Dear Old People: Old Game Talk

Make games! Discuss those games here.

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FyreWulff
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Post by FyreWulff »

TMC wrote:
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.
Yeah, you could sell GM games before the Yoyogames takeover, but GM was still very obviously a side project and toy project of the creator (considering it started as a 2D animation creator and was convinced to be a game engine later). Yoyogames bootstrapped some actual functionality onto it, and GM2 adds a lot of actually-a-game-engine-now features into the IDE, etc.
TMC wrote:
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.
As far as I remember RPG-ACE could only make Zelda-likes. Jade was in it as far as the engine had gotten at that point (i think you could walk around an overworld, can't remember if doors worked yet). I don't think, unless I missed that update, it got to the point you could give a game a "win condition" (and therefore have a game)
TMC wrote: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 game is based off some old notebook games I made when I was 10, called DogWorld (I made about 7-8 of those?). Then when I found the OHRRPGCE I was all "hey I can make an RPG now" so I made it as Dog Quest 2: Legend of the Gold Crystal, which had the Sword of Jade in it and the main character was Doghero (I KNOW, ORIGINAL), and Royal's graphics. When the game got renamed to Sword of Jade after Charbile pitched to me him working on the game, that was because I was "yeah, that name is a bit corny, so i'll name it after the title weapon". This is about the era that the game's title screen was a pencil drawing of the Sword of Jade by Mew and Charbile started replacing the Royal graphics, which were mostly the Memoria tileset and his original drawing of Dogero. Doghero became Dogero which was a retroactive reference to the word "daguerrotype" which is a strained homage to Link in that Dogero is a daguerrotype of the player, ideally. (BTW, you'd be surprised how many people miss that Adlez is Zelda backwards)

For a while the game was actually known as Sword of Jade 2 because it inherited the 2 from Dogquest and the 2 came from the fact that I wanted to FIGHT DA POWA and start a game series from the middle of the story. I outlined out SoJ1, SoJ2, and SoJ3 at the time. It was known as SoJ2 for a really long time (StellarX used to call me the George Lucas of the OHRRPGCE), in fact, but at a certain point it was starting to confuse people more than be neat so one night I told char I was renaming it. I hadn't quite figured out it but Perfect Dark had just come out and I loved the game so I renamed it to SoJ:PD. And then I figured out Parallel Dreams after naming it SoJPD after Perfect Dark after looking over the outline again. And yes, I'm not even making that up, "SoJ:PD" predates "SoJ: Parallel Dreams". I guess today almost nobody actually types out it's subtitle.

But that's also why Jade just sort of "jumps in" to Dogero mid-life. It was always meant to. There's an entire game that was planned that exists after the "play time dream" in the intro but before the Proem, and that game was always going to come after Jade. And it's sequel was outlined so that's why the game has the ending that it does.

Also if the GM port had come out the plan was to just name them Sword of Jade DOS and Sword of Jade Windows.
Last edited by FyreWulff on Wed Jun 07, 2017 2:32 am, edited 5 times in total.
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charbile
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Post by charbile »

FyreWulff Up In This Mother!! airhorn.wav what are you doing here, dog? be honest, you got custom open RIGHT NOW dont you. woo-woo calling the ohr police

And I was there, Virtuous. You never ate that old bread. Everybody knows swords don't eat bread. They slice it.

My old stuff was doom mods like Spazz. Haven't looked at the custom enemy sprites I drew in many years, but I keep them around. Same with the old ohr stuff. It's around on some hard drive, but it's like doodles in a sketchbook. The one secret I've learned is that getting better (mechanically/ability wise) is part discipline, i.e. not giving up on application, and part pushing yourself to get out of your comfort zone and study others, to stop doing the same thing over and over unless you're happy with where you're at.
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Ichiro
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Post by Ichiro »

My old crap was ZZT, then it was MegaZeux. Most of my time was editing other peoples' games.
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FnrrfYgmSchnish
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Post by FnrrfYgmSchnish »

My old crap was ZZT, then it was MegaZeux. Most of my time was editing other peoples' games.
Oh man, haven't seen ZZT or Megazeux mentioned in ages -- I fiddled around with those a lot back in the late elementary school/middle school years, actually finished a couple of (...terrible) games in each engine and started on tons more that barely got anywhere.

I actually still have a few of the ZZT ones (and weirdly, two different games both used the same title as the first crappy OHRRPGCE project I finished... not sure why I ended up making two different games with the same name back then, the second one wasn't a remake of the first or anything since it had completely different maps and bosses and everything) and the third a sequel. I had apparently planned on another sequel, but never actually started on it as far as I can remember.

I also remember making a game with a town called "Biggiefries" (...that's basically all I remember of this one, I don't think I got much of this one done) and one with Yoshi in it, but I don't remember anything about it aside from being able to accidentally burn yourself to death if you checked a hot stove in a kitchen somewhere (which would give you the message "ouch! stove hot 'n' roasty!" and do 1 HP of damage) -- I don't think this one ever got finished. I remember a couple of attempts were made at a game that let you choose from one of several characters/stories at the beginning of the game (I think the "town of Biggiefries" game was one of these?), but none of those ever got very far either.

My Megazeux games were probably lost when the hard drive on one of our old computers died -- I haven't stumbled across copies of them saved anywhere else so far, at least, and I don't think I ever uploaded them anywhere. The one I remember was a side-scrolling platformer type game (...which switched to a standard ZZT/MZX top-view thing for the boss battles) just titled "KIRBY!" and was the only actual Kirby fangame I've made so far -- King Dedede was the final boss, there were Waddle Dees and Waddle Doos as random enemies in the early stages -- though most of the stuff in it was unrelated to anything in a real Kirby game, and Kirby couldn't fly or inhale things (mostly because I didn't know how to program those features), just jump and shoot air-puffs. (The "Kirby Lands" games, despite what the name might mislead some people to think, never really had much of anything to do with Nintendo's Kirby. I'd made my own species of "Kirbys" in the early elementary school years that were white Kirby recolors but had basically nothing in common with Kirby aside from appearance -- different size, different powers, lived on a completely different planet, etc. I still draw them, but their name and a lot of their features have changed so they're not really all that Kirby-like even in appearance anymore, aside from both having a similar "round thing with stubby limbs" body shape. The current K'hyurbhi design has three-toed almost human-like feet rather than the Kirby-type red lumps, giant cat-like whiskers, visible nostrils, tattoo-like markings, and horns/spikes.)

I think I made a sequel (probably just called "KIRBY 2!") but I can't remember anything at all about it at this point, so I'm guessing it was never finished. I fiddled around with a lot of scripting-type stuff in MZX, but never really made an actual game out of most of it, just random little tech demos that were just one screen of testing out something like having your character ricochet off of objects in a zero-gravity room, or a sword edited to make a functional Yoshi tongue (seems like I made a lot of Yoshi stuff way back in the day, now that I think about it -- even my first plans for an OHRRPGCE game from 1998 included a Yoshi as a playable character for some odd reason.)

I mostly made my own stuff rather than editing other people's games (though I did copy-and-paste music generating objects from people's games occasionally, and once a slightly modified version of an entire boss), though there WAS one time where I stumbled across a ZZT game that was just really, really bad and yet for some reason people seemed to like it, or the creator was bragging about how great it was, or something -- I can't remember for sure, it's been so long, but something about this game definitely struck me as "people think this is waaaay better than it actually is." That one I edited until it was a functional game (I recall the original had tons of bugs/errors that made it barely work at some points, and I think the demo ended right before the final boss or something?) and then made it a parody of itself. This being when I was in 6th or 7th grade, of course, literally everything became a poop joke -- the game was renamed to "Poo Poo Land" and the villain was "Dark Turd."
Last edited by FnrrfYgmSchnish on Mon Mar 21, 2022 3:52 am, edited 1 time in total.
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MorpheusKitami
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Post by MorpheusKitami »

Man, weird to hear about ZZT. I had a shareware version that was a best of created games thing, not the actual shareware version. Never really got too far in most of them, but not for a lack of effort. There were things like a weird spy game with branching storylines that didn't have anything to do with each other, a Robotron game with terrible controls, and an odd number of deserted islands and cannibals. One of the most annoying was one set in a space station prison, with this really difficult block puzzle. I don't ever think I got past that one. Most of them seemed clever at the time, especially the branching storylines one.

I remember MegaZeux by a screenshot that looked like an Ultima 4 clone. Naturally, when I actually used it, the thing didn't look a thing like that at all.
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The Wobbler
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Post by The Wobbler »

I think it's pretty funny how some of us planned/started working on sequels before finishing one game. I had two additional Walthros games I started working on before even finishing #1:

-Walthros Mercenaries: I actually released a demo of this, with about a half hour of game play. It focused on character customization (pretty poorly) rather than following a set party. One idea I implemented that I still really like was changing dialogue after a boss fight depending on how much HP the player ended the fight with. Different character options were available depending on how badly you did, so it was sort of designed as a behind the scenes difficulty selector, where players that did poorly were given more powerful options.

-Walthros Alternative: This was supposed to be a parallel game with the original Walthros, where players would control the Blue Spirit instead of Bob Surlaw, manipulating the world in the background while guiding Bob along unknowingly to his doom. I started this one but never released anything public; I got bored of it pretty fast, since so much of it felt like rehash.
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Bob the Hamster
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Post by Bob the Hamster »

Now I want a Walthros Mercenaries tactics game :)
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FyreWulff
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Post by FyreWulff »

charbile wrote:FyreWulff Up In This Mother!! airhorn.wav
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OFr74zI1LBM
what are you doing here, dog? be honest, you got custom open RIGHT NOW dont you. woo-woo calling the ohr police
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My old stuff was doom mods like Spazz. Haven't looked at the custom enemy sprites I drew in many years, but I keep them around. Same with the old ohr stuff. It's around on some hard drive, but it's like doodles in a sketchbook. The one secret I've learned is that getting better (mechanically/ability wise) is part discipline, i.e. not giving up on application, and part pushing yourself to get out of your comfort zone and study others, to stop doing the same thing over and over unless you're happy with where you're at.
I remember trying Doom stuff long ago but couldn't figure it out back then. It also didn't help that my PC was slower than a toaster. Until like 2005 I was running on a Windows 95 PC with 32MB of RAM. Also we had lost the Cd years ago so i could never reinstall windows, so the installation was pretty decayed by the end

also fun fact to everyone: Char and I never talked in voice or showed each other pictures for the entirety of the game making, and still to this day. If people go look around youtube you can probs find videos I talk in, but for as much as we've done together, probably wouldn't be able to pick each other out in a photo lololol . We missed the facebooking standardization by like 3 years?

Sadly a lost a lot of my old stuff in a flood around here in 2011 or 12 ish. I think I have one old IDE HDD that might have some old development and experiments and stuff but I've left it alone for now.
Last edited by FyreWulff on Wed Jun 07, 2017 9:02 pm, edited 3 times in total.
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The Wobbler
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Post by The Wobbler »

Bob the Hamster wrote:Now I want a Walthros Mercenaries tactics game :)
I do too, bro. I do too.
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guo
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Post by guo »

I cut my pubescent teeth on rpg maker 95 and 2000, OHRRPGCE, Forgotten Realms: Unlimited Adventures, and lots of BASIC.
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Post by Pepsi Ranger »

My first real attempt at game design on the computer was with Duke Nukem 3D's Build engine. In 1997, I spent about eight months off and on working on a massive battle map built for exploration, hidey-holes, environmental backstabbing, and space-jumping loop-backs, to name some factors. It was crash-heavy from all of the assets it tried to support. A friend of mine and I used to play it all the time, and it never got old.

Here's a link to a review site I submitted it to years after I'd built it. At the time I'd sent it, they were no longer taking maps that used only original assets, but they decided to host mine.

(I think this is the site I uploaded it to. Unless this is a mirror. Hmm, now I'm not so sure.)

Anyway, if you have a copy of Duke Nukem 3D, you can check out the map here: http://msdn.duke4.net/dmbackalleyintersection.php

It should be noted that traditional death match style games are generally cramped and uninteresting. I'd built this map for strategy, tension, and stalkability, not for constant carnage.

I also used to make choose your own adventure style games on paper.

For the OHR, everyone here has heard of Powerstick Man. I haven't worked on it in over a year, but the intention to finish it is still there. I've spent many years fixing and refining the problems with the original release and making an attempt to rerelease with a more cohesive and memorable plot. Though, I'm starting to think this might be impossible, since it's still pretty overwritten and messy, and the features I want to include are creepier than a horror movie full of bugs, but it's better than the original release, which I'm not yet ashamed of, but I know I can do better nowadays.
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Post by SwordPlay »

I'm really curious. What were the heydays of the OHR community like?
It seems to have been busier in the past.
It seems that 188 users were online in April. Do people still lurk?
Is there a super secret forum where all you old folks hang out and laugh at the rest of us?
Last edited by SwordPlay on Fri Jun 16, 2017 3:22 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Bob the Hamster
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Post by Bob the Hamster »

It seems that 188 users were online in April. Do people still lurk?
That 188 count is almost certainly a spam flood. We have never had that many real users active on the same day.
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The Wobbler
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Post by The Wobbler »

Virtuous Sword wrote:I'm really curious. What were the heydays of the OHR community like?
Louder and dumber.
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Foxley
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Post by Foxley »

The Wobbler wrote:
Virtuous Sword wrote:I'm really curious. What were the heydays of the OHR community like?
Louder and dumber.
I can verify this. One of the reasons I didn't stay with the community past 1999-2000 or so was the immaturity, open hostility and arrogance on the old forum, which I think was called Zantetsuken. Everything feels way more mature and constructive now.

Here's a good example: I got banned for being a suspected sock puppet of someone who a forum admin was feuding with, with no evidence.
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