Heart of the OHR Contest 2018

Make games! Discuss those games here.

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guo
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Post by guo »

No major graphical updates to show off, but:

*You can phone home ("Scrype") for advice on your current quests, as well as conversations about the area you're in, other current events, and general banter.
*"Scrytunes" can be collected from non-hostile wild creatures
*A bestiary has been implemented - you can collect info on creatures by using your Scry on them. Until calling textboxes from menus works better this will only be 1 textbox worth of information per creature.
*A fish forgot that it was aquatic and roams about aimlessly on land.
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kylekrack
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Post by kylekrack »

I want Mayan architecture to influence the buildings in this world, so I worked on some tiles last night. I didn't intend to spend 3 hours doing art that might not even go into the final game, but you know, that sort of thing just happens sometimes.

It feels flat, but I'm not sure how to fix it. Probably the use of color. Color is hard. Does anyone have any tips on how to add a little depth an interest to the walls (or anything else)?
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guo
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Post by guo »

I'd make the top of the column one tile in size, at it looks too rectangular at this stage. A shadow on the ground and/or a view of the side of the column would help add depth, and you could perhaps reduce some of the contrast between colour, eg the shadows (?) that separate each block, as well as the outline on the sides.
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kylekrack
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Post by kylekrack »

I uploaded the first official version of my submission, Restoration of the K'ab. I want to give people the opportunity to walk around the areas in the game and get a feel for how it's meant to play out. It's mostly a proof of concept right now, the battles aren't even attempted to be balanced and the NPCs in town have no meaningful behavior. In the next release, I hope to have both of those things fixed. For now, at least there's an intro providing the most basic exposition.

https://www.slimesalad.com/forum/viewgame.php?p=133732

I know there's not much to give feedback on now, but I'd love to answer any questions about how things are supposed to function or take suggestions on where it could go from here. And, of course, any obvious bugs that may have been missed.
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TMC
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Post by TMC »

(Oh, heh, I see that guo posted here the answer to a question I just asked in the Bale thread.)

I tried out Restoration of K'ab. You've got some pretty nice tiles and that first map looks great. (That is a really unique, and crazy, grass animation!) It's a good thing you have three months left, because just playing it, even I feel daunted by the amount left to do :)
The brief intro to the game reminds me heavily of Bale, actually - so potentially pretty promising, if you can keep writing. However, I believe you said you have basically no plot?

The NPC wandering system is neat. I thought this would be similar to the system in Time and Time Again, where the NPCs follow patterns according to the time of day. At first I figured there must be a hidden time system. Not sure about that. The movement patterns do seem pretty aimless, although they go to that plot of plad to the south a lot. There must be some story behind that, just not revealed yet! Likewise, I hope there's more to what the NPCs are doing.
Maybe this is asking way too much when every other game has wandering NPCs, while this one has just more sophisticated wandering NPCs, which somehow demands even more. However, you must have had a good reason for implementing this system, which isn't revealed yet.

Huh, I notice that if you talk to a pathing NPC from behind, the NPC takes a step towards you, then continues pathing. It appears that both the "Face you" and "Change direction" NPC settings behave the same. I would consider this an engine bug. Unless you have some script running that forces the NPC to continue pathing?

It's pretty weird that when an NPC leaves a building while you're inside it, it's not there when you exit the building, although the other way around works. However I can see why it works that way: if you exit the building 5 seconds after the NPC, you want it to be 5 seconds away when you exit the building, and that's not trivial to do. I guess you could do something like place the NPC randomly at some distance, but it's clear that this is not a priority in the slightest compared to everything else.

Since the game is so unfinished, the doesn't seem to be much point in reporting most bugs.
But one time when I was one tile north (IIRC) of the exit to a building, an NPC appeared on the exit and just stood there, blocking it forever (see screenshot)

Does "No command" in battle just do a random action?

So to leave the wilderness you have to use the Return item? Well, good thing you explained that. It's kind of frightening to be stuck in an infinite wilderness!

When you run, the caterpillar party gets stretched out. If that's not what you wanted, there's a Preference Bitset to stop that, "Keep caterpillar length the same when speed changes"
For that matter, how long have you been working on this game? That's just one of several things suggesting an old .rpg file.

Gosh, I really need to make the walking animation speed customisable...
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TMC
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Post by TMC »

Wow, there's some really cool stuff being posted here. And by my count there are 19 people entering the contest, some of them with multiple games! Based on what I've seen, I'd predict that a high proportion of people will actually turn something in by the end.

It's kind of unfortunate that the Discord server is so active, because people are posting heaps of updates about their games there, and not much here.

Now, errr... I'm already a week overdue of my self-imposed deadline for the first HeartBugs feature requests, and haven't finished any yet. Sorry :(. I do expect to do them all soon though (except for Spoonweaver's, since that's so open ended). I've been working on the OHR lately, but always going off on a tangent. Also I realised I also need to be accountable for requests I said I was doing soon anyway. So that makes fixing joysticks my first priority.

I'm still taking bugs/feature requests, until the end of the year. (Unless you don't submit a game!) But if you don't make a request soonish, I won't set myself a deadline before the end of the contest!

The following people haven't made requests yet:
TheLordThyGod
kylekrack
Baconlabs
Foxley
Mammothstuds
Gaplan
Morpheus­Kitami
dantedynamite
Idontknow
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The Wobbler
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Post by The Wobbler »

TMC wrote:It's kind of unfortunate that the Discord server is so active, because people are posting heaps of updates about their games there, and not much here.
Seconding this, I like to see people's updates but Discord isn't for me. Post them here too dudes!
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Post by Feenicks »

Oh, yeah, actually putting stuff here would be useful, wouldn't it?
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character generation [I've had this for a while, actually, but it's only recently it's looked decent]
character generation [I've had this for a while, actually, but it's only recently it's looked decent]
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Post by Foxley »

Oh yeah. My request is being able to import individual tiles as a 20x20 BMP, if possible. That way if I want to use an external program like Aseprite I won't have to export the whole tileset from Custom, manually paste tiles into it in Aseprite, then reimport. Aseprite has a great tiling preview feature, but it's useless when enabled for a whole 320x200 set.
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Post by TMC »

Sure.

The "Don't care" gender option picks randomly? I don't remember ever seeing such an option before.
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Post by Baconlabs »

TMC wrote:The following people haven't made requests yet:
Baconlabs
Oh, I thought I had. Well, I'll lay it out in specific terms, just to be clear.
I'd like to request full control over the volume and balancing of sound effects via plotscripting.
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Post by kylekrack »

I finally have the NPC behavior at the basic level I want it to be. It's not bugfree, but for the most part, I don't think it can break in any severe way. I'll have to test more, of course, but I haven't encountered anything huge yet. It's hard to see exactly how it's any different than it was before, but I promise it is. First of all, NPCs all are assigned different jobs that have different tasks. Each job only has one unique task right now, but I can easily add more without changing any of the existing scripts. That means each NPC has unique behaviors, giving a little bit of diversity to what goes on in town.

For the feature request, I'll do: script commands to alter shop item stocks.
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Post by Nathan Karr »

Productivity is like a coconut gun. It fires in spurts.
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TMC
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Post by TMC »

Ah yes, my bad, we were discussing sound effect volume/balancing.
Script commands for shop stocks is fine too. I am starting to see a pattern here - that makes fives requests to do with items, equip and shops.

NPC unique jobs split into different tasks? Nice, just what you'd hope is really going on. But it might be kind of hard to indicate what an NPC is doing by just having them walk around, without any actual interactions with the environment shown. But that's more work...
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Post by kylekrack »

You're right, currently it's impossible to tell what they're actually doing. Partly because they aren't actually doing anything. What they WILL be doing is "cooking," "forging," "farming," etc. That will show on the resources tab: when an NPC is done with a job-based task (some tasks are not job-based, like loitering), it will convert resources, eg. after cooking, the butcher converts "Meat" into "Food". Since you don't always witness NPCs doing the tasks, though, I'll try to make it clear what they're doing by adding maptiles and possibly sprite animations. The butcher will move to an oven with raw meat next to it and begin walking in place. When he's done, the town will have more food. Hopefully details like that will be enough to show what's going on.

I know that's a lot of work, but it's been planned since the beginning. The hardest part is going to be determining when NPCs have the resources to convert. If there's no food but a lot of meat, the butcher should go cook some food, rather than go hang out at the inn. That's a little complicated to manage for every job. But, that's AI for ya. I've got the meat of the work done, now, so I'm not too worried. My one worry is showing crops grow... still working on the logistics of that.
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