Heart of the OHR Contest

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msw188
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Post by msw188 »

To Spoonweaver:
I'm very interested to know what you meant by a couple things in your ratings on Tales 2. First off, you mention that the scripting is 'clumsy but functional'. I'm curious to know what you found clumsy about it. The item interface? The scripted scenes? Most importantly, did you find any bugs?

You also mention a 'strong need to grind'. I found, in my playthrough, that simply not running from battles, I was able to complete the entire demo without any grinding at all. That said, I know the in's and out's of the battles system. And I don't consider exploring to be grinding. As in, searching out the dungeon but needing to retreat (note that death does not take away your EXP). But I'd be interested to know what made you stop to grind so much. Were battles singly difficult? Were you learning and using Apono's skills? Did you recognize that Mavel can restore his MP by attacking? Did you make use of the Esc.Ball and Windball items?

EDIT: forgot to ask about possible scripting bugs
Last edited by msw188 on Fri Dec 17, 2010 5:56 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Spoonweaver
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Post by Spoonweaver »

msw188 wrote:To Spoonweaver:
I'm very interested to know what you meant by a couple things in your ratings on Tales 2. First off, you mention that the scripting is 'clumsy but functional'. I'm curious to know what you found clumsy about it. The item interface? The scripted scenes? Most importantly, did you find any bugs?

You also mention a 'strong need to grind'. I found, in my playthrough, that simply not running from battles, I was able to complete the entire demo without any grinding at all. That said, I know the in's and out's of the battles system. And I don't consider exploring to be grinding. As in, searching out the dungeon but needing to retreat (note that death does not take away your EXP). But I'd be interested to know what made you stop to grind so much. Were battles singly difficult? Were you learning and using Apono's skills? Did you recognize that Mavel can restore his MP by attacking? Did you make use of the Esc.Ball and Windball items?

EDIT: forgot to ask about possible scripting bugs
It's really hard to say what I thought was clunky. I realize you fixed them up since the first release, so maybe I just feel like they're still buggy when they're not anymore. I guess it's not really fair to judge you on something that you fixed.... I'll give them another look and maybe I'll change my vote on that category later.

As far as balancing goes. When I got to the point where I was "searching out the dungeon but needing to retreat ", it felt more like being overpowered by the enemies. I mean, retreating is basically grinding. That's what you do, you go out into the world, fight some monsters but then retreat back to town and start again with a higher level. I'm not saying that a little bit of grinding is a bad thing, it just seemed like there was a lot in the game. I was doing everything I could think of to get ahead in the game, coping every new monster I saw, conserving MP with mavel's draining attack, using attacks that were more effective on certain monsters. It just seemed like those things should have driven me forward in the game, and yet I'd still end up hitting points were I'd either turn back or die.
THIS ISN'T A BAD THING. I may have given you less points for it, but it might honestly be a strong point in someone else's eyes. Your game is difficult, but not impossibly so. It's a good quality and I honestly had fun playing your game.

@PEPSI:
I feel a bit bad, being one of the people you thought was speaking out against old games with new content. But, let me be perfectly clear, I think they should be allowed in this and future contests. The problem seems to be the nature of the new content.
On this note, I believe there was some controversy over an entry that would have been just a graphical update. A complete graphical update, but just a graphical update. How would one go about judging that fairly? If I used my voting method, then it could only receive a maximum of 2 points, that hardly seems fair.
There are entries in this contest with similar updates. Fenrir's entry, for example, has "Enemies, Spells, and Rewards rebalanced." How would one go about voting on new enemies? What should they be worth? Thankfully, this wasn't the only thing new about Vikings, much to my surprise and delight.
Aside from the potential voting confusion, and the need to replay old games ( which is fixed with an included .sav ) there's really nothing wrong with the old games being part of this contest, and in fact they're a big part of what make this contest great! You have to keep letting updated games into the OHR contest in the future for the sake of the community. We need more updates to these potentially breathtaking games.
In order to relieve voter confusion, now and in the future. I think stricter rules should be put into place. I propose either having all developers have a defined starting point for new content, whether it be the entrance to a cave, or a new continent, OR voting for games in the next HotOHR contest as a whole. Voting for games as a whole would be unfair to newer games since the developer has had less time to make them and so would be at a disadvantage, but maybe the HotOHR should just be that sort of contest. I mean we have brand new games that MORE than compete with the old updated games. So in theory, there's really nothing stopping new entries from winning out even if the old games are voted for in their entirety. Plus, if since you're basically announcing the HotOHR 2 now, developers basically have 2 years to complete their games. That's plenty of time.
I see the HotOHR being a contest where each member of the community puts forth their best RPG for ranking. And the winner is the top RPG of the community that year ( or bi-year ). In this way I think New entries have more of an edge over old entries then one would think. People like voting on fresh games. They seem better just because they're new. Anyways, if we really build this type of contest up and keep offering prizes as good or better then this years prizes I think we could really drive this community forward and have some amazing games to show for it.
Last edited by Spoonweaver on Fri Dec 17, 2010 7:55 am, edited 3 times in total.
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msw188
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Post by msw188 »

Spoonweaver:
Thanks for the info! I couldn't find any bugs with any of the scripts while playtesting, but I only ran through the game once, and didn't die a whole lot either, so dying especially has a chance to be buggy.

And we just have different ideas on what grinding is, I suppose. To me, grinding is walking in circles learning nothing but growing your characters. This way your characters are improving, but YOU aren't, because it's mindless. Exploring and being forced to turn back means you, the player, are learning things. Finding the correct way to go, learning what works and what doesn't in terms of surviving in the next area.

In any case, I'm glad you enjoyed the game! And yeah, if you were playing the original release, there were a handful of bugs, at least one of them gamebreaking. Pretty terrible, but that's what happens when you finish your initial release at about 3:56am and the deadline is 4am your time, haha.

The graphical update was mine (along with some stats and other similar unjudgeable things). When I was working on it I had given more thought to simply having an entry and getting a bugfix, and not really thought about voting. All the same, I'm with SW in the idea that, for the upcoming contest, updates should still be allowed. Does anyone really want to disqualify a completed Motrya from the next contest?

I think the best solution to the issue would be to require that if you plan on releasing an update to a game, this needs to be announced early enough (like, at the same time you make your bug request, if something similar were to go down) so that other people can play what you have so far and make a SAV file of their own. If they don't want to, then they can still vote by asking where in the game the new content begins.
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Post by Baconlabs »

Is re-playing the old games really as bad as all that?
Well, yes and no. Me, I find it difficult to replay titles such as Okedoke and DYWTBAH - they are excellent games that were very fun the first time around, but having to start from the beginning is a bore because I already know just how much time I'm going to be burning before I get to new content. I think fiddling with save states is a good idea here - either the author uploads one of their own, or we, the people who have played these games before, import an older saved game. (The latter may cause problems, though. What if you saved on a map that got deleted in a future version?)

On the opposite side, new users of the OHR will stumble upon these old-new games and fancy them as a completely new experience.
Unless veterans are the only ones who visit and vote on these competitions, in which case this is a moot point.

(I've got nothing to worry about, personally. I'm entering another chapter of Viridia in HotOHR 2, but the early chapters have almost nothing in common with each other (aside from setting), so new content will be easy to vote on. Any of you who played Chapter 1 a while back probably noticed a lack of familiar content.)
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Post by NayusDante »

It might be a little late, but I posted the final bugfix for EF. Not much has changed since the "rebalanced" build I linked to, so if you've played that, there's almost nothing different in this release. I didn't have it up here though, so I wanted to make sure that I didn't have only the old easytype build up.

I didn't have the time it would have taken me to do an ending that gives it justice. Maybe over Christmas break...
Last edited by NayusDante on Fri Dec 17, 2010 2:15 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by Mogri »

Baconlabs wrote:Is re-playing the old games really as bad as all that?
Well, yes and no. Me, I find it difficult to replay titles such as Okedoke and DYWTBAH - they are excellent games that were very fun the first time around, but having to start from the beginning is a bore because I already know just how much time I'm going to be burning before I get to new content.
This is why you don't delete your save files :)
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Post by JSH357 »

Last edited by JSH357 on Fri Dec 17, 2010 7:20 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Chronoboy
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Post by Chronoboy »

JSH357 wrote:Audio #1 - Chronoboy Adventures

Started off on this one, and even in the latest stable OHR I cannot get very far because of bugs. Sorry about the limited commentary, Chronoboy.
The graphics in the beginning are mine(reason why I ripped graphics, mine can hurt the eyes lol). As you can see, I suck at drawing people entirely.

lol, never thought of the door windows resembling crosses until now. Maybe the doors should just have one window, rather than separated into 4.

Thanks for pointing out the typo in the first textbox.

During the intro it says, a boy and his friends. From this dialog, I would think the player would understand Jason, etc... are his friends.

The intro is not as polished as I would like it to be, it went though a few iterations and changes. At one point, the last part of the intro didn't make any sense at all, and the one character never ran to distract the police. This has all been added now.

The sprite when you fall down into the pit, is a sprite of a character from the ripped graphics lying down. It makes it appear like the boy fell into the hole, rather than falling and seemingly landing on his feet(which is completely unrealistic, unless your playing Vikings, where there are cat people :) ).

The flashing lights were to signify the police sirens, I didn't put the sound effect for the sirens in. That might may make that scene annoying. Police sirens flash red and blue here in Canada, so I can only assume it is like that everywhere else in the world.

Strange it still crashes there... It must be the scripting for the midi music used for when the harp is played. I fade the ambient music out, and then play one note after another, with a simple wait after each note, then a stop song. I believe I started initial development on my Windows machine, and the harp appeared to work fine. When I moved my development efforts over to my Linux machine, it also worked fine there as well. I can provide you with a SAV file, which will have the option to skip the intro on a new game, if you would like. Once the intro is watched once, it will allow the player to skip it on future new games. As I definitely understand the intro can be long and slow.

Can anyone else on these forums who has tried the game see if it also crashes for them on this scene and tell me which version of GAME.EXE they are using. I would really like to pinpoint this issue, as the harp item later in the game will be used to solve puzzles. The harp scripting is more than likely my most complex code, as it involved an interactive item. Such as the Ocarina in Zelda, but with less notes...

The intro calls the harp scripts, the one which plays each note on a keypress. Hence the reason you see the letters in the middle of the screen during this scene.
Last edited by Chronoboy on Fri Dec 17, 2010 8:03 pm, edited 2 times in total.
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Post by msw188 »

I have downloaded Viridia ch2, and it claims it is an rar file. This might have been mentioned elsewhere in the thread, but I'm asking again - how do I access and play the game? I feel like I've seen RAR files somewhere, but I can't think of where.
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Post by ncw64 »

Ok, a couple quick things:

I just got my computer back recently and have had finals, but I'm going to play through and try to put in some half-decent text boxes and variety in enemies. I'm not sure what happened with the door in Aduane fixing the bridge, I'll play through it as soon as I can. I'm not sure what you mean about having no scripting at all- I'm certainly not a pro but I have plenty of scripting in there as far as I'm concerned so far. Wow there are some weird issues, it was a kind of last minute release, it's probably just dumb things that I did but there is the possibility that it isn't the most recent version. I thought I took the exiter item out for my demo but I could be wrong. Well, I'll update as soon as I can play through and I'll play as many of your games as I can as well, thanks for any feedback so far!
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Post by JSH357 »

msw188 wrote:I have downloaded Viridia ch2, and it claims it is an rar file. This might have been mentioned elsewhere in the thread, but I'm asking again - how do I access and play the game? I feel like I've seen RAR files somewhere, but I can't think of where.
Google Winrar. RAR is a better compression format than ZIP in general, so a lot of us will probably be using it in the future.
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Post by JSH357 »

Audio #4 - Eternity Fragment (Part 1)
Audio #4 - Eternity Fragment (Part 2)

I'm kind of stalled in this game, not sure where to go after the ice cave and rescuing the princess. I'm probably missing something obvious. Great stuff though.

Audio #5 - Apophenia
Audio #6 - Hero
Audio #7 - Skyfall
Last edited by JSH357 on Sat Dec 18, 2010 1:22 am, edited 5 times in total.
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Post by guo »

Oh cool, thanks JSH. I always enjoy these.

...

Yea, I need to get cracking on more content. I have *alot* of graphics ready to go, I just need to work more on developing the story so I can fill in the maps.

I suspect I'm going to totally rework combat aswell. If anyone would like to contribute ideas I'm more than open.
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Last edited by JSH357 on Sat Dec 18, 2010 6:36 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by NayusDante »

After the Ice Cave, you're supposed to talk to the king again. I think I put something in the king's dialog that indicates that he wants you to come back, but I don't think it's entirely obvious.
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