Heart of the OHR Contest 2018

Make games! Discuss those games here.

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Nathan Karr
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Post by Nathan Karr »

Drydocks 8/10. The game had a lot of weird glitches when I was playing it, like displaying that I had 70 GP and then refusing to let me buy things because I only had 20. I would mostly wander around the mainland until I starved, sometimes I'd randomly get 500 GP seemingly out of nowhere. NPCs would force things onto me when I said "no" and then my inventory would be too clogged up to actually purchase the trade goods I wanted to get. NPCs would deduct money from my account and then not even give me the item I'd purchased. I found a pile of potions and a broken sword randomly.

The world is huge and a lot of work has gone into the graphics, menus, and pathfinding for the NPCs (prettymuch nobody would have noticed if they were just set to wander/random turns/whatever but I've seen how much work has gone into scripting them).

...And even if the game functioned exactly as intended, merchant logistics, trading, and large-scale strategy games aren't my style. I'd still have happily given the game a 9 or maybe even a 10 if it wasn't so glitchy on me.

Hero 5/10. Like the One Pirate game(s?), this is a transparent newbie game full of sloppy graphics, shamelessly copying a mainstream franchise's ideas, and a constant stream of bad spelling, bad grammar, and inconsistent capitalization. I still kinda liked it and played it all the way to the end, but I scored Crystal Cave a little too high because it came right after playing some games that left a worse impression. I've adjusted the other game accordingly.

Gameplay-wise, my biggest criticism is actually that the heroes all have multiple spell lists, often ones which only get a single spell in the entire playthrough. I'd suggest merging Hop's Black Magic, frog tongue, and Green Magic into a single list; likewise for Red's White Magic, Summon(misspelled "summen"), Fox Magic, and Heal, and the heal-sword variant of the main character doesn't need "White" and "Leader" to be separate from "Heal" for sure.

Also, that wooden sword sure looks like pink plastic rather than wood to me.
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A lot of work went into copying the appearances of specific Pokemon, then miscoloring them, without just importing existing Pokemon sprites. Effort that'd have been better spent copying reference images of regular rats and birds.
A lot of work went into copying the appearances of specific Pokemon, then miscoloring them, without just importing existing Pokemon sprites. Effort that'd have been better spent copying reference images of regular rats and birds.
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Biggest glitch of all was that there was a bard with an awesome name on the tutorial island, who said he lost his instrument on the south side of the island near the forest. I searched around the forest and accidentally boarded an invisible airship, unabl
Biggest glitch of all was that there was a bard with an awesome name on the tutorial island, who said he lost his instrument on the south side of the island near the forest. I searched around the forest and accidentally boarded an invisible airship, unabl
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Post by Feenicks »

Dark Planet is, uh...

Dark Planet appeared in the last HotOHR, and has charitably gained a quarter of an hour of gameplay in the two years since. There's an intro area and a dungeon now, in addition to a single-street town area and the tower bits from the original demo... and that's kind of it? There is still not much here, and I can hazard a guess as to why.

Leading up to the deadline, you spent what felt like months deliberating over the look of a gigantic concrete tower block [one so big that you wouldn't actually see most of the center of it]. This is a relatively minor thing, but it relates to a larger issue: I'm getting the distinct impression you're trying to run before you can walk when it comes to a lot of the parts of actually making a game.

There's a custom menu and a bunch of tutorial pages alongside it, but an intro scene where the bad guys walk into a wall of safes and abruptly vanish. There's a fancy bestiary system, paired with all of 3 [and a half] enemies to fight. There was what I'm assuming was a time-consuming process to make a 3d model for a character, who then gets an extremely basic walkabout sprite and a single special ability in battle [which isn't really worth using over their main one]. I'd go on, but you probably get the point. You're getting bogged down on trying to do the flashy parts of a project while neglecting the meat.

The demo ends with some hints of some actual plotty stuff beyond the introductory gang stuff, gives you a new party member, and then throws you an 'end of demo' message. I can't really tell where this is going: what is this titular dark planet? Why does a police force have genetically enhanced people in generic police-ish roles, and why are the big set of labs in the main building such a big secret? Is the gang stuff at the start simply there to lead into the main plot, or does it have some relevance elsewhere in the game?

I'm not saying you should abandon this, as it could possibly lead somewhere. I just want you to put this to the side and make something - it doesn't even have to be that big a project - that isn't tripping over the scripting stuff that's getting thrown into it.

4/10.
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A schism, I guess???
A schism, I guess???
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Prerendered 3d tiles are an interesting look for the OHR, I guess? No other part of the game uses them, though, which makes this building stand out hard.
Prerendered 3d tiles are an interesting look for the OHR, I guess? No other part of the game uses them, though, which makes this building stand out hard.
darkplanet0004.png (12.68 KiB) Viewed 3174 times
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Post by Kefyrra »

Arc Wars: Some of the visuals are rather creative, and left me wanting to see what the next layer of hell would be like out of morbid curiosity. And I kinda get where MK was coming from in intentionally trying to make the player suffer (get it, because you're in hell?). But at one point you have to look back and wonder if all that cheap shock value, long, repetitive "mazes", and abysmal combat, are worth wasting the player's time for. 3/10
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Post by Feenicks »

You Need a Hero by idontknow

I'm seriously divided on this one. On one hand, YNAH easily had the longest runtime of anything I played for this, and does some things pretty well. On the other hand...
It's rough. It's really, really rough.

Let me back up. YNAH is ostensibly a game about the attempts of Mura, a vampire the mother of the main character fought against years ago who's recently resurfaced to obtain three relics and gain immense power, although it takes some time to get to him. Instead, for a good chunk of the game it's about the exploits of HERO, a band of jerks who say they want to do something about all the weird monsters but obviously have ulterior motives. It starts out before they make themselves known, of course - the prologue involves the main character [Damien]’s friend [Freya] going missing and a shadowy figure [???] popping up in the middle of the night - but they're always there, with a jerk friend who joins up with you in the prologue being one of their head members and nudging things along.

The game starts off on the more comedic/light-hearted/lewd-ish side of things, with the second dungeon being Vaporwave-themed [complete with a keyboard-mashing variant of the style’s most infamous song], but slowly gets more and more serious, with a mansion in the back half of the game being my personal favorite thematically. There’s a proper escalation of stakes, both with its moving-average tone and what everyone’s doing.

I'm okay with a progression like that. My problem is that it changes tone really, really quickly. Not even the intro is exempt: you go from Damien’s mom being seriously messed up about an old evil she faced popping up in one scene, and in the next you have Damien talking about his stashed-away smut and having his laptop attack him [and subsequently blowing up]. These can exist in the same thing, but having them jut up against one another in that sorta way is jarring. Later on, some guy Mura, maybe??? goes to sit next to Damien on a bench in the middle of a bright and otherwise cheery town and starts being really vile in a subtly-directed way towards him. It’s excessive, and I can’t tell if it’s just meant to signify the guy as obviously Bad, or if it’s meant to be a full-on tonal shift. One or two other antagonists also go off on these rants, and they never stop feeling a bit out of place. There was some stuff I was going to say about some conversations being overly long for no good reason, but eh, I can’t remember stuff.

I also kinda object to having a character that seduces women, steals their souls, and turns at least one of them into a war machine being in the same game that features a Vape Demon, but that might just be me.

There’s one gameplay thing I have a bit of an issue with. After the first stakes-raising, you go on a bus trip, stopping in another city along the way for a while, and eventually reach a point where you’re given a very clear warning that you can’t go back to town for a while. After a few scenes you find yourself somewhere that feels very much like it’s the final dungeon of the demo – it’s big, the enemies hit hard, you get some party-splitting action, the stakes finally turn from relatively minor happenings to Serious Stuff, and so on – until it ends, and it turns out that you’ve got another dungeon right after the fact. That dungeon also does the same ‘can’t go back after this point’ deal and has other trappings of [fake] final dungeons, but doing that sorta stuff twice in a row dulls the second time and retroactively weakens the first time. I’m not sure how you’d space things out, and switching the two around would also make both feel a bit wonky being so close to one another. It’s the reason why a lot of RPGs have kinda fillery dungeons or spaces where you can do sidequests or serious looking-around in between big plot points; you need the space to decompress and not get worn out by the plot’s goings-on.

Unfortunately, this is the part of the review where I have to admit that, sans debug keys, I’d have never got to the end of the demo, or indeed into those last two dungeons. There’s a good few situations [most of the ones I remember being in Fang Manor] where you can go through a door and end up stuck in what I’m assuming was supposed to be a walk-on NPC. I’m a bit hypocritical here, sure; both Winged Realm and Laby… both feature relatively easy ways for you to get stuck for good, and god knows False Skies has something of the sort too. None of those, though, involve the critical path being blocked off.

There are a lot of other situations like this where things get Messed Up. There’s a lot of open doors you can walk on but can’t enter – the abandoned mall comes to mind, which is really odd given how they were fine in the demo from 2016. Freya gets Damien’s walkabout graphic after a certain scene in the seaside town. Certain doors in Fang Manor turn into other doors when interacted with. I only needed to interact with one of the orbs in the final dungeon before being let through a barrier. Several of the cutscenes had wonky bits, the specifics of which I can’t really remember at the moment. A few of these are much more severe than others, and I guess you did say it was a buggy game, but still. It’s really rough.

This roughness extends to the battles as well; while at first the difficulty curve is reasonable [if a bit intense], by the last two dungeons the enemies are hitting for huge and wildly variable amounts, and also have serious amounts of HP. The final dungeon in particular feels excessive, as I felt forced to cheese a lot of encounters with Jessie's accuracy-reducing move, lest I succumb to the excessively powerful stuff that was in there. Dealing with OHKO stuff like that degenerates down to using reviving items constantly while hoping you get lucky and don't get instantly killed, and that's not very fun.

You end up with six party members by the end, but the later ones aren’t nearly as useful as the former ones. The sixth’s jump ability and nature-tinged skillset was basically useless when compared to any of the four party members you got within the first hour of the game; even Diana’s moveset, which started out with a full complement of all-target elemental abilities and a few buffs, stopped feeling hugely useful by the endgame, where MP was tight and characters that could operate fine without it valuable. Even the healers stopped being valuable for their healing, as healing items were pretty easy to get: Damien had his buffing, and Angela had all the other skills her Blue Mage-esque analyses gave.

Items and equipment feel a bit haphazard as well. A few things were infinitely useable [the alcohol-related stuff in particular, and thank god for that] when being consumable seemed more appropriate. Some equipment was oddly statted; in one of the towns, you could buy a sword that was less powerful than some sharp nails half as expensive as it, and some of the new equipment in the final town had no stats at all attached to them. As said above, there don’t seem to be any MP healing items, which feels like an oversight when there’s three different flavor of item that revive you.

Other stuff to mention: artwork’s fine, maybe even above-average for purposes of the OHR [although some of the enemies are still pretty basic], and the backgrounds are still really neat. Music is over the place in terms of its style, but it’s generally well-placed [...maybe not the penultimate battle's theme, which was way too laid-back for a pair of enemies that could deal 4-digits with basic attacks].

Eh. It’s a game I played for 4 hours, so it’s not bad. It just needs some […a lot of] stuff fixed and rebalanced.

6/10 it’s fine, just please fix the bugs and do some editing and this’ll go up 1-2 points easily
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Apparently this door was a huge pain for some people. Not me~
Apparently this door was a huge pain for some people. Not me~
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this screenshot brought to you by tmc wanting to see more screenshots
this screenshot brought to you by tmc wanting to see more screenshots
ynah20180003.png (6.75 KiB) Viewed 3084 times
Wonky battle balancing, exhibit A: the skeletons hit for more damage than anyone has HP, while the shades miss every attack they attempt.
Wonky battle balancing, exhibit A: the skeletons hit for more damage than anyone has HP, while the shades miss every attack they attempt.
ynah20180054.png (9.81 KiB) Viewed 3109 times
I agree.
I agree.
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Was there supposed to be a scene after this? It dumps you back into Tulip City - in daylight - after this.
Was there supposed to be a scene after this? It dumps you back into Tulip City - in daylight - after this.
ynah20180034.png (4.16 KiB) Viewed 3109 times
Last edited by Feenicks on Sat Jan 19, 2019 12:04 am, edited 2 times in total.
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Post by Idontknow »

Yeah I kind of ended up rushing the last parts of the game out with loads of issues to meet the deadline. Whole thing needs a BIG rebalance.

Also the tone shifts were kind of intentional. The second part of the game where the bad guy runs amok with the two magical artifacts and things get... worse will probably be darker in line with that. I was kind of going for it being like a Mother 3 kind of thing (dark subject matter with cute, bright graphics). It's supposed to be jarring that this evil man is able to exist and thrive in a world that appears to be so happy and carefree. I dunno if I pulled it off the best though.

Anyways, thanks for the feedback everyone whose reviewed the game so far!
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Post by Feenicks »

Hinterlands: Pilgrimage by ThyLordThyGod

I have some mixed feelings about this one. On one hand, it has a really funky feeling to it, with a mythology that permeates the setting and drives the plot and some music that gives things a really distinct flavor. On the other hand, there's some strange design decisions that bog down things a bit.

In case you weren't aware, ThyLordThyGod did the LinearQuest games, which given a brief glance are the ultimate example of incremental sequel design. Unless I'm seriously mistaken, Pilgrimage isn't derived from these games, but there is at least one element of their design that persisted into this. I'll get to that in a bit.

You play as Glur, a worshipper of Yoth [a god who is best summed up as almost absentmindedly creating the world]. You're due to be one of the Folk [the leaders of the village, I'm assuming], but have a few tasks to do before you can take up the title. You're then let out into the village and left to complete your first task, which is getting rid of the giant rat that's set up shop in a woman's basement.

The world of Pilgrimage feels different, in a good way, and its music does a lot of the work to help with that. My music knowledge is a bit lacking, but it definitely suits the religious tones that run through the game, with a battle theme featuring some choir bits to really hammer that through. Graphically it's a bit weaker; while I find the walkabout graphics [which don't really feature much turning of the sprites; Glur and co. tilt their head to the side when walking left/right] alright, enhancing the game's feel, the tiles are fairly plain. Battles are weird; the hero/enemy graphics are mostly their overworld ones doubled in size, and the attack animations mostly consist of single frames flipping left/right.

Anyway, there's actually a few solutions to get through Glur's first challenge, some more obvious than others. Just attacking is an option, but Glur is painfully weak to start off; although he has an attack that hits every enemy, his hit rate is lousy, and hitting one out of three enemies is not a path to success. There are some places to grind up or otherwise get money, but they're either questionable [the sewers] or limited [the various sidequest things in town - those were neat, though]; the third [using the arena to fight some easy foes and get yourself on a good footing] should've been something I tried, but for whatever reason I assumed it was something you'd be better off doing after the first dungeon - my mistake, though the inability to actually buy any equipment may have been part of that feeling. It's annoying to have half a dozen shops in town and yet have absolutely no money to start off with to buy anything. Could it have broken some of the puzzley sidequest stuff in the process? Sure. Would it feel a bit better? Yeah.

Anyway, I ended up making some cheese via sidequesty stuff and feeding it to the rat in question; other people had different methods to finishing the first task. [An aside: you're actually able to get that rat on your side after a bit! He's called the Grand Zark. He's neat]

Things continue to go on - there's another task, you're able to get some more party members, you kill an entity talked about in the setting's mythology [always appreciated]. There's a good sense of opening up after the first task, as you reach the overworld after half an hour or so locked within the town walls; even if exploring immediately will likely get your world rocked by enemies that can take off half your HP in one hit and there's really only one place to go when you first have access to it.

Unfortunately, it's now time to get back to that one design decision I mentioned earlier - or, rather, the one overarching design decision that influences so much of the RPG meat of this. That is: the actual RPG side of this feels very, very mechanically inclined.

Dungeons are for the most part space-filling curves, enemy variety feels really slim [the second task you do has you fighting large amounts of the exact same type of enemy over and over], and attacks are basic 'hit all enemies' or 'hit one enemy', with Glur's skillset shared by the majority of the cast. This last one feels the most strange - it feels odd to have such a strange and unique-feeling world coupled to characters with skills named 'MultiHit' and 'MultiSlash' [both of these cost the same, but the latter felt stronger, making the former completely redundant - a strange design choice, to say the least]. Your enemies also share your attacks right up until the mountain, making for some weird stuff like rats attacking you with fists or knives.

Your third task involves going through what very much feels like the final dungeon, which is the point where I ran out of steam. It does a good job of feeling like a final dungeon - the battle music changes, for one. However, it's still a big space-filling curve, with enemy variety still kinda lacking for how many times you'll be fighting them [and they hit hard! I died the first time I fought them, albeit due to being at the point where I needed to take a break]. I got through the first floor of the dungeon, traveled on the path outside, and kinda gave up once I saw that the enemies on the second level were the exact same. The dungeon itself began to look a bit different - but it's a bit of a punishing encounter rate for even the small amount of puzzle solving that was starting to be introduced.

It's a neat cosmology that's here, and the parts that involved exploring outside of dungeons were genuinely neat. I just don't have a giant amount of time for the really old-school style of dungeon crawl that's here, I suppose. I know you're continuing to work on it - will be interested in seeing what comes of this.

6/10 - a neat setting unfortunately only gets you so far
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This is just before I gave up.
This is just before I gave up.
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Strangely enough, I was fine with this area. Being very different from everywhere else may have helped, I guess?
Strangely enough, I was fine with this area. Being very different from everywhere else may have helped, I guess?
pilgrimage0015.png (3.61 KiB) Viewed 3059 times
This area's bad about the single-enemy-type thing, but admittedly has a reason behind it.
This area's bad about the single-enemy-type thing, but admittedly has a reason behind it.
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TheLordThyGod
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Post by TheLordThyGod »

Thanks for the feedback. It's reassuring that most of your gripes (lack of enemy diversity, excessive encounter rates in larger dungeons, etc.) are things I'm aware of and already on my to-do list for the beta. The game will still lean into old school dungeon crawl elements that probably won't be to your tastes, but I think a lot of your other issues should get resolved.

Pilgrimage IS actually a direct descendant of LinearQuest. Every game I've made so far expanded upon the list of attacks and enemies from the previous game, so LQ9 begat No Exit begat Pilgrimage.

In regard to the available attacks... Slash/Pierce/Bash attacks are elemental, whereas Hit attacks are non-elemental (otherwise they function identically to other similarly prefixed attacks); which attack does more damage is dependent on a given enemy's resistances (detailed in the Bestiary). Glur is the most flexible hero in combat (sharing a lot of attacks with the other PCs); the other heroes are more specialized and most of them either have a unique ability (or preferred elemental damage type) or else a combat role they excel at due to their stats and available equipment (Oot, despite her weaker attacks, can become a death machine once she levels up and acquires a better weapon later in the game). It's also possible for certain characters to learn elemental spells from scrolls, which can change their roles in combat. If this is lost on the player, I will consider flagging this info somehow and/or expanding and refining the attack lists to further differentiate the characters.

Thanks again for the feedback.
Last edited by TheLordThyGod on Sun Jan 20, 2019 6:56 am, edited 2 times in total.
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Post by TheLordThyGod »

Arc Wars (full review here)
6/10 – A conceptually strong game with some interesting content; however its expectations of the player are far too steep, opaque, and tedious.

Asphodelus (full review here)
3/10 – The graphics are very pretty, but the game makes no literal sense and refuses to explain its abstractions.

Bale – Chapter 1 (full review here)
6/10 – This game starts really strong, but gets wobbly after Jaducora is vanquished.

Birdcaged (full review here)
8/10 – A brief, focused game that benefits from its small scale and colorful characters; the necessity and means of early-game grinding could be better flagged.

Dark Planet (full review here)
4/10 – An incomplete, unpolished game with neat cutscenes and menus.

Dreamwalkers (full review here)
5/10 – A demo that is attractive and functional, but incomplete and unbalanced.

Drydocks – A Merchant RPG (full review here)
5/10 – A really cool concept that needs a lot of fixing.

False Skies (full review here)
6/10 – A nice looking demo with cool features that needs fleshing out.

Hero: Adventure in Animal Kingdom (full review here)
3/10 – Very similar to the dev’s other noob games but more focused, less broken, and not quite as excitingly weird.

Kaiju Big Battel: Fighto Fantasy (full review here)
8/10 – A very polished and professional demo; I’ll gladly buy the full version.

Masks: 15 Pages (full review here)
5/10 – A complete adventure with themes; but combat is broken.

My Little Pony: Trixie’s Adventure on the Rock Farm (full review here)
3/10 – A complete, playable MLP fan game that is neither engaging nor painful.

One Pirate: Adventure in the Crystal Cave (full review here)
2/10 – Broken mess of a noob game; but complete and mercifully brief.

One Pirate: Adventure in Summer Island (full review here)
4/10 – An incomplete, broken epic of a noob game with redeeming qualities - a disasterpiece of sorts.

Px (full review here)
2/10 – There might be a great game hidden in here, but I could find no indication of what it might entail.

Really Hard Game (full review here)
8/10 – Truly this is the bloodsouls of indie platformvanias.

Rolling, Radical Revolution (full review here)
8/10 – With colorful characters, balanced combat, and thoughtful puzzles, this was a very positive experience (despite my own ignorance of the language).

Trytuges (full review here)
7/10 – A clever, self-aware JRPG pastiche that needs some balancing.

You Need A Hero (full review here)
4/10 – Long and dense, but buggy and in need of revision and editing.

Zalag: Glustu (full review here)
3/10 – A brutally vague game that appears to have a point, but refuses to offer any hint to the player.
Last edited by TheLordThyGod on Tue Jan 22, 2019 6:10 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by TMC »

Bravo!

I need to get a move on with playing games.

Also, regarding HeartBugs (page updated): my attempt to get these requests implemented before the end of the contest was a disaster. But I will still be honouring the requests, including from people who didn't make the deadline (almost everyone who said they were going to enter the contest but didn't submit posted a lot of progress on thier game updates instead of just disappearing! That's impressive)

Also, anyone who entered the contest, even if they dropped out, and hasn't made a request yet still can! That's TheLordThyGod, thecrimsondm, Mammothstuds, Morpheus­Kitami, dantedynamite, whoapotato, Chalk Flower, Kefyrra, TheMan, and Bird.

Also, isn't KBB actually a re-release?
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Post by Pepsi Ranger »

Thanks for the votes.

Don't forget, you can vote for your own game (and should, especially if you want to meet that 2/3rds voter margin). Just be honest about your score as if someone else had made it.

Guys, seriously, vote for your own games. It's a great way to self-evaluate for your future revision process.

EDIT (Because TMC Ninja-posted): I believe Kaiju Big Battel, both demo and full game, were released exclusively within the window, but it's possible the demo came out before May. The demo is a different cut of the main game, however, which is why I encourage everyone to get a copy of the full version and cast their votes based on that, but I'm allowing votes for the demo because I know not everyone is willing to pay $10 just to cast a vote.

It does seem that Trytuges, on the other hand, is a rerelease. I didn't know that until just a couple of nights ago. Sounds like the current version is such a leap from the original, however, that it probably isn't even recognizable. Only Nathan can say for sure, but the originals versus rereleases categorization doesn't have the weight it used to have, so it doesn't matter for this contest.

P.S. Thanks to Kylekrack for a special project he's helping me with. The short version: We finally have a theme song.
Last edited by Pepsi Ranger on Wed Jan 23, 2019 1:37 am, edited 2 times in total.
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Post by Nathan Karr »

Pepsi Ranger wrote:It does seem that Trytuges, on the other hand, is a rerelease. I didn't know that until just a couple of nights ago. Sounds like the current version is such a leap from the original, however, that it probably isn't even recognizable. Only Nathan can say for sure, but the originals versus rereleases categorization doesn't have the weight it used to have, so it doesn't matter for this contest.
The original was only ever on two computers and never released to the web. The basic structure was the same (fight Magus Divunni so you can buy a ticket into the kitchen, get a boat from the kitchen sages, sail to another island, enter the rectangular final dungeon and fight the dark lord) with a lot of the same flourishes like the gluttonous knight Sir Eatsalot, the rodent problem in the main town, the gold sword vs. golden sword items (with NATE/Knate having ruined one of the former after buying it and discovering it wasn't the latter, using it as a display piece because he can't resell it) and item-learning spells being the default method. The games would be mostly recognizable about the same way that Final Fantasy 3's remake with named, personality-having player characters would be recognizable as a remake of the Famicom original or how Final Fantasy H can clearly be identified as Final Fantasy 1.
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Post by Spoonweaver »

Really Hard Game :: 5/10
There was a lot of good design here and some not so great. But the jokingly bad graphics are hard on the eyes
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Post by TheLordThyGod »

TMC wrote: Also, anyone who entered the contest, even if they dropped out, and hasn't made a request yet still can! That's TheLordThyGod, thecrimsondm, Mammothstuds, Morpheus­Kitami, dantedynamite, whoapotato, Chalk Flower, Kefyrra, TheMan, and Bird.
The issues I've had coming up with a feature request are that:

1. I'm still using a nightly from over 6 months ago (so my game remains stable) and have no idea what has changed in the interim.

2. I've not even fully explored the possibilities of the nightly I'm using (I am only just beginning to understand what is possible via scripting and still no idea what a "slice" is), so I don't know what OHRRPGCE will already do that I just haven't figured out yet.

3. I have no idea what is easy or hard to implement into OHRRPGCE.


The only things I can think of so far that I couldn't figure out how to make happen are (roughly in order of importance to me, #3 is really specialized for one game idea I had and probably not that crucial):

1. Changing the size of tiles (for instance 32x32 or 64x64 map tiles for a more SNES-ish look).

2. Additional MP-like meters for skills powered by resources other than MP (tech points, "charge" on an energy weapon, etc.)

3. The ability to lock certain heroes to certain available party/caterpillar slots (characters A & B can only be used in the first slot, C & D can only be used in the second slot, etc.)
Last edited by TheLordThyGod on Wed Jan 23, 2019 12:49 pm, edited 4 times in total.
...spake The Lord Thy God.
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Feenicks
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Post by Feenicks »

I'm lazy, so have some short reviews for the other stuff I played:

Bale: 8/10
Fixed the stuff that was really wonky with the 2 years' old version, and ended up with a really nice-feeling post-apocalyptic fantasy setting. The one-and-a-half member party going on in this requires some thinking/banking on enemies wasting turns, which feels right for the game's tone. I'm still not entirely sure how much boosting my stats at the pool post-library [oh yeah, you boost stats individually in this] actually helped, though? I was actually able to get to, and then beat, the worm that kicks off you getting summoned to the place, after which there's a much-appreciated feeling of things opening up.

Birdcaged: 7/10
This was originally for the one-room contest, and it took the prompt literally, resulting in a very compact game. You're a bird stuck in a room, along with a bunch of metaphorical stuff that occasionally manifests itself as [fancy-looking!] boss battles. There's a nice progression, with the colored track outside the room giving a very clear ramping-up of things; not sure how the various random encounter enemies play into a depressed crow's psyche, though. Really appreciate the secret ending.

Dreamwalkers: 4/10
Feel a bit bad giving this such a low score, seeing how there's a lot of fancy stuff going on, but unfortunately that's how it is. The concept [lucid dreaming plus dream monsters] has a lot of potential, but it feels weirdly implemented here. The main character's friend shows up to help you beat the monster that prompted the main character's lucid dreaming, somehow, which is appreciated: even with his help, though, you're still going to be bodied by the powerful random encounters. You can see them on the field and can differentiate between easier and harder ones, but there's places where hitting one of those harder encounters is pretty much inevitable, and those harder ones feel like you. This is one of those games where there's no easy healing to be found - there's a shop most of the way through the first area, but it's expensive and you'll run through what you get really quickly. Even with them, it feels really, really easy to end up in a situation where even perfect play won't get you out of a bad situation. There's a boss at the end, but it hitting for half a character's HP [and, of course, having no capacity for healing] means they're a wall I didn't bother climbing over.

Drydocks: 6/10
This merchant simulator is much-improved from its ???-year old earlier incarnation; you're still buying low and selling high, but there's a limit to how much you can carry, and with that plus the additional restrictions of food there's suddenly a proper failure state, making for something a lot more interesting to play around with.
There's still no real ultimate goal, though, as far as I can tell. I didn't get to the point where you could organize raids on places, the highest rungs of the merchant guild ladder seem ridiculously high. There were a few NPCs that mentioned quest-sounding stuff, but I never figured out where those actually went. Other bugs, like certain locations not triggering upon being walked on or the displayed city prices oftentimes differing from their real ones, get in the way as well.

Adventure in Animal Kingdom: 4/10
This is a newbie game, no beating around that. Stuff like the character-choosing at the start is neat, but various things - the maps made up of just a few tiles, the misspellings, half the enemies being knockoff pokemon, those portraits - knock things down a lot. It's endearing, sure, but not enough to be good.
Pluses: if you mention that a character has a powerful sibling/friend, and then have them join your party, I will probably like that. Shame that the sibling here had the exact same skillset the main character did, though.

Kaiju Big Battel: 10/10
Kaiju gets the honorable mention of being the game that easily has the highest production values of things in this contest [maybe even the OHR as a whole], so props to it. I played the demo on hardmode, and despite a few party wipes managed to get through to the end.
A few things bug me [but not enough to deduct a point]: battles feel a bit slow, despite being turn-based; most of the non-item buffs feel pretty weak; the beginning of the game having items you can definitely waste on battles you still end up wiping on is a bit annoying; the demo is a bit too whistle-stop-ish for my liking [but does make me want to see the areas in this expanded out a bunch, which I guess is the intent.
gj

Rolling Radical Revolution: 7/10
There's unfortunately a bit of a limit to how high I can rate a game where I don't really understand what's going, and this reaches that; so props. It's a very dense game, but not in a painful way - each map [at least in the part I played] is one screen, and there's one or two things that happen on it, which are typically a battle plus something else.
There's some issues I have - combat's a bit slow, and the restrictions on healing [20% of HP/MP of a single character each, per battle won/berry(?) eaten] in the ~30 minutes I played felt a bit excessive given the tone of the game - but they're more than balanced out by the fact you can get a goose in your party.

Trytuges: 6/10
On the other hand, this just feels unevenly dense in a worse way; I can totally see why Nate takes a long time to make things when things like stepping on a random flower results in a half-dozen textbox-long conversation.
Enemy balancing seems weird, too; the desert enemies feel way too powerful for their easy-to-access location, and there was a fox in the mines that shut all my characters down, revived from death into the corner of the screen, and wiped the party out [fun].
Having 90% of the grinding being done in a specific area is interesting, I guess, but having all the other enemies in the game give awful rewards for fighting them [to the point that the first trip to the inn required selling off some of my lousier equipment] is weird. I dunno.
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This is the middle of a castle. Can you tell?
This is the middle of a castle. Can you tell?
trytuges0004.png (4.9 KiB) Viewed 2855 times
I can't remember what this surprise was [also: I wasn't kidding about those areas made of single tiles]
I can't remember what this surprise was [also: I wasn't kidding about those areas made of single tiles]
hero0007.png (8.45 KiB) Viewed 2855 times
He's just standing there... menacingly!
He's just standing there... menacingly!
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Bosses deserve fancy backgrounds.
Bosses deserve fancy backgrounds.
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TheMan
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Post by TheMan »

Rolling, Radical Revolution: 8/10
The game seems really solid, although combat is a bit slow sometimes. I live the level up system.
Asphodelus: 5/10
While the graphics are quite good, the exploration isnt very interesting, and there seems to be a lot of backtracking. I got kind of lost, and eventually gave up. Then again, I've never played yume nikki, so some of it was probably lost on me.
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