OHR One-Room Contest 2019

Make games! Discuss those games here.

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Nathan Karr
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Post by Nathan Karr »

Okay, apparently the version of Snake Hallway I uploaded earlier had a textbox chain where one of the textboxes linked one further than I intended, resulting in something playable but slightly nonsensical dialog and completely invalidating one of the game's few actual branches or meaningful choices.

So I found and fixed this on my own before any of the twelve people to download so far had time to give me feedback.
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kylekrack
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Post by kylekrack »

charbile wrote:Hey guys, so uh

I am throwing myself at the mercy of the court. Begging, pleading. If you could give me to the 26th, I am confident I could finish.
Charbile gets an extension to the 26th. Voting won't happen until then. Everyone else should get their game turned in by Sunday.
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Foxley
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Post by Foxley »

My game's basic systems still aren't working with 1 day left, so uh. I'll try to have it ready around mid March instead. Still going to keep working on it but having it ready tomorrow ain't gonna happen. Congrats to everyone who actually finished their game!
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Post by SwordPlay »

I'm having crippling personal problems. Depression. Anxiety. All that jazz. So I don't think I can submit on time (barring divine intervention). I guess that makes two (or more) of us. Hey, we're a crowd! Or a party. or something.

To everyone who did submit, nice stuff!
I'm sure that any problems have already been mentioned and fixed, but I'll go over my experiences. WARNING :Might be spoiler-y

Feen, your game looks and plays great! "Heat" is overpowered (999!) and I didn't really use the other skills. I got to the final treasure and selected no, so I could check my treasure, and it locked up(?) playing on android. Sad thing is I had 100% of the treasures so I had to do it again for no reason. That speedy thing bugged out when I ran away from combat. I assume it paces back and forth, and when you approach it from above, it switches to pacing up and down instead?
I died like twice, once because I forgot to heal between fights, and once due to your cheap trick. You know which one that was. probably.
EDIT: Also that (mostly) mindblowing music!

Nathan, your game was amazing! I love the characters and the writing was excellent! The gameplay was sharp too, well paced combat and equips/items. I found the Trident. And the first time I played I had a few Hjalmar from grinding meat before getting in the boat.
But the dialogue by far stole the show, with joke after joke woven artfully with exposition and narration.
Combat comes in just behind, or perhaps alongside it. It's really tight! I didn't really get a chance to use all the skills. I would have a loved a spread attack of some kind. And I had a lot of knives. I'm not sure I saw all the enemies either, so you might like to have 1 tile with a guaranteed rare (one-off) encounter or something, maybe like if you backtrack... I only heard La Cucaracha on my second playthrough. First time I finished the game I was like "huh? I think I would have remembered if I had heard that song"
It works perfectly with the short-form design, and it was well focused within the 1-room constraints. That's definitely (one of) the most interesting room I've ever been!
I would love to see an extended version of this, maybe with the passageway twisting around, and opening up into various organs, like the stomach, liver. heart, intestine, brain whatever. I definitely want to hear the rest of that story as well, whatever that might be.


Chalkflower I didn't get to complete your game unfortunately, I got stuck at socks&fear. Nothing I did seemed to work, and I tried everything (I think.) (except "Attack" :p). I managed to guess the right options to get past some of the encounters, which was gratifying, but there are a lot of options! It's definitely cool enough to be spun out with more variety, and perhaps responses from the encounters, like yielding an item, or dialogue/text as a reward.
The narrative is quite obfuscated, and it hurt my head to (try to) decipher it all, it was quite obtuse. But challenging, and different, and also intriguing! It certainly made me pay attention, like all your games. Like your all games it also made me feel deeply inadequate. But in a good way, like I was humbled, I guess? I liked it anyways. For some reason I think that if you mashed up all your games so far, it would be kinda neat.
Last edited by SwordPlay on Sun Feb 24, 2019 10:56 am, edited 8 times in total.
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Post by woahpotato »

got my submission in, hope it's enjoyed in some fashion
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dantedynamite
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Post by dantedynamite »

I regret to inform you all, my comrades, that I too could not finish my game within the given time slot. I didn't think it was too ambitious, but my train simulator proved to be a very difficult job to code. For every workaround I had, two more problems sprang up. I will hopefully finish it later on, but for now I'm caught up with classes and work for the foreseeable future. I will be happy to play the games that have been released. I'm offering to whoever 'wins' any 3d printed object of the winner's choice. Whoever ends up winning should PM me for details on that. Unrelated, but I am extremely sad that governor Newsom is scaling back the LA-SF high speed rail project and American cultural attitudes toward infrastructure and the overall economic situation of my home region will suffer the consequences for decades to come.
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This is a work in progress for my train simulator.
This is a work in progress for my train simulator.
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Post by MorpheusKitami »

I'm not gonna be releasing anything either. I was going to do a "City of the Living Dead" inspired game, but most of the, shall we say, "meat" of the game was unfinished. There also wasn't much to it after the intro. Something tells me that people aren't going to be very sad about missing some of that sweet, sweet Fulci-inspired gameplay. Maybe next time.
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Post by kylekrack »

I managed to truck through and get something finished. I planned on having multiple days, but one was plenty work to do! I hope it's not too confusing and arcane. Puzzles are hard to make without user-testing.

https://www.slimesalad.com/forum/viewto ... 864#134864
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kylekrack
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Post by kylekrack »

By my count, I see 5 games submitted for the 2019 One-Room Contest.

We've got:
  • Snake Hallway by the lovely Nathan Karr
    Camomile tea by the stunning Chalkflower
    Vault.rpg by the illustrious Feenicks
    Star Ranger by the incomprehensible woahpotato
    Mom's Home by the me
    And hopefully something by charbile coming soon ;)
Everyone should start playing these games and getting an idea for how you'd rate them. I'm torn between doing a ranking system and a scoring system. Since there's a manageable amount of game to play (eg. <21 half-hour+ games, JFC), it doesn't seem unreasonable to expect participants to play all of them and rank them by favorite to least favorite. If anyone has any suggestions or advice for how exactly to carry out voting, it'd be appreciated.
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Post by guo »

Rank them in order of favourite to least favourite?

Each position is worth the inverse amount of points. IE the game you have ranked first gets 5 points, 2nd gets 4, etc.
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charbile
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Post by charbile »

it's going to be a photo finish, spending all day finishing up (maybe i'll have time to playtest who knows). thanks for letting me have a little extra time
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Post by Feenicks »

I'll wait to play charbile's thing to rate them, but here's some quick reviews of things:

Snake Hallway This sure is a game by Nathan Karr
Camomile tea I really liked the aesthetic, but it's not really clear as to what's going on [although after reading the readme, it does help give the impression of the characters being slightly addled by the burning of incense in a closed room]. Battle system is conceptually neat, but it ends up being hamstrung by the correct option basically winning non-bosses automatically [contrast with undertale, where ACTing often came with benefits or drawbacks alongside being able to spare the enemy]
Vault.rpg It's a bit hard to fairly judge one's own work, but I like what I ended up with here. Not sure if the ranking gained from clearing things at low percentages are even possible, but it's not like anyone is going to go for those, right? The treasure counter goes up to 102%. Each entrance into an area lets you get to a sub-vault. I'll let you figure it out.
Star Ranger Western with lo-fi sound is a really, really good aesthetic, and the battles being super-deadly shootouts helps with that. Not sure what all the other ammo types actually did, beyond a bit more damage?
Mom's Home It says a lot that even with the severe time limit and eventual getting stuck, I kept trying to redo it and try opening the box. Had to get help to finally do it, though. A mention of there being two holes in the box would be appreciated.

Nice showing.
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Post by charbile »

worked on it all day and still haven't put in the ending or connected scripts to npcs... also TMC says sound is important, which isn't in yet either. i think it's better to give it another afternoon, one of those 'too far to give up, too close to make it worthwhile to play for the amount of effort' scenarios.

don't have to wait on me to vote on stuff, can just release it (hopefully) tomorrow as a party gift to everyone here. was too ambitious for the amount of time i had, but boy was it "fun". like old 48 hour times. maybe i can have a 'you tried' gold star sticker
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it really exists, i've been playing it all day. (dont tell jsh)
it really exists, i've been playing it all day. (dont tell jsh)
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Post by SwordPlay »

Star Ranger. The artwork is great, really funky, cowboy-punk with a tonne of style and 'tude. Combat is a bit flat, and I didn't use the defensive skill. But still impressively threatening and perilous. The bandits dialogue is hilariously camp and slightly unnerving.
The music is frankly fantastic and mind-blowing <3. Awesome stuff! Really good use of space/tiles/graphics as well, with different feeling/looking bits and a real sense of motion throughout.

Mom's House.
The music is lovely, and the timing system is clever. It makes good use of the 1-room concept, and even though stuff is happening off-screen, it still has a lot of impact.
It'd be nice to get more of a hint from the shrew.
I didn't complete it and I tried a few times. I got as far as the journal pages. I couldn't figure out what to do after that, but I will go back for another run soon. It's an intriguing puzzle all the same and charmingly put together.
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Post by Nathan Karr »

SwordPlay wrote: Nathan, your game was amazing! I love the characters and the writing was excellent! The gameplay was sharp too, well paced combat and equips/items. I found the Trident. And the first time I played I had a few Hjalmar from grinding meat before getting in the boat.


Adding hjalmar as an enemy drop was a late-game addition, which I intended on making a pretty low drop rate but maybe I made it too high. I wound up getting three of them when I tested the game to make sure it was beatable (and fount it a bit too easy but figured I wasn't going to try to fix it for fear of overcompensating); when I put the hjalmar on the floor, that was the only way to attain it.
SwordPlay wrote:But the dialogue by far stole the show, with joke after joke woven artfully with exposition and narration.
Writing the dialog is usually the best part of any game for me, and for various reasons I'm most comfortable writing when there are two characters going back and forth (and the more different their outlooks, and their bodies, the more fun I have with that). This plays well into also giving characters different and complementary battle skills.

I also went out of my way to make some small things change here and there depending on whether you follow the tutorial dialog, think ahead of it, or actively defy it. Captain Flint won't open the Equip menu if you put Marina's clamshells on manually before meeting him, and Billy Bones acts a little differently to Marina as leader than he does to Captain Flint. The latter was broken when I first put the game out, but I fixed it after a couple hours of it being up so depending on when you downloaded it the dialog chain might be a little broken and skip the textbox where these were supposed to branch.
SwordPlay wrote:Combat comes in just behind, or perhaps alongside it. It's really tight! I didn't really get a chance to use all the skills. I would have a loved a spread attack of some kind. And I had a lot of knives. I'm not sure I saw all the enemies either, so you might like to have 1 tile with a guaranteed rare (one-off) encounter or something, maybe like if you backtrack... I only heard La Cucaracha on my second playthrough. First time I finished the game I was like "huh? I think I would have remembered if I had heard that song"
Some of the skills have no situation where they're useful.
  • I neglected to give any enemies a stun attack so Marina's awakening song only serves to pad out the flavor of her spell list; a bit of worldbuilding, but sadly not a useful move
    The octopus only has a blinding ink attack so that her Wash spell can be useful, too
    Poisonous enemy attacks were only added about a day before release to make her late-game Cure spell and the common Fruit item actually meaningful aside from being weaker, cheaper heals
    Sonar is also there mostly for flavor, but I had the decency to drop its cost to 0
Marina does learn a spread attack (the Wave spell) and a single-target attack that hits twice (Whip). Wave (and possibly Whip?) being "attack the enemy with water", don't work on aquatic creatures (fish, fish skeletons, crabs, frogs, ducks) but do work on others (bats, rats, cats, plants, skulls). I guess it's pretty easy to grind enough meat to survive the stomach acid but not get enough experience to learn Wave; perhaps I should have switched its level learned with Vivify since Meat can already be used to revive.

Knives, bones, and spears exist to be used as throwing weapons. They all do a little more damage than your melee attack, except when using the Silver Dagger against some non-undead monsters that are also boneless or when you have a trident/silver dagger as your melee weapon and a monster critically weak to those attacks. You're likely to acquire more of them than you can really make use of (especially bones).

I should change the Octokraken's vulnerability to the Trident from 800% to 180% to keep the "eight" theme I had going but not make it too much better than all the other options. Some enemies have a main stealable item and a rare stealable item that's even better.

La Cucaracha only plays when you're fighting swarms of the weakest, least-rewarding enemy in the game so it makes perfect sense to not hear it on every playthrough. But every "dry-land" area has at least one cockroach swarm enemy formation in it, I'm pretty sure.
SwordPlay wrote:It works perfectly with the short-form design, and it was well focused within the 1-room constraints. That's definitely (one of) the most interesting room I've ever been!
My focus included underdoing my own self-imposed limits. I started by saying there'd be no more than four heroes, and after writing the scene where Flint and Marina meet I decided I didn't even want a third; one mage and one thief, both slightly fightery, was all that such a short adventure demanded. Billy Bones was considered as a possible third party member, but I changed my mind before I even imported the skeleton sprites.

The original plan for the game involved putting an NPC (treasure, monster, whatever) on every single tile aside from the one you start on. I didn't quite do that, but maybe someday I'll revisit the "linear hallway RPG" game plan and include shops as well.
SwordPlay wrote:I would love to see an extended version of this, maybe with the passageway twisting around, and opening up into various organs, like the stomach, liver. heart, intestine, brain whatever. I definitely want to hear the rest of that story as well, whatever that might be.
Anything more than what's here would be padding, I feel. Possibly good padding, with more dialog between these two characters, more bosses, more formation sets made of combinations of the existing roster of monsters, more unavoidable spots where a treasure happens to be laying around.

As for the rest of the story, one way to expand on the ending would be to draw new backdrops for each major beat in the narration. There's some hinting here at the giant snake itself being used as a boss encounter in another game of mine at some point, possibly, but Marina's and Flint's stories are pretty much done with (except possibly as cameos).

I don't really feel like I have more tale to tell here, and I was already struggling for boss encounter ideas as it was towards the end (a skeleton and a giant octopus being easy, but I didn't want to just throw Cthulhu at the end so I looked around in my sprites until I found something that felt suitably aquatic and a little less obvious; I just kinda felt like I wanted three bosses rather than two for how long the tunnel was).
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