OHR Podcast

Talk about things that are not making games here. But you should also make games!

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RMZ
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Re: OHR Podcast

Post by RMZ »

Took notes for a week, did a test call to make sure levels were good, and it came out with me a little nervous and then Char came out too quiet, I came out too loud and Fen came out just right. The test we did 2 minutes before was perfect. It was fun and thanks to Spoon for letting us join his party, and special thanks to PJ for the opening jingle!
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polkakitty
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Re: OHR Podcast

Post by polkakitty »

It's good to hear that Spazman is still working on a game, and that it's one that seems to have an original story and some pretty deep lore instead of being derivative of another popular game. For some people, you see that they've posted in threads from years ago, but there's no indication that they're still active, and there's no way to tell whether or not they're ever going to finish the games they were working on, which makes me sad.

For a while, I've felt disappointed that Charbile wasn't going to finish Mystery Dungeon Friends (as far as I could tell.) I'm a huge fan of Slay the Spire and deckbuilding games generally (the big, non-contest OHR game that I'm working on is a card game with similar mechanics,) and while I've seen games that expand on that style of gameplay by having a party of multiple characters with their own card pools (Roguebook and Arcanium come to mind,) they all suffer from the same writing problem as most RPGs that let you choose the characters in your party at any time: the characters each have their own personalities, but each of them essentially exists in a bubble. They interact in terms of game mechanics, and build combos off each other's cards, but even though they have spoken lines throughout the game, none of them so much as address the other party members by name, because the game designers couldn't know which characters you would have in your party with them. That was why I was so excited at the prospect of Charbile making a deckbuilding game with multiple party members that actually interact with each other between battles, because he seriously writes interactions between characters better than most published novelists I've seen.

But the idea of there being a sequel to Hati's Bizarre Adventure.... all I can say is "holy slime, that was not something I was ready for", because I adore Hati's Bizarre Adventure more than you want to know. It's one of about five video games whose soundtrack I listen to when I'm doing other things besides playing the game. It starts with a completely absurd premise, making lewd jokes about the characters, but it also gives them beautifully written personalities that I couldn't help falling in love with, with relatable vulnerabilities and aspirations, and the scenes with Hati visiting Mi'la and Natalie in their rooms, and the ending, have a lot more genuine emotional impact than they would if the rest of the game was played completely straight. More than any other game I've seen, in the OHRRPGCE or otherwise, Hati's Bizarre Adventure is the kind of game that I want to be able to make someday.

(To tell you the truth, I didn't think it would be possible for there to be a direct sequel, after Natalie's creator left the community on the second worst terms on which I've ever seen anyone leave a community. But, if the sequel introduces new characters and focuses on Hati's relationships with them, and if it's left a mystery what really happened to Natalie at the end of the first game, maybe that would be the best thing for the story anyway.)

After listening to episodes 3 and 4 of the podcast, I'm even more confused than I was before about whether Golden-chan is really being made or not, but if it is, I feel like Charbile is the ideal person to make it, because he would actually make it a genuinely good game. He has a history of taking what should be terrible ideas for games, and putting so much care and polish into them that they've ended up as some of the highlights of the OHRRPGCE's library.

(Also, I always thought Charbile's name was supposed to be pronounced /tʃaɹ'biːl/, like "congeal", instead of /'tʃaɹ.baɪl/. Funny what you end up missing, when you only look at text....)

I can't believe Sword of Jade actually ended up on one (or more?) of those old shareware collection CDs! I mean, I should believe it, because as far as I can tell, those CDs were all made by some pitiful little company with about 10 employees, where some intern was told to log into all the BBSes and all the websites he could find that offered free downloads of games and to download everything, and they hastily classified the games into largely meaningless categories like "action", "action-adventure", and "family games", burned them on CDs, and then they went out of business.

It's just that, from what I can tell, Sword of Jade was first released in 2005, and that was about when I stopped seeing any of those shareware collection CDs in shops. (It was also about the height of the BitTorrent versus RIAA wars, and I think that's probably the real reason people stopped making those CDs. It's not so much because the shareware model fell out of favor, or because the games were considered obsolete (collections released in the mid-90s would commonly have games in them that were already 10 years old,) but because that was when people were first starting to realize it was possible for there to be real-life consequences to anything they did on the internet, and they were afraid of being sued. As well they should have been, because every one of those collections that I ever saw had several games in it that were obviously pirated, and were not just shareware demos.)

About games that don't feel like they were made in the OHRRPGCE, I think the genius thing about the engine is that you can create a game without using scripting, with just the built-in features of the editor, and over time, as you learn more about HamsterSpeak (and about programming generally, if you don't come from a programming background,) you can use it to customize more and more aspects of your games, but the built-in features still remain useful, because it's possible to have them work together with custom-scripted systems. Walthros: Renewal and Axe Cop are good examples of this: they use the engine's built-in battle system and its mechanics for walking around maps, talking to NPCs, and displaying dialogue, but they have custom menus with a lot of added functionality, like the bestiary and character profiles, and they have special kinds of character progression where you can customize your characters' equipment (in Walthros: Renewal) or their stat gains every time they level up (in Axe Cop.)

In ZZT and Megazeux games, you can't combine the default game systems with custom ones in the same way, and I think that's because the premade RPG mechanics that the OHRRPGCE provides are more versatile, and can fit into more styles of games, than the game mechanics that ZZT and Megazeux are built around, which are sort of a bizarre combination of a Sokoban game and a Chaos Engine-style top-down run-and-gun game (some people have said it's similar to Robotron, but it isn't, because it lacks the ability to move in one direction while shooting in another.) What this means in practice is that, if you want to make a platformer in Megazeux, you have to script everything that every object does yourself, and you have to ignore all the built-in game elements, because they can't be made to respect gravity or to behave in ways that are conducive to platformer gameplay (there's a built-in moving wall, but you can't make it so that, if the player jumps on it, it will carry the player as it moves. Compare that to the OHRRPGCE, where scripts can query and alter the position and properties of any NPC at any time, even ones that are using the built-in "wander" behaviour.) (If you want to make a platformer in ZZT, the correct approach is to not do that.)

Consequently, ZZT and Megazeux don't really have a stage of game complexity in between "newbie game where you shoot built-in enemies" and "tech showcase where every part of the game has been custom-scripted and no built-in elements are used". And the communities around them, in the early 2000s, reflected that fact: there was little you could do that would elicit more hostility from them than using the engines the way they were designed to be used to make a game, instead of knowing, before you released your first game, all the weird hacks people had figured out over the course of more than a decade to make the engines do things they weren't originally intended to do. (For what it's worth, the few people still using ZZT and Megazeux today, by and large, have grown up, and will be willing to point you to some documentation on how to actually do things in the engines, although it's still an uphill battle to make anything work properly.)

(In hindsight, I guess this all should have been obvious from playing Super Mario RPG, which clearly uses a scripting language that's similar to HamsterSpeak in many ways, not just to handle NPCs, dialogue, and cutscenes, but to implement a different silly minigame in almost every area of the game. You wouldn't see the same degree of variation in gameplay in a platformer, because although platformers can certainly have minigames in them, they have to be coded separately from the main game mechanics. The scripting that's used to implement the main gameplay generally won't be flexible enough to support a different style of gameplay.)

Apparently some people have argued that if we have a demo game that's made to introduce people to the OHRRPGCE, it shouldn't use scripting, but I think it's better to have a demo game that makes limited use of scripting to complement the basic game mechanics that the engine provides instead of replacing them, the way that Vikings of Midgard does. Anyone who plays Vikings will get a good idea of what the engine is designed for, and what kind of gameplay is easiest to create in it, but they'll also see that it's possible to do things that aren't listed as options in ohrrpgce-custom, like having cutscenes with animated effects like explosions and the Bifrost rainbow, or a character like Renard that can learn enemies' moves like a Blue Mage, or a rhythm minigame. And since the scripts for Vikings are available to look at, and have comments that explain how everything works, step by step, that's a great place to start learning about how to use scripts to enhance your game's features.

(Myself, pretty much everything I know about HamsterSpeak, I learned by poking around in the scripts for other people's games to see how they worked. Mostly James' and Charbile's games, because they always leave their games editable, and have well-structured scripts that do interesting things. That's usually the only learning approach that works for me; I tried several times to learn programming using books with names like C For Dummies, that would try to lay out all the key concepts to learn in a logical order, but none of it ever stuck until I started using Linux and getting into the open-source community, and I had the opportunity to look through the source files for actual programs.)

And as a new user gains more expertise with the engine, and with scripting, depending on where their interests take them, they might ultimately end up making RPGs with lots of crazy custom systems, like Walthros: Renewal, or they might make something like Bell of Chaos, that uses scripting to implement a different genre of gameplay, with features like the physics engine that controls the bell, which would be considered unusual even within that genre.
"It was right through those trees; I'm not insane
That's where the fin tried to drag me in
Don't look at me, look at where I'm pointing
Close your eyes, see what I see, Canajoharie..."
-- They Might Be Giants
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charbile
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Re: OHR Podcast

Post by charbile »

i nominate polkakitty for guest spot in next podcast episode

(thanks for those game links, was unaware other people tried the party based deck building. and it would be cool to talk about my games more. i should have threw in the scripts last time if i knew people were still getting something out of it)
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Spoonweaver
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Re: OHR Podcast

Post by Spoonweaver »

charbile wrote: Fri Feb 18, 2022 2:45 am i nominate polkakitty for guest spot in next podcast episode
if they are up for it, I'm cool with it,

in general, to anyone, if you want to be on the show, just reach out
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SwordPlay
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Re: OHR Podcast

Post by SwordPlay »

Spoonweaver wrote: Tue Feb 22, 2022 3:03 am
charbile wrote: Fri Feb 18, 2022 2:45 am i nominate polkakitty for guest spot in next podcast episode
if they are up for it, I'm cool with it,

in general, to anyone, if you want to be on the show, just reach out
i want my own dressing room and full editorial control
"Imagination. Life is your creation."
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Spoonweaver
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Re: OHR Podcast

Post by Spoonweaver »

SwordPlay wrote: Tue Feb 22, 2022 12:39 pm
Spoonweaver wrote: Tue Feb 22, 2022 3:03 am
charbile wrote: Fri Feb 18, 2022 2:45 am i nominate polkakitty for guest spot in next podcast episode
if they are up for it, I'm cool with it,

in general, to anyone, if you want to be on the show, just reach out
i want my own dressing room and full editorial control
editorial control I guess I can provide
not should how I would provide you a dressing room. I guess you can use my bathroom, assuming the dressing room being off set is fine.
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Fenrir-Lunaris
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Re: OHR Podcast

Post by Fenrir-Lunaris »

Swordplay having a voice that ISN'T some kind of Text To Speech device is heresy.
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RMZ
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Re: OHR Podcast

Post by RMZ »

Oh man, was the episode I hosted the season finale? I hope not. I'd sure love some more of the Official OHR Podcast. I'd love to see an episode about Ravan, Holly or Mogri. I know James is already on your list. Hope you get back to it soon Spoon!
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Re: OHR Podcast

Post by Spoonweaver »

I have had a handful of people sort of flake out as far as guests go.
I need to gather up a few people and knock out a few so there isn't a lull in episodes when this happens.
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Re: OHR Podcast

Post by Spoonweaver »

Episode 5, with Holly
https://www.buzzsprout.com/1889431/episodes/10390800


Also: check it out, we're on Spotify
Last edited by Spoonweaver on Sun Apr 10, 2022 1:42 am, edited 1 time in total.
TMC
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Re: OHR Podcast

Post by TMC »

Great to see the podcast continuing, I've really enjoyed all the episodes. Keep it up!
I listened to the earlier episodes and started writing my thoughts on them long ago but inexplicitly didn't finish.
It wasn't until I downloaded them to my phone and listened while doing things that I got through them. It was a bit tricky to find
the podcast but IIRC I found it using the podcastindex.org search option in my podcast app. Also you have a tendency to use "OHR" everywhere and omit "OHRRPGCE". Maybe it's easier to find now.

Whatever happened to the intro jingle used on episode 2? I don't know whether that music actually had any link to an OHR game, but it was nice


1 EonHet1229
Listened while performing perambulatory chores, searching for eggs and feeding the chickens

Interesting, an entertaining guest.
Musings on consciousness (or was it conscience?) sounds like something intersting and recommendable to me! I see no reason to only recommend "games"/projects that are normal games.


2 PJBebi

Listened while cooking dinner and pickling eggs

Interesting again. Thought maybe could have gone a bit deeper into the games rather than superficial stuff like naming and sequence.

It's too bad Spoonweaver didn't know ahead of time PJBebi made Stone Wings to lookup what it was. I would've been keen to hear the story behind the making of such a such, and what was changed in response to those reviews.
It got a fair amount of attention thanks to the Year in Review challenge, including a notable review by Gizmog which generated some discussion.
Drive-by game postings are pretty common, or at least authors that have stopped checking the forums by the time feedback eventually comes in (e.g. Year in Review challenges), which is sad. So it was very nice to hear that you came back a year later and found what had written about the game.


3 Spazman
Listened while baking bread

I think this was a missed opportunity to talk about Spazman's released games when you ran out of Xenophage material to talk about. I seem to recall Doom RPG went through a remake. It had some vision I never understood. John Romero wasn't even mentioned.


4 RMZ, Charbile, Fenrir
Listened while watering and working on water supply, cleaning fishtank, planting tomatoes

This one was a lot of fun! I'm sure Charbile and Fenrir both have endless interesting things they can talk about (as opposed to Cat in Box).
I don't know why Charbile kept going on about oars though.
I hope you get Fenrir and Charbile back and give them more space to talk.
But, Char (and Fyre) always going on about timers as if they're the end-all solution! They're so nasty. It pains me.
The volume levels weren't too badly balanced but rather RMZ was clipped.


5 Holly
Listened while making pumpkin soup

Lots of game talk in this one. Maybe more than all the others. That's good.
I'm surprised and confused why I haven't heard about this Nimbus (dragon) game. Maybe I just don't recognise it and how many different games Holly has switched between? Plot sounds nice.

Regarding lists of top recommended games, yes that's a huge lack. I'm determined to do something about it. In the meantime, I think the best resources are the SS gamelist sorted by ratings (bet you didn't expect that), the OHR Essentials thread and the list of complete games.

You don't have to wonder about Fnrrf and Okédoké and Puckamon. He regularly updates his wiki userpage about his projects. He's been saying forever that he's waiting on us to increase the reserve party size limit before resuming work on Puckamon. It's on the todo list. Apparently also considering an Okédoké remake.

Also, Shizuma (W.Geese) and Harlock (Blackleaf199X) are still around, though I've never heard anything about them planning to continue Dungeonmen. Blackleaf had other projects since, and I think expressed a wish to get back to them when time permits. Also was (at one point) waiting on some graphics/animation features I promised.


---

Yes, I'd like to hear from polkakitty too! (I meant to reply to that writeup).
And there's lots of other people who would make interesting guests too.


charbile wrote: Fri Feb 18, 2022 2:45 ami should have threw in the scripts last time if i knew people were still getting something out of it
People often include their scripts, but they very rarely state that they're happy for other people to reuse them. I wish people would do so. Some people assume that included scripts are there for the taking, others don't (and some people have even complained if you use scripts that are explicitly free to use, but such complaints should be ignored).
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Re: OHR Podcast

Post by Bob the Hamster »

I am delighted that the podcast is up on Spotify now. That makes it so much easier to listen while driving. Now maybe I have a chance of catching up on the whole 5 episode backlog :v:
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Re: OHR Podcast

Post by RMZ »

Holly episode was good. Thought the IDK episode had some good questions about him, but overall the non-IDK stuff felt very mean-spirited. I hope that type of tone doesn't repeat in the next episode.
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Re: OHR Podcast

Post by Spoonweaver »

*
Looks like episode 6 slipped out unedited. I was trying to set it to auto publish in a few weeks, and was going to give it a once over before then, but I guess it published automatically, so I need to go back and look at what i did wrong there.
Looks like a few people got a hold of it without letting me know. It's a shame.
I guess I'll release what I have for it now instead of in a few weeks as was planned.
I was honestly considering either redoing this one or not using it because there wasn't enough content, it was by far the shortest episode. So I spoke with idontknow again and spliced in the new content, the part of the podcast where I splice it in is honestly so seemless it's hard to tell, see if you can hear it!
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Re: OHR Podcast

Post by pjbebi »

TMC wrote: Thu Apr 07, 2022 4:16 pm Whatever happened to the intro jingle used on episode 2? I don't know whether that music actually had any link to an OHR game, but it was nice
That music is the theme from Tough Girl Gina. I thought it might be a good idea to use it, since we'd be talking about that game.
TMC wrote: Thu Apr 07, 2022 4:16 pm
It's too bad Spoonweaver didn't know ahead of time PJBebi made Stone Wings to lookup what it was. I would've been keen to hear the story behind the making of such a such, and what was changed in response to those reviews.
It got a fair amount of attention thanks to the Year in Review challenge, including a notable review by Gizmog which generated some discussion.
Drive-by game postings are pretty common, or at least authors that have stopped checking the forums by the time feedback eventually comes in (e.g. Year in Review challenges), which is sad. So it was very nice to hear that you came back a year later and found what had written about the game.
I love pickled eggs! Also, it's crazy to find even more talk about that game! I've talked about it on my own podcast, but in conversation I could never do the story justice. So here it is.

In March 2013 I got into smoking weed again after giving it up for years, due to being too broke to focus on living from 2007-2013. For the first time ever, I didn't have to worry about finding work, more work, or better work. I still shared a room with my girlfriend in a dilapidated house with alcoholics and drug addicts, but I found that I finally had the space and attention span to sit down and make my game. And I was finally doing it. So exciting! I stayed up till 6am every night making my game. Waking, working, making my game. Forgetting to eat, I lost 30 pounds. The deadline was June, as I was due to fly out west for a music tour from washington to southern california, on which I gave away cd-rs of my game to anyone who bought the soundtrack on cassette. My tour mate played Stone Wings on his laptop, and that was when I first saw that there were bugs I wouldn't have found myself, because I knew how to play it. And then I saw the reviews. So I found myself starting project after unfinished project, hoping for the same weight-losing, life brightening excitement of Stone Wings. It never happened, but eventually in 2020 I finished Tough Girl Gina.

That being said, I need to listen to the new episodes! Sorry for talking about myself so much.
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