Castle Paradox

[The Drizzle]

So I was just looking at the OHR development timeline on hamsterrepublic and I realized how long I've been working with this engine(and how little I have to show for it). Check it out here if you haven't and you're interested. Anyway, just out of curiosity, I wanted to run an informal poll to get an idea of how long everyone's been using the engine. You can also talk about your first game, what you learned, whatever else you want to talk about that's unrelated to this conversation. Go nuts. I just want to reminisce a little.

I don't know if anyone's interested in it but whatever....

I started using it in late 1998 or early 1999. I can't put a finger on it, but it's definitely in that area, since I remember making a couple of Star Wars Episode 1 fan games before the movie came out. Then the movie came out and I was ashamed to have even made them. I redesigned one game shortly thereafter so that every enemy you killed looked like Jar Jar Binks. That was fun for a while but I never released anything to this day (that I can remember).

The first game I did was sort of a Smash Brothers type of RPG, with all the characters from every popular video game I could think of. It had really bad graphics compared to what I can do now and absolutely no regard for battle balance or fun. When I first started designing games, things like "Extra hits" and "Extra damage" seemed like a good idea, and having really high stats seemed to make sense. I've learned a lot since then. Anyway, after a while, I took a little break from game making (as I need to do from time to time) but kept up with the community to see what was going on.

I started getting better with graphics (not good, but better) and began making a game I actually took seriously. In fact, I took it so seriously, I simultaneously started designing a sequel before I'd even finished a demo of the first. The games were called Eternal Epic and Eternal Epic 2. Basically along the lines of a Final Fantasy type of game (perhaps obvious from the title). The graphics of EE2 were rounding out to be better than EE1 so I scrapped that one and just focused on EE2.

A little before that I'd started to actually talk in the community a little under various user names (eventually settling on Optimus) and found out about a company called Red Murdock. I saw how much work they were able to get done by focusing on the things they were good at and helping each other with their games so I decided that I'd make my own company and make it kind of a game maker guild, where we'd have one main project that was the product of everyone's ideas and everyone could help with each other's games. That was called Black Sun Productions. It worked well at first, then participation started to dwindle and it fizzled out. We were working on a project called Eternal Epic (which was actually completely unrelated to the original Eternal Epic but I wanted to keep Eternal Epic 2's name for some reason so we titled it that). My experience working with those people was pretty good and I feel like it helped out a lot.

But the best thing that came of that company was the reviews that were written. You see, I also conceived that the site would work as a review site, sort of a rival to RPG Online. So I started writing reviews and playing A LOT of games. And in general the response to the reviews was good. Some people didn't like it when I would give their game a bad review but I called em like I saw em. Other members started doing reviews too and in general the response to the reviews was good. The response to me hosting games without asking was not as well received and I eventually opted to shut the site down since I was getting flamed every day for probably two weeks. Lesson learned. A while later I got flamed big time when I got into a politically charged discussion and eventually left the community for a few of months.

When I got back into it, I changed my name and just started from scratch. The Zantetsuken boards only lasted a couple more months and the community seemed to be in limbo for a while so I lost momentum too. The times of the Zantetsuken board really were the most productive times for the engine (in my opinion).

I came back around 2003 and was participating in the community but not making games. In 2004 or so that urge reawakened and I started again, but this time I wanted it to be great. I held the game to such high standards but had so little planning that I couldn't get it off the ground. I started again in 2005 and swore I would release a demo in 6 months and even planned some things, but again, I didn't plan enough so that fizzled yet AGAIN.

So now I'm back in it, mostly in the planning phase. And I vow this time to make the planning phase last as long as it has to and not to get ahead of myself so that I stall yet another time. At least every new feature the engine adds inspires me to work, which is great. James Paige is my hero.

Some things I remember that I want to share:
-Moogle1's Mystic Sky was so innovative I wanted to wet my pants. For those who weren't here that far back, it always seemed to me that Moogle1 was pushing the limits of what the editor could do.
-Memoria was just an awesome game. It was doing plotscripting before plotscripting existed.
-Ends of the Earth was a completed game that actually felt complete. That game gave me hope that I could finish a long game. Hasn't happened yet but I'm hoping it does some day.
-Chenzi gave me a lot of crap for giving a bad review to his game Bahamut's Breath. If I remember correctly, the score was in the high-70's or low-80's out of 100. Seemed like an overreaction to me.
-Evil Dead was HARD.
-There were way to many unreleased games on the Top 30.
-Fantasy Under a Blue Moon X was an awesome game with a weird title.
-I definitely didn't appreciate Monterey Penguin as much as I should have.
-Sheep Rancher was the first game that made me realize how powerful plotscripting could be.
-Not sure how many people have even heard of this game but Siv: The Journey of an Egg was just nuts. It didn't even seem like an OHR game.
-Remember when battlescripting almost happened?
-Remember when HamsterWheel almost happened?
-Countless communities games have been tried and failed. It's a shame because I think the combined effort of all of us could make something good. But someone really has to spearhead the initiative.

Anyone else want to share their OHR experience? You don't have to go as far as I did. Also, just out of curiosity, was anyone here a member of Black Sun Productions?
_________________
My name is...
The shake-zula, the mic rulah, the old schoola, you wanna trip? I'll bring it to yah...

[Ronin Catholic]

I started using this engine on November 24th, 2002, with the Handshake release(which, oddly enough, coincided perfectly with my birthday). I had extremely limited access to the internet, so for about six months I had nothing to learn by besides my own ability to experiment and the sample games(sample.rpg, npc_tag.rpg, and pstutor.rpg, for those of you to join since Vikings of Midgard was added).

I couldn't figure out how to plotscript because all the files relating to it were written in HTML, which my computer couldn't understand at the time.
To this day, plotscripting has been my weakest OHR-related skill(even worse than music composition, sadly).

The first game I played made by another OHR user was Exposing the Unknown. The second was Wandering Hamster. I tried downloading the Sailor Moon RPGs on Hamster Republic's gamelist at the time, because I was a Sailor Moon fan, but they wouldn't work.

I can actually remember looking through Castle Paradox's gamelist and seeing FFH listed as "in production."


My first game was "wolfqest.rpg," which, besides the hero's name, has no connection to the Wolf's Quest series in any way. It consisted of one minimum-sized map, with brick walls going all the way around the edge and B&W tiles filling it up; it also had a tiny chunk of an overworld with two random encounters: a slime that could be killed in one hit, and a monkey that killed you instantly.

My first game with anything resembling substance was called "Starrhao Swordsmen." The hero was a man named Wulf of Bei, whose sprite I reused for the final boss in Wolf's Quest. Having never played any of the Final Fantasy games, I had no idea of what the differences between "weapon graphics" and "attack graphics" were, so I wound up drawing a sword for the attack and a slash mark for the weapon. I also didn't know that the heroes were supposed to be facing left, so I drew them all facing the player. This was the first game to have UniBlocks.

My first completed game was called "Traitugess Saga." It consisted of six maps(one town, the indoors of that town, one castle, two dungeons, and an overworld). The heroes were sprites ripped from Spellshard: the Black Crown of Horgoth. Except I erased the beards and moustaches. The fighter was named NATE, the thief named THF, the cleric named HLR, and the wizard named WIZ. Obviously, NATE was the only one with a distinct personality. In the game's final dungeon, a Pikachu NPC said "This is the final dungeon. Sorry, but Nathan got tired of making a game with stolen graphics." I wish I still had a copy of it somewhere.

I don't remember when I started working on Wolf's Quest, but I do remember that it was the first time I ever tried making a game with outlines on the sprites.
I always wanted feedback on Wolf's Quest, but I was too shy to ask for it.
_________________
"I didn't start the flame war;
I don't know what you thought here
'Twas that way when I got here"

"I didn't start the flame war;
I can't understand a word you're saying
nor the game you're playing~"

[The Drizzle]

[FyreWulff]

Black Sun OHR was the greatest reviews site ever.

I liked it because you didn't coddle anyone at all. It was to the point and very truthful.

[The Drizzle]

[Rya.Reisender]

I don't like strict review rules either. They just make you feel like writing the review is work and no fun. :-/


I got to know the OHRRPGCE during the 4 maps period, however, I haven't used the OHR, nor really stayed in the community at that time (I just exchanged mails with James and Valkayree). The time I really started using the OHR and going to the community was when vehicles were added so I voted for this period.


Also the poll shows we need more new members. ^^'


Edit:

[djfenix]

[Rya.Reisender]

Well there are good and bad sides to games made by multiple persons.

Advantage:
- you can actually get a good game done in less than 3 years
- each member can concentrate only on the aspect he/she is best with and due to the extensive focus on his 'strong point' he/she will get even better in it

Disadvantage:
- you rely on the other members, if someone quits, you're basically screwed (someone else could take over but it'd never be the same, especially when artist, composer or dialogue writer quits)
- you can't claim you're an indy game developer (might be important to get a job or particularly famous)

[Calehay]

[Rya.Reisender]

Personal experience. The composers on my team either disappear after making 1-4 bams or they demanded money for making more. ^^'

Well I know many artists and composers that'd help me for money actually, but I know few (read: no) plotscripters that actually would consider to take money for their plotscripts.


Anyways, what do you think are reasons against teamwork then? Just saying mine aren't good is not fair. :p

[djfenix]

Time's have changed, my friend. There are quite a few composers nowadays (myself included, but ironically enough, music isn't my strong suite). Sew, for example, has work on several OHR games, as has Artemis Bena. I know there are a lot more, but those two come to mind first, really. And their stuff is really high quality.

For the graphics, every good artists knows to draw completely with the OHR palette, so importing is a breeze. Even then, it's easy to simply import graphics into a blank .rpg and make adjustments here and there, so having the actual .rpg file to work on graphics isn't necessary at all. There are quite a bit of graphic artists as well. Graphics are my strong point, and others would be Fenrir (working on Vikings of Midgard, the new "welcome.rpg"), Friend/Orchid-layafette (although he seldom pops on CP anymore), Adrianx, and there are quite a few more.

Dialogue isn't that tough. Write out an entire script on notepad or what not, then just spend a day writing it out on the OHR. It's better this way, anyways, because having it in one txt makes it easier to quickly browse through for a quick proofread, and then rewriting it on the OHR makes it easy to catch any mistakes that were overlooked the first time.

[Moogle1]

[FnrrfYgmSchnish]

First one I used was the old 4-map version--someone gave me a link to the OHRRPGCE from an old AOL Pokémon message board sometime in late 1998.

Never actually got a game made with that one, though--I remember attempting to make some weird Pokémon-based thing (where I asked people from the board what Pokémon would be good characters in an RPG--I think it was going to have something like a Magikarp, a Dratini, and two others I can't remember as playable characters, and it didn't get ANYWHERE before I stopped making it. Not even the hero graphics or anything basic like that.)
Then my computer got seriously screwed up somehow (I don't remember how) and the hard drive got completely wiped out.

Sometime later (probably mid-1999 or so), after we got a new computer, I re-downloaded the OHRRPGCE and I don't think it had the 4-map thing anymore by this point (or maybe it did and I just don't remember), but it still had all those unused bitsets for status effects ("Is Always Hyper" and stuff like that on the hero bitset lists)... if I remember correctly, armor either wasn't put in yet or didn't work for some reason. I attempted to make a game at this point but it never got anywhere.

Then I switched over to RPG Maker 95 for a while, made a crappy game that almost got finished, got tired of RM95 because its fullscreen mode kept doing strange things to my computer's display, and made another attempt at an OHRRPGCE game, which ended up being titled "Supernum and the Eight Orbs of Power." Which actually did not feature Supernum at all, oddly enough. I got the first part of the game done, and was starting on one of the later parts when the power went out in the middle of editing the game and when it came back on, the file was screwed up. And my last backup of the game was from waaaay back when the first part of the game wasn't even halfway done yet, so instead of trying to redo the game I just quit.
I think this is probably the only point in my "OHR history" where I actually played more games than I made. I remember some weird forum-based(?) one named "Veteran RPG" or something like that, which had annoying forest maptiles that were overhead so it was impossible to tell where you were going in forests, and that "OHR Battle" thing where people could send in their characters, and of course Fat Frog (a "free demo" version, which was so awful that it makes the completed version look good.)

Then somewhere around 2000 or so was the first time I was actually in any kind of OHRRPGCE "community," when I was starting on other games and didn't know how to use plotscripting yet (kinda like pretty much everyone else at this point, considering that it was a new addition back then.) I occasionally posted on the "OHRRPGCE Help Me" board with the name Supernum and basically just asked for plotscripting help. I entered one of the 48-hour contests back then and made an incredibly crappy game called Xutt's Tournament, and then eventually got another crappy to a point where it could be called "finished." Never did figure out why the airship kept disappearing, though.

And of course, after that I started about a dozen games that never got anywhere, including the various gamelists that have existed: Staff of Parupoo (a TKL sequel and/or remake of the old Supernum and the Eight Orbs game) and Spuduf Splorchers (a weird little game where most of the equipment--except the weapons and a single armor slot--were replaced with "Spuduf" creatures which you could either equip for stat boosts or use as an item that let you summon them in battle) were the only ones from the 2001--2003 period that actually got anywhere. As far as I know, they no longer exist on the internet.

Somewhere around 2003 I first came here, and didn't post a whole lot. Not much difference from now actually. Entered another 48-hour contest, made Frankfurter's Quest for Soap. Not great, but not nearly as bad as Xutt's Tournament either.

In 2003--2004 I tried to make another game, Fnrrf Ygm Schnish, which failed miserably because I made the mistake of basing almost every character in it on people from my school.

Sometime in either 2004 or 2005 I tried to make a "make a 4-member team chosen from these generic characters" type game, sort of like how Final Fantasy H worked, titled Nherbi. But it didn't get anywhere. Later I tried the same thing but with a Dragonball Z theme to it, and again it didn't get anywhere.

Sometime around 2006 or maybe early 2007 I made another attempt at Fnrrf Ygm Schnish, this time with an actual plot that sorta made some amount of sense. I got most of the "intro" part done before I got tired of working on it.
Also around that time, I started remaking Frankfurter's Quest for Soap. It got about... halfway done? Maybe a little less than half? before I kind of stopped working on it. I might actually got back and finish it someday.

[Rya.Reisender]

[Moogle1]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Independent_game_development