Dear Old People: Old Game Talk

Make games! Discuss those games here.

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The Wobbler
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Dear Old People: Old Game Talk

Post by The Wobbler »

Most of my fellow old grouches aren't too active any more, but I'm feeling nostalgic.

Rather than doing something productive, I've been digging into junk around the house and on my computer lately, looking at projects I've worked on over the years. Figured I should replay some of my old OHR games that I hadn't touched in years, see what I can learn about myself and my projects.

Walthros: I actually think Walthros is still decently made, but there are a lot of tremendously lazy cut corners. Some of that was a result of rushing out the game while I still had a working computer, some was just disinterest in certain aspects of game design (specifically: Dungeon design.) I disliked designing dungeon maps so much that most of my later games would feature extremely simplified ones, or none at all when it came to C. Kane. I'm trying to design some nice maps and puzzle rooms for Kaiju, and it's been a major challenge, but I think it's turning out well.

Walthrus: Return of the Crystals: Man, the jokes I wrote at 16 were bad. I think there are a few gems in here, but it's a good 15 minutes of content repeated forever and stretched out to a little over an hour. The bad internet speak jokes would probably be popular with the Meme Crowd today but it's cringey as hell. I think the ugly, blocky characters are the funniest part. People liked Super Walrus Man here back in the day, I think he's nearly unbearable now. Maybe you can only enjoy this as a kid.

Gato Sucio: Turns out the jokes I wrote at 18 were even worse! A random George W. Bush face drops out of the sky as an attack for no reason, it's overly mean, and it has absolutely no focus. It's basically the jokes from Walthrus again, but lazier. I used to think the first part of the game was good and the rest stunk; turns out the first part may actually be the worst?

Walrus Chef: I still like the core mechanics here, it's just really clunky. I'd love to remake this game using menus and slices instead of absurdly sloppy key-based commands. Figuring out what each judge likes feels too random, and you can pick HAM x 3 every time to win most rounds. I wrote a similar minigame for RMZ to use in Triangle's Adventure that worked better, but I'd still like to make another game in this style again. The pop culture cameos range from absolutely confusing to stupid but almost funny. I have no idea why it's so foul-mouthed.

How 'bout you, gramps? Talk about your old crap. Doesn't have to be OHR. You can talk about that time you ate old bread, whatever.
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Foxley
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Post by Foxley »

I started working on my first game with the 4 map release in late 1998. Sadly it doesn't exist anymore, a sibling later wiped out the Documents folder on that computer to make space to install The Sims. Which didn't even have the right system requirements to run on that computer, so it was erased from existence for nothing. It was about some amnesiac dude, a martial artist, and a magical girl. Not a lot of potential, so I'm not incredibly sad it got deleted.

I had two other projects I started that I uploaded a while back, in this thread: https://www.slimesalad.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=6705

Didn't work on anything else 'til I got reinvolved in Fall 2013, which was about 15 years after I first discovered OHRRPGCE. It's been part of my life for over half of my current lifespan.

Bonus fact: My ancient 13-year-old-AOL-kid-me moniker is in the playtesting credits for Ends Of The Earth.

Now GET OFF MY DAMN LAWN!
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Foxley
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Post by Foxley »

Also the first RPG maker I discovered was actually Verge.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J_qvOqewPVo

I didn't do much in it aside from messing around in the sprite editor, because I had no idea how to code anything in its VergeC language when I was 12/13. But it still blew my mind that such software existed, that you could actually make games without programming everything all by yourself. Then I read a webpage that had a list of different game making kits and OHRRPGCE was on there, so I gave it a try, and found I was able to actually do things with it.

Despite having superior sound and graphic capabilities, the fact that Verge didn't have any viable default battle system in the engine made it really limited and made me abandon it in favor of OHRRPGCE. Also Wandering Hamster was totally fantastic, it made a much better impression than Sully Chronicles had with Verge. I had a lot of affection for the Adlib-ified Gounod and Mussorgsky tracks, even moreso than the technically superior .S3M music that Verge supported.

Judging from Verge's website the community is mostly inactive/dead by now. Stark contrast to how vital the OHRRPGCE still is.
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Post by The Wobbler »

My first game maker was The Bard's Tale Construction Kit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bard% ... uction_Set

I never finished anything with it, and I don't think you could even make your own graphics. Also, I've never enjoyed a single First Person Dungeon Crawler so it was probably never meant to be.
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Post by TMC »

Well, by coincidence I came across this thread mere seconds after I was showing my sister an old "game" we made together (which was probably also my first game, not counting what grew out of the HOWTO). Sadly there's hardly anything to it, but it's a fairly humorously broken/nonsense newbie game. Probably the whole point of uploading it was to show off my tiles.

To be honest I think never got most of the jokes/references in those Walthros spin-off joke games so didn't see the point of poking fun at the original game (which was one of my favourites) like that. I remember Super Walrus Chef definitely felt like a milestone on the OHR.

Back-when, Verge and Sphere (together with RPG Maker and Game Maker) were the main other game engines that I was aware of, because people compared them to the OHR, and although I never used them, it's sad to see the state of them. But they had a whole of forks, and I thought one of them was still being worked on? But last time I looked I couldn't find it back.
Last edited by TMC on Sat Jun 03, 2017 3:58 pm, edited 2 times in total.
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Post by FyreWulff »

I remember back then a lot of people were going "Verge will be the future!!11111"

I popped in one of my old DOS text adventures a month or two ago that was still at a relative's house. It wasn't very long, but it was my intro to C++ back then.
Last edited by FyreWulff on Sat Jun 03, 2017 4:43 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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The Wobbler
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Post by The Wobbler »

TMC wrote:To be honest I think never got most of the jokes/references in those Walthros spin-off joke games so didn't see the point of poking fun at the original game (which was one of my favourites) like that. I remember Super Walrus Chef definitely felt like a milestone on the OHR.
I wanted to take the characters in a way goofier direction, because I thought the original game was too serious. I just couldn't write it well for the life of me, and I relied on jokes even I didn't find funny but I thought would have broad appeal (everything with Walrus Man.)

Years later I wrote the super dumb Surlaw stories in HamsterSpeak and those I actually do think are funny. http://www.superwalrusland.com/words/index.html

When I do finally make a new Walthros (I want to after Kaiju's done) it will be somewhere in between the tone of the original game and these things.
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Post by FyreWulff »

Reminds me, at a certain point Charbile and I were having the idea of porting Sword of Jade to other engines. I actually talked about it "back then", but I remember we were running into walls in the OHRRPGCE and the idea of reworking it in another engine sounded doable.

I remember bootstrapping some versions in RPGMaker (which we both disliked soon after and killed), Moogle1's RPG ACE Zelda-style engine (that one actually got decently proto'd, but I think Moogle dropped the project), Lucidity (which Neo converted into.. something else, from what I remember). The longest lived port was the Game Maker one, which I actually posted screenshots of. That one got the farthest of all the ports, in that the opening town was entirely re-created, mouse based movement was up and working, and I was working on a particle-emitter based water system so that Charbile wouldn't have to animate 500 frames of water. Unfortunately I ran into a wall getting a replica of the OHR's battle system running in Game Maker. It was just beyond my programming/design capabilities at the time. I had no idea where to start, or even how to do it. I basically just stopped talking about it and cancelled it months out from release. The Windows launcher that came with the original release was the only public remnant of it, that was actually a Game Maker exe that had the port of the Grinlow spire top with the multi-layered effects and stuff implemented.

Nowadays, I actually would be able to do it. Damnit.

edit: Verge was never an option. I tried, but it was too obtuse for a beginner back then. The impression I got from the authors at the time is they were just throwing something out there and hoping someone would make a Big Game(tm) with it for them to bootstrap a larger community and eventual licensing.
Last edited by FyreWulff on Sat Jun 03, 2017 4:53 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by Newbie Newtype »

In hindsight Verge seemed more like a glorified C Library than a full engine, and when I saw it, it mostly had tech demos.

Hedgemaze has NPCs with cat ears. A product of my more awkward years. I was also still really into fake battlescripted boss battles which resulted in a terrible boss battle in that game, as well as another game where I tried to have a really gimmicky boss battle that was horrible, resulting in me having a huge 180 on that design approach (and also never managing to actually make another RPG to begin with).
<TheGiz> oh hai doggy, oh no that's the straw that broke tjhe came baclsb
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Post by marionline »

Image
This inspired me to gather old images and stick them together to a new image: A collection of old and recent OHR Sprites, the tiles in the left upper corner are from 2011.

I'm not around on Slime Salad for that many years. 2011 I joined slime salad, but my game making ambitions are a bit older.
Before trying the OHR I was messing around with a book about blitz basic and the game maker program. There might still be a game maker version of Kim and Jose somewhere on an old backup. :zombie:
If I look at the Kim and Jose demo now, I'm a bit ashamed I uploaded it. Looking at it now, it's just bad. And found 3 old remakes and there
is a fourth version that was party lost by not backuping enough in combination with a pc crash. A fifth try to make that game, that is the most recent one, turned out be a pygame programming practice. It was not really successful, otherwise I could show you a game. Maybe one day I'll make it, or maybe I won't. :angel:


Over the years I started many projects. Most of them did not even get a demo uploaded here. (This might be a good thing, if one remembers the Kim and Jose demo, right?). At the moment I am working on Magic and Monsters. Comparing the old sprites to the new ones, I can see how ugly the old ones were. But at the time I created them, I thought these sprites were the nicest I would ever draw. (Haha..... What will it look like in two more years?)


Being around for a while, it is nice to see how everyone (and the engine) progresses and gets better at game making!
That's really cool! :D


What is the state of game maker nowerdays? Last time I looked it had 2-3 versions, one was quite expensive.
I guess, the OHR being open source saved it from going a similar way?
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Post by FyreWulff »

Game Maker is an actual commercial-level engine now. former Xbox exec started a company and took it over from the original creator Mark Overmars, and they rebuilt it into more of an actual engine, and yeah it costs a lot of money now depending on where you want to deploy to.
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Post by Foxley »

The Wobbler wrote:My first game maker was The Bard's Tale Construction Kit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bard% ... uction_Set
I lied, my very first was Unlimited Adventures. Me and my sister would just edit the names of characters and things to highly inappropriate and/or bizarre stuff, we didn't actually design dungeons or anything.
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Post by TMC »

Marionline: nice idea to put together all those screenshots!
So you only released the oldest version of Kim and Jose. I didn't realise; I think you've posted many screenshots of later versions which were never released.
FyreWulff wrote:Game Maker is an actual commercial-level engine now. former Xbox exec started a company and took it over from the original creator Mark Overmars, and they rebuilt it into more of an actual engine, and yeah it costs a lot of money now depending on where you want to deploy to.
I always considered Game Maker a big commercial engine. (Long before the modern frenzy of game engine.) Well, commercial mainly the sense of selling it to users, but there were lots of commercial GM games too, and I assumed there were plenty of professional ones to a similar standard as Rinku's.
FyreWulff wrote:I remember bootstrapping some versions in RPGMaker (which we both disliked soon after and killed), Moogle1's RPG ACE Zelda-style engine (that one actually got decently proto'd, but I think Moogle dropped the project), Lucidity (which Neo converted into.. something else, from what I remember). The longest lived port was the Game Maker one, which I actually posted screenshots of.
Did anyone ever make a game with RPG ACE? I've seen very little information about it; I didn't even know it was for Zelda-likes.
What was Lucidity? I don't remember hearing about it.

I'm curious, where did the SoJ2 name come from? Was it the name of the GM port? Or did you start using 'SoJ2' after Charbile replaced Royal and his graphics?
The Wobbler wrote:My first game maker was The Bard's Tale Construction Kit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bard% ... uction_Set
Hmmm... nice main menu:
<img src="http://bardstale.poverellomedia.com/scr ... a-menu.gif" width="450"></img>

Well, on that count, the the first games I made were campaign files for C-Dogs (a top-down shooter, originally DOS, now ported to everything), when I was about 11-12; again partially with my sister. That was a fun game. The campaign editor let you define the story, map and goals for a series of levels. And enemy stats and palettes too, I think. Interestingly you don't directly edit the maps, since they're all randomly generated; instead you define a bunch of generation parameters for them, including the enemies and items. It was a clever system and worked really well. You could create a unique campaign in no time (not including playtesting it).
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Post by MorpheusKitami »

Feels weird to hear about people just messing around in '90s modding tools. I had it easy, since the hot RPGs to mod were Neverwinter Nights and Morrowind. Not that I ever produced anything there. Didn't know how to do scripting yet and nothing ever got past a few items and monsters.

As for games making. I think I started around '06 with OHRRPGCE, Adventure Game Studio, and Engine 001. (now called GGmaker, I think) I tried a different RPG maker, perhaps one of the actual RPGmakers, but gave up because I couldn't figure out how to do anything of value. Back then I didn't know how to do scripting in anything other than AGS, and even then it wasn't impressive, but because of that, that's what most of my early unfinished projects were made in. Most of them related to ninjas. Modern-day ninjas oddly fond of using guns and getting into fights in parks. The only one that wasn't about ninjas IIRC, was a completely original game where your car breaks down outside of a mansion filled full of zombies and multi-colored keys. Resident Evil? Never heard of it. It was the farthest I got on a project before actually releasing one. Even had an ending where it turned out it was all a simulation and you were a time-traveling cop training for...I guess zombie mansions must of had some sort of practical value in time travel stuff.

The last one kinda leads into the first OHRRPGCE games I remember working on, Time Knight. Time Knight was going to be this epic RPG wherein instead of traveling through time, you travel across planets gathering warriors to fight against a group of evil aliens that took over the time knights planet, because of some reason or another. Can't remember, probably wasn't all that important. Oddly, despite never being completed, the events of the game are still canon in other games of mine. The title character/only surviving member of his organization/complicated stuff, was mentioned briefly in Blackeagle, and was a character in Complicated Gallery.
The other of my early RPG games that I remember is...Shadow Knight. An epic RPG where your kingdom has been conquered by evil and you must gather warriors from other kingdoms to reclaim your kingdom. No patterns here, nope. Not even the lead heroes having the same sort of combat abilities, the ability to hire random soldiers to help fight while still having story characters. If nothing else, I still like the name.
The rest of my RPGs I don't remember much about. I think there was a Shin Megami Tensei clone in there somewhere, a few more games staring the Time Knight, and a precursor to Blackeagle called Counter-Terrorist RPG, which is the only one I still have around.
Oddly, despite usually playing an evil character in RPGs at this time, I never created a single game where you're the bad guy...Now I'm more interested in playing a goody-two shoes paladin and in half my finished work you're the bad guy. Strange how times change.
I'd talk about my 001 work, but that's not exactly old, since it was all released in the past two years. Did work on another Resident Evil during the Shadow/Time Knight period though.
One thing I'm glad about though, is that I didn't release anything until I had actually finished something. (well, mostly) As interesting as it would be to see my old work again, the internet is littered with the corpses of unfinished games everywhere. So many concept demos...
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Post by SwordPlay »

One time, I ate some ol' bread, yessirree yes indeed, it was old. Very satisfying. I'll never forget it. That was some good eating.

:p
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