Does anyone make a shiny buck on any of their OHR games?

[Chronoboy]

An interesting question with an attached poll to easily tally the responses. I am curious if anyone has attempted to make a few bucks from attempting to sell their game? Has anyone even given the idea some thought? There are some really insane RPGs on the platform that surpass what is available on DSiWare(lots of awful RPGs on there).

Here's some food for thought:

Average price of RPG on DSiWare: $7.99
Average price of RPG on SmartPhone: $1.99-$14.99

Say, if you attempted to sell a full version of your RPG for even $0.99, and you managed to find roughly 500 people which enjoyed the demo, of which 300 of them forked out money for it, you would make just under $300 in profit. You could obviously sell for more, but this is just an example.

With the right Advertising(look at Motyra's campaign), one could definitely toss a profit with a Indie title. With a great story and enough hours of play, it will entice some hardcore RPG gamers, who crave a good classic RPG from SNES. Look at how Minecraft made it's way to fame. The game was very simple when released, addictive and very fun to play. Nobody cared that it wasn't made by a large game studio, they cared more for the gameplay and the enjoyment. Think of what some of you OHR developers can do, I've seen some of best pixel art in OHR games. Not only that, but OHR games also have original music scores, and storylines which keep the player interested. If a demo was released, and say the player wanted to continue this story(like a good book), I'm sure they'd pay a buck or two to experience it.

Writing this makes me feel like a coach or something...

[JSH357]

Motrya has a campaign?

Advertising is actually the thing I'm most concerned about because I have no idea how to do it properly

[Spoonweaver]

Well advertising is key isn't it. Right now, a new game on Slime Salad gets roughly 100 downloads. The percentage of those downloads that would be willing to pay as little as a dollar to download the game is unknown, but I'd guess it wouldn't be a high number.

I think we as a community could us some advertising. Getting the OHR name out there would benefit all of us. So anyone with any ideas of how to do that should not only share them but perhaps even do them themselves.


On this topic, I've been thinking about making a new ohr website. I love Slime Salad to death but I just don't think it's very new person friendly. It's too much of a community site and not enough of a game site. (Also I think the name turns people off more than a little.) I'm thinking of calling the new site OHR Arcade. What does everyone think of this? Would anyone like to help? Would anyone like to object?

[Master K]

OHR Arcade

No no, call it OHRcade. It may look strange, but it pronounces good.

I'm positive this entire community could get together and create a game that could possibly sold. It would provide great exposure to SS and the OHR engine. Our community is small and tight knit, at the moment. The amount of quality games that comes by is, to say the least, slim. I'd say Spellshard and Ruin are recent examples of a good RPG game.

[Mogri]

On this topic, I've been thinking about making a new ohr website. I love Slime Salad to death but I just don't think it's very new person friendly. It's too much of a community site and not enough of a game site. (Also I think the name turns people off more than a little.) I'm thinking of calling the new site OHR Arcade. What does everyone think of this? Would anyone like to help? Would anyone like to object?

Do you have any concrete ideas besides a name?

[The Wobbler]

I like that the first person to respond after "I just don't think it's very new person friendly" is a new person who posts, makes games and contributes regularly.

So anyone with any ideas of how to do that should not only share them but perhaps even do them themselves.

Make a game worth playing and promote it on other sites.

[Spoonweaver]

Make a game worth playing and promote it on other sites.

I like to think that I did. I posted Slimes everywhere I could think of. I did everything up to paying for advertising.

And you're right, new person is the wrong word for what I meant. I think the term casual gamer is more what I was looking for. A person that glimpses this site without the intention of making games might be turned off I think.

Please, please, please, don't get defensive about my suggestion. I only suggested it because I truly think it would help the community. I don't want to step on anyone's toes, or upset anyone here.

As for concrete ideas besides a name. Aside from the logo and color format, both of which kind of go with the name issue and aren't actually bad here on Slime Salad. (I actually like the green), my other main idea is the games list. Right now it's rather bland, and aside from a short list of 4 games on the front page and a bland listing on the side of the page people really have no idea what to play. I think with the simple addition of some thumbnails the games list could be a lot better. The presence of tech demos and graphic packs really hurts the site too I think. It would be best to have a separate place for those so that someone looking for a game doesn't stubble upon one of those and get confused. (they are normally labeled pretty good in the description though) Let's take Kongregate as an example. When you open up the front page, you're bombarded with dozens of games to play and they all (well most) look fun.

Anyways, these are just some thoughts I've had. I don't really have a problem with Slime Salad, I love this site. I just think things could be improved.

[Chronoboy]

On this topic, I've been thinking about making a new ohr website. I love Slime Salad to death but I just don't think it's very new person friendly. It's too much of a community site and not enough of a game site. (Also I think the name turns people off more than a little.) I'm thinking of calling the new site OHR Arcade. What does everyone think of this? Would anyone like to help? Would anyone like to object?

Late last year I working on a new game list, which was a copy of the game list which "Zelda Classic" has. I really like their game list and how to search for games, it's really nice. Do check out their game list to see what I mean. I was actually thinking of giving some life back to that project and making it a reality, this time around perhaps adding a feature to enable payments via PayPal, if that interests anyone.

Basically a modern game list needs the following attributes:

- Easily searchable
- Categorized and tagged games(tags are most common on blogs).
- Perhaps the ability to search by game theme.
- Should be-able to auto-package GAME.exe on request per download.
- Search by screenshots(check out Zelda Classics version of this).
- Easily indexable by web crawlers.
- Beta keys for sharing beta downloads with select users.

If done and advertised right, the community could gain more players, meaning your game could be seen by a larger number of players.

I'll see if I can dig up the old game list code and put it back together with all the features mentioned here. For the most part it has most of the features already.

[TMC]

- Should be-able to auto-package GAME.exe on request per download.

Yes! This is something I'd love to see. RPG file only/Windows download/OSX download/Linux distro packages/whatever other platforms we support in the future. If I knew PHP (I'd prefer Python) I would add this to CP's gamelist (don't have access to SS's source). Custom can also do the same thing now (but only Windows and plain zipped RPG currently). I'd be willing to help with this.

- Search by screenshots(check out Zelda Classics version of this).

Cool! I remember that.

[Chronoboy]

- Should be-able to auto-package GAME.exe on request per download.

Yes! This is something I'd love to see. RPG file only/Windows download/OSX download/Linux distro packages/whatever other platforms we support in the future. If I knew PHP (I'd prefer Python) I would add this to CP's gamelist (don't have access to SS's source). Custom can also do the same thing now (but only Windows and plain zipped RPG currently). I'd be willing to help with this.

I code all my websites in Python, and my old gamelist project was being done in Python.

Do you know if it is possible to bind Game's binary with the RPG file?

I believe Euphoria used this method to create it's binary's, and sdlBasic also uses it.

Let me explain how it works, since you are technically minded you might know how it can be implemented:

GAME.EXE is currently 1,329,152 bytes in length.
VIKINGS.RPG is currently 11,682,017 bytes in length.

Append VIKINGS.RPG to GAME.EXE. VIKINGS.RPG begins at position 1,329,153 in the EXE now.

When launching GAME.EXE or whatever it got renamed to, upon launch it will check the length of it's own binary, if the length is greater than what it should be, it will use the remaining length as the RPG lump data and index all data from there when the game is running. Thus a single contained binary file. Although not cross-compatible, easily distributable to anybody who can launch an EXE or whatever on their platform of choice.

sdlBasic during the binding process actually modifies the EXE directly to change the start address of where the sdlBasic source code starts. However, sdlBasic is coded in C, so direct addressing and such is possible. One can easily set a specific location in the EXE to contain a static variable, which can be altered using a HEX editor, or a similar application. I'm not sure how well a compiled FreeBASIC app would work with this, so if the app checks to see if it's larger than it should be, will work fine enough.

The reason I ask this, as this would be a neat idea for the game list, instead of including the GAME binary for the players platform, Python can simply bind the RPG to the GAME binary for the players platform.

Overall, this creates the fake impression of creating a single EXE for a game, a larger EXE, but only the code/data segments from the EXE will be loaded into memory, the RPG data will be loaded when the GAME.EXE virtual machine needs them for the game to operate.

[TMC]

Of course it's possible, but would there be any advantage to doing so?

[Chronoboy]

Of course it's possible, but would there be any advantage to doing so?

A single binary, something which is listed in the FAQ:

http://rpg.hamsterrepublic.com/ohrrpgce ... ame.exe%3F

It will also protect the authors RPG file a little more, it's more difficult to extract the RPG file from the binary to unlump and play around with the assets. Some authors are worried about their assets being hijacked. Custom won't open the RPG lump from a binded GAME.EXE, it will deter unlawful actions. A specialist could use a tool like dd to extract the data though, but the offset will need to be known.

Although I do develop that cloud-based engine, authors no longer need to worry, as the assets exist only in the cloud, not on the authors machine. Which in the end also deters piracy, if say a game author does wish to sell their game for public consumption. Think how OnLive deters piracy...

[TMC]

That FAQ doesn't mention any advantages :)

But most users don't know how to open a password protected RPG file. Those that do are the ones who know how to use a hex editor or compile Custom. Copying an RPG file appended to the end of an EXE is just as easy as removing the password (as measured in lines of Python anyway).

Although I do develop that cloud-based engine, authors no longer need to worry, as the assets exist only in the cloud, not on the authors machine. Which in the end also deters piracy, if say a game author does wish to sell their game for public consumption. Think how OnLive deters piracy...

Interesting, hadn't thought of that.

[Bob the Hamster]

On the subject of commercial games, I think it would be really awesome if somebody made an OHR game cool enough to be sold as part of a Humble Indie Bundle. An OHR game could totally qualify because we support all three target platforms and there is no DRM

[Spazman]

If I ever get to work on it, I had intended my Mechanix: Biowar game to be a commercial game. It would require a considerable amount of time to complete, but I hope that it if it does get done, it would be able to give out as commercial stuff, (linking my game with the OHR community, of course.) As a matter of fact, I've got a few of my buddies trying to work with the engine, but they're all asking me how to work it. Some don't have internet, so they're kinda lost there... I'm trying to get it out there the best I can.