-objectives like fetch quests and minibosses and such. It'd offload some of the design work by allowing the player to just wander around and look at things, fight battles and do stuff. My inclinations once I started designing the map, however, veered towards tightly controlled spaces and I think this was a mistake. The game would have been more fun to play if things were more open and readily explorable. If I end up doing a redux of this game's theme and setting, this will be what I'll go for.

* Close to a week in, I had to pivot away from a game that would have had around 7 playable characters and a hidden superboss. Christ, wasn't this contest supposed to be about not overscoping? It is such a nasty habit to kick.

* I liked that I had an opportunity to demo a couple of scripts: palette cycling and disappearing footprints. The biggest breakthrough I had with this project, though, was getting elbow deep into the guts of the OHR battle system, something that I've shied away from so far. I'm pretty proud of how some of the enemy interactions came out, and the timing/rhythm of attack captions and sound effects during the fake battlescripting sequences. Even though I didn't even come close to finishing the game, I feel that I developed some valuable skills.

* May or may not do something more with this game. If I get super bored while recovering from dental surgery after next Thursday, I might work in more content, but not really holding myself to it.
User avatar
MorpheusKitami
Slime Knight
Posts: 218
Joined: Wed Nov 30, 2016 8:23 pm
Location: Somewhere in America

Post by MorpheusKitami »

1:No Exit
This one reminds me a lot of old non-commerical RPGs from the '90s and '80s. The ones where you didn't really know what you were doing beyond a vague 'kill the evil monster' and then get tossed in a dungeon. Which I like, a lot.

2:Deliquent
It looks the nicest, but that makes the graphical glitches seem more noticeable to me. And I can't say I'm fond of the artstyle. Other than that, all I can really say it's okay. Nothing bad, nothing interesting.

3:Snowshoe Forest
I liked the use of secrets and some of the graphical effects, but otherwise it seemed very unfinished. That's probably because it is, but I get the feeling it'll be decent to play once it's finished.

4:Space
In it's current state, Space just really isn't that good. It's got a good concept, buuuuuuuuuuut that's about it. The heroine is unlikeable, and her portrait seems...off somehow. Maybe it's the weird look in her eyes. There's also not any way to heal. Which wouldn't be bad if the game didn't make you think there would be a way to heal. Maybe it'll be better later.

Also, on my own game, I'm noticing a lot of people have not been getting past the dialog system. It's explained in the readme, but you're supposed to use the numpad keys.
User avatar
kylekrack
Liquid Metal Slime
Posts: 1240
Joined: Mon Jun 16, 2014 8:58 am
Location: USA
Contact:

Post by kylekrack »

Foxley wrote:Edit:
I got distracted and left the game running for like half an hour and the music is great!
I'm happy to hear that. I was focused on making something that could loop continuously without getting obnoxious.
My pronouns are they/them
Ps. I love my wife
User avatar
Foxley
Metal Slime
Posts: 832
Joined: Sat Nov 09, 2013 5:54 pm

Post by Foxley »

MorpheusKitami wrote:Also, on my own game, I'm noticing a lot of people have not been getting past the dialog system. It's explained in the readme, but you're supposed to use the numpad keys.
I'll bite: what prompted you to make this design decision? Multiple people including myself assumed that the game had frozen due to a scripting error when the dialogue cross came up. Like... if you already use the arrow keys to move, why not use the arrow key scancodes for your script, or check for either arrow keys or numpad keys? It's worth pointing out that 10-keyless keyboards are becoming increasingly popular, and most medium and small laptops don't even have a 10-key, which would make progress impossible purely on a hardware basis.

Also, a README gets packaged with the .ZIP automatically when you pick Distribute Game and a vast number of people don't even add information to them. Assuming that everyone will read something that's usually blank doesn't seem like a good method of communicating info.
User avatar
kylekrack
Liquid Metal Slime
Posts: 1240
Joined: Mon Jun 16, 2014 8:58 am
Location: USA
Contact:

Post by kylekrack »

Hello again.

I haven't tallied up the votes yet. I've been traveling the past few days, and on top of other deadlines, I haven't made time. That being said, if anyone hasn't played the One Room games or hasn't voted, PLEASE DO SO! Feedback is one of the most important parts of game design. You have some more time to cast your votes, so take advantage of it.

Get back soon to tally everything up and declare a winner of the Big Kid Club Champion Award
My pronouns are they/them
Ps. I love my wife
TMC
Metal King Slime
Posts: 4308
Joined: Sun Apr 10, 2011 9:19 am

Post by TMC »

(OK, I need to finish playing the games)

In a surprising coincidence, it turns out that there's a 1-Room RPG Jam happening right now! You can probably enter your OHR 2018 One-Room Contest game in that jam too, to get a larger audience. It finishes in one day and 6 hours, so don't delay.
(Just like this contest, the description says "Create an RPG whose entire gameplay is constrained to one map/room")
User avatar
kylekrack
Liquid Metal Slime
Posts: 1240
Joined: Mon Jun 16, 2014 8:58 am
Location: USA
Contact:

Post by kylekrack »

(Hey everyone sorry for the delay, I think I got caught in a time warp for a few days)

BUT WITHOUT FURTHER ADO

The winner of the 2018 Big Kid Club Champion Award
by a whopping 1 points is...


...wait for it...





Snowshoe Forest by Foxley

It was a really close call. delinquent.rpg was only a point behind, so I feel it should be mentioned as being the other strong contender.

That being said, thank you so much to everyone who participated! The turnout for this was far greater than I imagined, and it's awesome to see so many new games out this month. Every one of the submissions was a joy to experience and you all deserve credit for what you made. Hopefully I can get a page on the Wiki up for this contest to somewhat immortalize your names.

Thank you as well to everyone who played the games and voted! Your part was also very important in all of this. I understand how tough it can be to sit down and play a bunch of games (and write about them, as some of you did) when you've got other stuff going on in your life. That's why it means a lot that you did.

@Foxley: If you have a better screenshot or title screen or whatever you want me to replace in the BKCCA image, send it my way and I'll replace the one I have.
Attachments
The official Big Kid Club Champion Award winner
The official Big Kid Club Champion Award winner
snowshoeforest_BKCCA.png (192.88 KiB) Viewed 4886 times
My pronouns are they/them
Ps. I love my wife
User avatar
guo
Metal Slime
Posts: 749
Joined: Fri Dec 04, 2009 9:12 pm

Post by guo »

Congratulations! Now finish the rest of it, I want to know what happens (talking to all of you here.)
vvight.wordpress.com
TMC
Metal King Slime
Posts: 4308
Joined: Sun Apr 10, 2011 9:19 am

Post by TMC »

(I said this already, but) Congrats to Foxley, and all the contestants who turned something in!

Pheonix wrote:-The text boxes weren't too difficult to set up, but I like how they turned out. They're obviously missing a lot of the stuff the built-in textboxes have [setting of tags, giving of items, and so on] but seeing as I'm already scripting out everything involved with them that isn't that big a deal.
Oh! I thought you used the builtin textbox system but just overrode the way the text appears. You can do that by hiding the sl:textbox text slice and creating a new text slice in its position. However the first line of text is already visible on the first tick (which will be before your script gets a chance to run, it if didn't bring up the textbox itself), so to hide it you'd have to do something like prepend a blank line.
-The serious amount of turning on and off of map layers that this involved was a pain and probably not something I'd do to such a degree outside of a contest setting, but it's something that I already have other uses for [having side areas in dungeons be hidden until you go into them, ala FF1/the NES/SNES-era dragon quests, for instance].
Was it a pain to script (I wouldn't have thought so, using zones), a pain to set up in the editor, or just a pain what should go on which map layer and which need to be visible?

Also, nice to have an explanation of how the attack system (and non-mandatory battles) worked. Interesting.

I think a better RPG player than me would have managed to figure out when to use the different attacks - attacks for higher def enemies is a pretty basic mechanic - but I struggled.

I liked the autosaving too.
User avatar
Foxley
Metal Slime
Posts: 832
Joined: Sat Nov 09, 2013 5:54 pm

Post by Foxley »

Whoa, just realized this is still stickied. Unsticky por favor.
Post Reply