OHR 2018 One-Room Contest

Make games! Discuss those games here.

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kylekrack
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Post by kylekrack »

Sorry to hear the timing didn't work out well for you. Next time I'll try to get a better lead on when to schedule the actual contest so as not to exclude anyone. If you can get a submission in before a winner is chosen, I'll count it. The only issue you might face is not having everyone who voted on the other games vote for yours, meaning you'd get fewer votes. I don't have much control over that. I do urge you to make something if you want and have the ability to.

On that note! I'm gonna say the deadline for voting should be a week from the official end of the contest (Monday). Please get your votes in by Monday, February 26th if you can. If not, it's not a huge deal, but we shouldn't drag this on any longer than necessary. People have HotOHR business to get to.
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Foxley
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Post by Foxley »

Just got finished playing delinquent.rpg for about 30-45 minutes and here are the thoughts, observations, ramblings etc. I jotted down:


"Amazingly good artwork, the extra walking animation frames really set a standard for how 16bit-ish OHR games should look. This game looks incredible.

Outside a building, main character said "I have no reason to be here again. Once a day is more than enough." and then runs north a few tiles. This repeatedly happened while walking around town for no apparent reason, which got kind of annoying. Got into a building and there was some dialogue with characters I didn't have in my party yet.

I got into a fight with a couple of fairies who completely destroyed my 3 party members, then the game froze afterward so I had to start over. So that kind of sucked. To add insult to injury it even freezes up the game when I reload the save file. Welp, starting over.

Where am I supposed to heal? I start with a few potions but I'm just kind of dying all the time. Also it's kind of weird only the main character can use healing items.

Alright, just barely managed to beat the fairies. I got into the Rosa boss fight with like no HP left and got murdered because I couldn't heal anywhere. Then it put me back to the fairy copse with the game frozen again. F#$&. Not sure I really want to start over yet again. This game is pretty unforgiving.

The game looks great and just walking around looking at the animation frames and the pretty maptiles is great, but it has some scary and weird glitches that really took me out of the experience."

I'll do something similar for other games soon.
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Post by TMC »

Foxley: seems you had some of the same experiences I had: accidentally going into the school early, and getting wiped by the kid-fairies the first time, due to lack of healing items.

You can buy healing items from the vending machine in the school.

The game certainly isn't unforgiving, it very easy once you find out about the vending machine. It was too easy if anything (I thought it was fine)
then the game froze afterward so I had to start over. So that kind of sucked. To add insult to injury it even freezes up the game when I reload the save file. Welp, starting over.
What do you mean by "froze?" Did ESC still bring up the menu? Did you get a script error about an infinite loop? Did alt-F4 or clicking the window X button cleanly close the program?
Last edited by TMC on Wed Feb 21, 2018 5:52 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by Feenicks »

God, and I thought I fixed that bug with the fairies. It should be fixed now, but let me know if things are still wonky.

Anyway, some quick reviews for the other games, in descending order of how I liked them:

Snowshoe Forest -
Cute. Unfinished, sure, but I enjoyed what was there. Like the quick character switching that you can do. The battle theme is distractingly similar to Brodyquest.

The flow -
Fun little economy thing. Buying stuff is a bit wonky and I pretty sure the things that were being sold at $0 or couldn't be sold at all weren't supposed to be like that, but it's fine. Got above my starting money value once which was cool. Seems a bit odd that it's really easy to accidentally spend all your money, but I guess there'd be no failure condition otherwise [beyond, say, a timer].

Space -
there's a start to something here, but it's really unfinished and buggy. Managed to get two extra party members by talking to one of the machines. Why wouldn't the main character be able to put the meat/mold lying around the place in the composter machine?

No Exit -
I get what you're going for here [some sort of emulation of text-based games], but it's a bit arduous to actually play through to completion. Even with all the best equipment I was still getting destroyed by enemies that were dealing either 1 point of damage or 50+, and grinding's a pain due to low experience amounts and the shifts between enemy difficulties not actually being telegraphed. Never got around to getting any of the other party members, and I'm not sure how I'd do so.

Paradise -
I'm sorry, but what?
Last edited by Feenicks on Wed Feb 21, 2018 2:10 pm, edited 2 times in total.
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Post by TheLordThyGod »

No Exit Tips & Walkthrough

Tips:

The Dungeon is divided into quarters, each devoted to an element. Monsters in these areas are frequently vulnerable to the element of the quarter opposite their own in the Dungeon (Fire vs Water, Earth vs Air). Stronger monsters may retaliate to or draw power from certain elemental attacks.

Each elemental quarter has 3 basic monster types: the weakest thrive along the exterior walls of the Dungeon, the truly ferocious ones keep mostly to the larger rooms of the Dungeon's interior.
Four Elemental Guardians occupy their own large Sanctums, each of which requires a matching key to unlock.

There is a fifth element Aether which only Heroes, Priests, and Elves can wield. It often works well against demonic or undead monsters, or whenever elementally neutral magic is required. Demonic/undead monsters are also sometimes vulnerable to healing spells.

Primary portals lead to and from the safe zone of the Hub. Secondary portals don't usually put you any closer to the Hub, but they can allow you to quickly traverse long distances or choose the elemental biases of the monsters you'll encounter.

Life is precious. Don't take too many unnecessary risks. Hug the exterior wall whenever possible, return to the Hub often, and SAVE YOUR GAME (I almost removed this feature, please take advantage of it).

Some equipment increases Total HP. It is best to equip these items before resting at an inn, in order to make the most efficient use of resources.

With the right equipment, the Elf is a glass cannon. Keep it alive if you want your party to survive the more dangerous areas of the Dungeon.


Walkthrough:

Head to the southernmost portal in the Hub, which takes you to the South Wall.
Stay close to the portal, hug the South Wall to avoid the lethal baddies, and kill Slimes until you can afford a Short Sword.
Return to the Hub via the portal, purchase and equip the Short Sword.
Go back to the South Wall, kill Slimes until you can afford the Light Armor.
Return to the hub, purchase and equip the Light Armor, rest at the Inn if needed.
Go back to the South Wall, head East hugging the wall until you get to the Southeast Corner.
Talk to the Adventurer, who tells you about his missing Amulet.
Head north hugging the wall, head West to collect some Gold, head back to the Hub.
Rest at the Inn, pick up a spare Short Sword and Light Armor, head to the northernmost portal.
Head West hugging the North Wall until you reach the Northwest Corner, ignore the Priest for now.
Hug the West Wall and head South to collect the gold.
Talk to the Priest, he'll join you and give you an Amulet.
Equip the Priest with the Short Sword and Light Armor, and head back to the Hub.
Rest at the Inn if needed, buy the Long Sword and Heavy Armor if you can afford it, head back to the Southeast corner.
Now that you have the Amulet, the Adventurer will join your party, equip them with the Long Sword and Heavy Armor.
With the Priest and Adventurer armed and armored, you're probably tough enough to grab the Gold on your way back to the portal.
Return to the Hub, rest at the Inn, buy a Staff and Elven Cloak, head to the eastern portal.

*Now you're going to have to start taking some risks, and hugging the exterior wall won't always be possible.*
You can check out the Elf if you want to, but he's not going to join you yet.
Instead of heading due North along the East Wall toward the Elf, take the next northward path over (slightly to the west) toward the Mushroom.
Take the Mushroom and deliver it to the Elf, who will now join your party.
Equip the Elf with the Staff and Elven Cloak, return to the hub, rest, gear up.

*Animal Companions (optional)*
If you'd like some animal companions, buy a Ration plus some Collars and Cones (Collar+ is ideal but more costly), head to the northern portal.
Head south from the portal until you see the Canis Key; be careful getting it as you can meet some dangerous foes in this area. You might want to heal up or purchase some Revives before chasing the Cat.
Curiously, the Cat is nearby the Canis Key. Be careful - it moves quickly through dangerous rooms.
Catch the Cat, feed it a Ration, put a Collar and a Cone on it, head back to the Hub.
Take the westernmost portal, then follow the West Wall southward to the Southwest Corner.
Use the Canis Key to untether the Dog, put a Collar and a Cone on it, grab the Gold on your way back to the Hub to do some shopping and healing.

*Elemental Guardians*
Now it's time to gear up your party with the nicest kit you can afford:
Give all of the Light/Short equipment to the Hero and Priest.
Give all of the Heavy/Long equipment to the Adventurer.
Give all of the magic-enhancing equipment to the Elf.
Put Cones on your pets' heads, and buy them fancy collars.

I'm not going to elaborate on exactly where the Elemental Keys are located, but (if I recall correctly) there's no need to use the eastern portal to get to any of them.
Be careful and move decisively when exploring the Dungeon's interior halls and rooms - GET THE KEY AND GET OUT.
There's no need to go picking any more Mushrooms; there are Elixirs to be had if you know how to Steal.
When you've got all the Keys you should heal up, gear up, save up, and whatever else you need to do in the Hub.
Take the portals to the Elemental Sanctums, kill the Elemental Guardians, take the Elemental Gems, return to the Hub and do all of your Hub Stuff.
Give the Gems to the Elemental Statues in the center of the Hub, kill the Elementals, and then ASCEND.
[/spoiler]
Last edited by TheLordThyGod on Fri Feb 23, 2018 7:11 am, edited 3 times in total.
...spake The Lord Thy God.
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TheLordThyGod
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Post by TheLordThyGod »

...spake The Lord Thy God.
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Post by TheLordThyGod »

...spake The Lord Thy God.
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Post by marionline »

@Pheonix
Why wouldn't the main character be able to put the meat/mold lying around the place in the composter machine?
That's exactlyx what I was planning for, :D batteling mould and putting in into the recycler, after that. (It is very unfinished, that demo unfotunatly.)
Do you remember where the machine was that added two party members? I'd like to fix that, too.
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guo
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Post by guo »

Ok, I sat down and played them all this afternoon.

In order of favourite to least favourite:
  • delinquent.rpg
    Snowshoe Forest
    Flow
    No Exit
    Space
    Paradise
Well done. I have some notes I wrote for each game if people would care to see them.
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Post by TheLordThyGod »

guo wrote: Well done. I have some notes I wrote for each game if people would care to see them.
Very much so.
...spake The Lord Thy God.
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Post by kylekrack »

Here's my votes for now. Sorry for taking so long. Midterms and projects and going out of town have had me pretty swamped. I'll try to write some reviews or at least some feedback this weekend while I'm out of town.
  • Snowshoe Forest
    No Exit
    delinquent.rpg
    Paradise
    Space
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Post by SwordPlay »

Okay, here's my votes, based on acknowledging that the games are in prototype phase, more or less. Therefore, it is based on my ideas and experience of playing the game, and what it could be (in my imagination :p)

Snow shoe - Feels like a classic. I was looking forward to different mechanics
Space - Exciting and fresh. A bit scary/claustrophobic. It gave me feels.
Paradise - Imaginative and vivid. Wish I could figure it out :p
Flow - I think this had a great potential to be interesting haha
No Exit - Promising, but focused too much on grinding/random encounters.
Delinquent - The best made game by far. But it is a boring game at its heart. Sorry. It will probably win though, so I don't feel bad about ranking it low.
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Foxley
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Post by Foxley »

Thoughts and observations about "Space":

"The premise is good: you're in an abandoned space station and need to find a way to survive starvation and presumably space pirates. I like the diary entries at the beginning but it's pretty much 70% of the text in the game all at once. I think it would've been better to spread it out more for narrative effect.

No sound or music hurts the experience. Something is better than nothing, even if it's free assets that people have already heard many times before.

The script that hides and reveals rooms is quite buggy. The overlay doesn't change until you move a space after a room transition, when it should happen immediately. In my opinion it would have been better if this had just been disabled if it wasn't working properly.

Random encounters are frequent, brief and uninspiring. Rats get in one guaranteed attack, and are then killed in one hit. They're the only enemy you fight.

I bought some delicious curry from a vending machine ...wait, wasn't the main character just saying she had totally run out of food and was going to starve to death? There was a vending machine two rooms over, and she even had money for it!

I examined an organic waste disposer a few times and suddenly had a full party of heroes, all three named Anne even though one looked different... that was kind of weird.

Once I entered the far right room and triggered the cutscene, I was stuck in the room and couldn't get back out. Kind of felt like wandering around a bit more.

In summary - I really like the setting and premise set up during the diary entries, but this would need a lot of work to bring out its potential in terms of polish and narrative. If there are going to be fights, the only enemy being rats that die in one hit don't justify having fights; abandoning fights altogether honestly wouldn't be a bad idea. I'd be interested to see where this goes in terms of story."
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Post by Foxley »

Thoughts and observations while playing Phos:

"Music and art are both dissonant and jarring, kind of unsettling. This does work in its favor.

There are some trees. Supposedly you're supposed to cultivate vegetation and wait. It's not explained how this is supposed to be achieved. Examining most of the trees does nothing.

I ate the fruit of the Tree of Good and Evil and when I talked to Adam again, I got what looks like a dialogue choice cross with RAPE, MURDER, FEED and NOPE. Nothing does anything, and... yep the game is frozen. Alright, let's press Alt+F4, restart the game and make note not to do that again.

If you walk away from where Adam is standing, Lilith will completely reject Adam for no apparent reason. Because... leaving the immediate physical vicinity of your significant other means you're breaking up with them?

I had a change of heart and came back. Talking to him again got another dialogue choice cross that froze the game. Again. For YHWH's sake. Restarting...

This time I wandered away a bit, talked to some nearby NPCs that had almost nothing to say. Pair of boring goobers. I subsequently got a very dramatic sounding ending out of it and was kicked back to the title screen. Great. Time to watch the intro cutscene all over again with the screechy violins and all, then try talking to another NPC.

Wandered around again. There sure is a lot of nothing in this huge, open map with wraparound.

Alright, found another different NPC, it's Lucifer. Got another lame dramatic sounding ending that had no relation to my actions as a player.

Found another NPC. Got another ending.

...and another...

...and another...

...and another...

I think that was all of them. I hope it was. Some of them I got to do a dialogue choice for, which results in a different apocalyptic ending that again has no relation to anything I actually did besides talking to random NPCs on a big empty map.

In summary: Sorry but overall I kind of loathed playing this. The biblical stuff felt very contrived, edgy and ultimately pointless. I hate using the P word since it's so overused/misused, but the writing really did feel very pretentious and there was no actual story to speak of. Having to restart the game every time you talk to a NPC and trigger another two textbox long ending, which is literally all that there is to do, was an absolute chore. The attempt at variety via flavor text works against it, as the game becomes less and less interesting and tolerable with each incessant restart."
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Post by Foxley »

Thoughts and observations while playing No Exit:

"During my initial playtest several days ago, I got destroyed about 3 times in a row by random encounters. This time I'm going to be a lot more cautious and methodical. For the record, if I weren't playtesting games for a contest I were participating in, I probably would've just quit and deleted the game immediately after playing it for less than 5 minutes, because being introduced to a game by dying instantly because you were given no information is not very fun or interesting.

I actually kind of like the no-fi graphical style as an abstract for a fantasy setting with sages, inns, elemental statues and such. Groovy map music too. Is this original? Either way, I can dig it.

Holy crap there are a lot of pieces of equipment for sale. Unfortunately most stuff is kind of expensive and I started with $0, so there's not much to do except lick the proverbial window. A crappy healing item that restores 10 health costs $10, a slightly less crappy healing item that restores 30 health costs $30? Good lord that's awful. Looks like I'm going to be stuck heading all the way back to the inn whenever I need to heal.

Decided to play it safe this time: fight a few easy battles, then run back to recover and try to buy equipment. While I'm pretty used to the idea of doing dungeon runs and then going back to recover, stock up and go back into the fray, I just barely made it back alive after two fights. Those slimes take way too long to kill and chipped down my health.

What the hell, just resting at the inn cost half of the gold I almost died for? Highway robbery! Thankfully I had just enough to buy a Sword.

Sweet, with the Sword now I can just kill slimes in two hits. Easy money.

I strayed from the south wall just a bit and I'm taking way more damage now from some moles. Gotta go back and heal yet again after one battle, that sucks.

These equipment choices don't seem terribly balanced in terms of stats versus cost. Going with just the Sword and Armor for now, stuff like boots and helmets and cloaks give barely anything for kind of a lot of money, so I'll save those for when I'm drowning in unspent cash. Also why the hell does the hero have like... 6 Aim? No wonder he keeps missing. No real Aim-boosting equipment options either.

Okay, the droning sound in the music is starting to get really obnoxious. Muting it.

Strayed away from the wall a bit to grab a $ treasure. Got attacked by a Kraken, which did either 2 damage or 57 damage randomly. Couldn't run, got murdered. Reloading.

Grabbed the $ treasure again. Got attacked by three "Angry Angles". Got murdered. Reloading.

Exact same thing happened yet again. Reloading. Why the hell do I have to stick to a wall where there's nothing to do in order to just... not get killed from full health? I can understand restricting player progress, but this is starting to piss me off.

I find myself getting extremely bored of fighting slimes that give almost no experience, bored enough to repeatedly wander away from the wall and getting slaughtered every time. It seems at this rate I would need to grind for hours just to not die constantly from fighting anything that's not the weakest enemies in the game. My patience is wearing thin, but I'll stick it out for a bit and see if I can gain some foothold and start overpowering these mooks.

Alright, so buying the stronger Sword ended up making a huge difference. Suddenly I'm able to fight things that aren't slimes and moles. But why is there a Steal ability if none of the enemies have anything?

After some successful exploring that involved grabbing a random key, I ran into some Flaming Skulls that I couldn't win against by attrition so I got slaughtered, since there is NO EXIT from battle... ohhhhh, I get it now. Clever! I think?

Alright, think I'm done. That death was a huge setback that I don't care to try to redo. I've been trying to play this game for nearly an hour and thus far there's nothing except grinding and trying not to die - no quests, no flavor text, no apparent objectives. Just endless fights where you hold Enter and hope you don't die because your attack magic sucks and you can't run.

Summary: While at first the game seems graphically inferior, the one-step-up-from-Nethack aesthetic got kind of likeable and I could appreciate it. The music was cool at first but quickly became grating. While I appreciate what TLTG was going for in this retro dungeon crawler, and throwing together a dungeon crawler in such a short span of time, the pacing and balance make the game not really worth dealing with for more than a short while. For all I know some fun and interesting stuff would have happened eventually, but even giving it a herculean effort over the course of an hour I barely made it away from the starting area. I'd happily give this game another try if the balance and pacing were fixed, because as it stands it's broken to a point where it's actually kind of miserable to play. Kudos for making a 50x50 tile game seem dauntingly massive, even if it's by virtue of holding the player back so hard that they have no hope of trying to explore it.

And for the love of god: PUT IN AN ESCAPE OPTION. That alone would have largely salvaged the game in its present state."
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