It was more blamed back in 2010, as that's when it was still fresh in the community and more influential toward the creation of the Heart of the OHR--not alone, of course, as there were many games back then that influenced HotOHR, though Techno Ship is perhaps the most memorable of those games for the controversy surrounding it--but once history is set, I can't really alter it. I'm working on it though.Spoonweaver wrote:Tl;dr technoship is still being blamed for things.... 😬
I don't particularly encourage "in the spirit of" games over a traditional or modified RPG in this contest, as I'd still like each entry to share common conventions (as I think you would, too, hence your viewpoint), but I'll still accept them as the rules allow.Pheonix wrote:Eh, I guess that the new rule would allow for such a thing. Point conceded.
Still feel that if the contest is to go in that direction [that is, to games that emulate what was being made in 1999, whether or not they're RPGs], then maybe a renaming is in order. Spirit of the OHR? Soul of the OHR?
Regarding your name-change suggestion, I'm not terribly against that idea. Here's why:
As RMZ says, this contest, which encourages us to put heart into our creations rather than cheap laughs, as was the goal it seemed of many of the games coming out in the late 2000s, which convinced me it was time for something like this to make its debut, has evolved gradually with each year we've revisited it, and at some point we may very well go beyond modeling the 1998-2002 era and somehow push this into a "OHRenaissance" where we chase the mid-2000s, a time when the games really began to change course. It's not the direction I particularly want this to go, but I think that it could if that's where we ultimately drive it as a community.RedMaverickZero wrote:Regardless of how the contest evolves, as it has since it's first one, the important part is that all games are made with heart. We're a small community, and it's important we make the best and most honest games we can. For a lot of us, games usually star people we know and are based around personal experiences. The first game we all fell in love with had James Paige as one of the main characters and his personality was definitely front and center there. We just need to make the best games we can and be true to ourselves and work on encouraging this instead of using our dying community to try to put other people down. We should be constantly encouraging creativity. We work too hard on these projects to just write them off and flat out say they suck.
But here's the thing:
I don't plan on hosting this thing forever. I'm really only committed to doing this until 2018, which is the next one. I'd like to try to pass Heart of the OHR off to someone new in 2020, if I can. That said, there are talks happening right now about how to not only improve this contest's appeal within the community, but also how to expand it and reach a much wider audience and participation. I don't know how well that's going to work as of yet, but that's what's being discussed. I'm not going to say any more about it at this time, for there is much to figure out, including how realistic the idea of pushing it outside of Slime Salad's boundaries actually is. I also have to logistically factor in how much time I can devote to a more advanced prep phase, which is what will be required if I'm to push this contest to a wider audience.
With that said, if the contest does go wider, and if it does get a new host by 2020, then a name change might actually make sense, with "Spirit of the OHR" or some derivative signaling a clear break between the two contests, even though they are basically the same. The reason I may ultimately shoot that down and keep the name as is, is to keep its "branding" intact. If we do manage to break out of Slime Salad's fortress, then we may actually do more damage to the contest if we change the name between 2018 and 2020. And if we don't do it before we go wide (if we go wide), then we can't do it at all, as that would lock the name in for good. And I can tell you that the name won't change in 2018. So, everything will come down to what happens with the next contest. That will be our time for evaluation, to see what we can and should do differently, and what we should keep sacred.
If the next one is the last one I host, then I'll want to do what I can to encourage the 2010 rule set to be back in place, as sort of a bookend to my legacy as host. Maybe. Or, I don't know. Maybe we'll just make it a contest for side-scrollers and call it the Id of the OHR. (Just kidding)
I'm not compiling the results until Sunday at the earliest, and even now I'm getting some private messages with votes for only one or two games, which can throw off the contest average if the two-thirds rule is forced into play for the majority of under-voted-on games. This isn't ideal, so I'm tempted to allow voting for an extra week to balance out the voted-on numbers. Either way, if you haven't gotten a chance to play the games, you still have just a little bit of time left to cram in a few more (though it's probably too late to play them all, so I'd recommend playing your top three or four hopefuls if you can).Bob the Hamster wrote:I was hoping to play everything before voting, but some games I still haven't played at all, and most I have played too little to give any kind of rating (less than 3 minutes of play)
I have been reading everyone's reviews with interest, and enjoying screenshots, and feeling bad about not participating more.
Nathan Karr wrote:Fruity Quest 4/10. I was enjoying the bad graphics and crude jokes for what they were up until I fought against a ball on a white background. I spent what must have been ten minutes wailing on the thing before giving up and switching to the skip battle hotkey for the rest of the game, skimming over the text. I almost gave this game an 8, and would have if it'd known when to end/how to pace its joke battles in the second half of the game like it did in the first.
The creator of this game never got back to me about making it official, and even though I announced it as having been released during the window, I think we can all agree it was made a long time ago and not really something we need to include in this year's contest, so I don't really expect anyone to vote on this game anymore. I'll mention it on the contest page as having come out during the window, but I won't rank it. Just want to clarify.
So, that should catch us all up. You can keep voting until Sunday at the earliest. If my voted-on numbers are so skewed that one or two games will inevitably force the two-thirds rule into place for most or all of the other games, then I'll likely give you guys one more week to get those voted-on numbers back up to par with the rest. In case that's gibberish, what I'm saying is that if one game gets 10 votes, and the next most-voted-on game gets 6 votes, then the two-thirds rule will require at least one more vote be cast on the one with 6 votes in order for it to receive a true, comparable, voter-influenced average. And according to the two-thirds vote rule, if that extra vote isn't cast, then an automatic score of 5 will be given to that game (times how many votes it takes to reach 7 votes, or however much brings the total to two-thirds of 10--the number of votes the most voted-on game gets, if that's where we end up--10 is just an example). If that's still gibberish, then let me simplify by saying, more votes means greater score accuracy. As you can see, a bunch of automatic fives could significantly improve a poor game or severely degrade a good game's average score. We don't want that, so vote for as many of the games as you can, even if you can't give more than 30 minutes to each one.
Thanks, and I'll see you guys at the finish line. Hopefully.
