Interview With Paul Harrington

Paul Harrington has many names: Bob Surlaw, The Wobbler, That-Guy-Who-Ran-Hamster-Speak. He's well known around the OHR community for his sage advice, critical eye, and bizarre games. I know him best as being the inspiration for starting the Hamster Burrow after Hamster Speak's long run ended. As such, it's pretty great to have him as the first interviewee on the Burrow.

Hit the jump for Paul's thoughts on his latest game, game design, and the origin of flaming yaks.

The 2013 Week Long Random Collaboration Contest

There's still a week to sign up for the 2013 random collaboration contest, held by Spoonweaver. Entrants will be paired randomly with another entrant. They will then be tasked to create a game during the week of April 6-14. There are already quite a few entrants and we'll be waiting with bated breath for the results. Check out this cool contest over on the Slime Salad Forums, and sign up if you haven't already!

EDIT FOR GLORY: The contest has been moved up a week! THERE IS STILL TIME TO SIGN UP gogogo

High Score Challenge: TheSuperAmazingBlueBallGame

(Our current high score is 312, by Willy Elektrix...wow!)

It's time for the first high-score challenge ever! This first round will be a competition in TheSuperAmazingBlueBallGame by foreverblue2. There will be a prize for the winner, but first let's look at the rules:

1. This will be for the All Out mode, so high scores in any other modes will not be accepted.
2. One entry per...entrant. Submit your best score the first time. Never mind, I'm not worried about this anymore.
3. That's it, I think 2 1 rules is enough, don't you?

So here's the deal: submit your score in a comment below. Please tell me the score and include a link to a screenshot. You can take a screenshot by hitting F12 in game. If you need a place to upload it, try Tiny Pic or some other free uploading service. No screenshot, no prize.

Speaking of which, the prize will be a fancy pin/button saying that you won a Hamster Burrow High Score challenge! I will only be sending these to winners of these challenges, so it's pretty special.

The contest will run for a week from today, so it ends March 22nd, 23:59 PST! So get to scoring!

Thanks to Meowskivich from the Slime Salad forums for the idea.

Littlest Game Contest Voting

The Littlest Game Contest has ended, and voting has begun! Vote your favorite game up! The voting will last until the 24th, so that gives you a good chance to play all of the games and give them a fair shake...especially considering how little they are. Vote now!

Free Battle Backdrops from Fenrir-Lunaris

Fenrir Lunaris, pixel artist extraordinaire and famed creator of Vikings of Midgard, has offered up 6 battle backdrops for free use. In his words:

I've collected no less than SIX battle backdrops I've pieced together into one spiffy package for newbies and OHR enthusiasts alike to try out in their own games - all already set with the default OHR palette! Now your worlds can consist of more than just sandsea.bmp!
 

You can download the pack here and hit the jump for a preview of all six backgrounds!

Making a custom combat engine

Today, Adam Perry takes a good hard look at what it takes to make a new combat engine in the OHR. As a bonus, there are many example scripts as well as some darn good advice for anyone working on a project of this magnitude. 

Anyone who's hung around any game design forum for any length of time has inevitably seen someone new drift in with a request that looks like this:

"I want to make custom combat engine that is totally awesome and also brews your coffee for you! How do I do it?"

This is awkward. Usually, no one will answer for a day or so, then some kindly soul will step in and gently suggest that the requester start with a smaller, less ambitious project.

But maybe you're past that hump, and you still have no idea how to move mountains with the power of scripting. In this article, I will give you the answer to that age-old newbie question. Are you ready for this?

The Littlest Game Contest!

I'm a little late to this party, but Adam Perry, AKA Mogri, is hosting a game contest on Slime Salad known as the Littlest Game Contest. The goal of the contest is to create a game within certain limitations, such as a low resolution, single-button input, or only 2 colors. Entrants are awarded points for meeting these limitations, and some creative designers have already met the challenge. But there's still time to enter! The deadline is February 28th, more than enough time to create a little game.

Mr. Perry explains it better than I do, and in great detail, in the announcement thread so check it out!

Heart of the OHR Contest Results - 2012 Edition

Pepsi Ranger organized the Heart of the OHR contest both in 2012 and in 2010. Today, he's announcing the results from the voting period. What follows is a detailed breakdown of every entrant, the votes they received, and the winner of the contest. Also, a bunch of really cool statistics and achievements for each.

From June 1, 2012 to November 30, 2012, the OHR community was once again given the opportunity to relive the days when random battles were accepted and game design was about visiting towns and crawling through dungeons, and then get rewarded for implementing the throwback design into their games. The contest, called Heart of the OHR, had a simple rule: make, add to, or finish a traditional OHRRPG.

This year we had an overwhelming turnout. With three categories to enter, fifteen people rose to the challenge. And meet the challenge they did. One author submitted the first ever “OHR Legends” release, the classic Vikings of Midgard, which has now earned the world’s first Heart of the OHR Legends badge. The condition for earning the “Legends” title is to release a game previously rereleased for a Heart of the OHR contest but with new content. In the “Rereleased” category, three authors released new content to games we’ve played before, with one of those games originally released as an original for the 2010 contest. Thirteen authors (including one who released a release, and the one who released the Legends title) produced new games never before seen in the OHR community for the coveted “Originals” category, and many of them knocked their entries out of the park. With a whopping 17 entries total, these authors’ contributions made the 2012 Heart of the OHR among the best contests in the OHR’s history for turnout (the 2001 48-Hour contest still holds the lead with 19 entries) and one of the best for quality. It was also one of the few contests where nearly every entry was rated generously. The Heart of the OHR 2012’s average contest score was 6.14, which is more than a third of a point above Heart of the OHR 2010’s average of 5.8. With so many great games released in 2010, this seemed like an unbelievable feat. But mission accomplished nonetheless.

However, even with so many high praises given to the games of Heart of the OHR 2012, only two could reign supreme: the one for the original category and the one for the rereleased category. The rest had to fight for second place and beyond.

Here again is the story of that battle for the Heart of the OHR:

Trawling the Forums

In this multi-part series, I'll be digging through the Slime Salad and Castle Paradox forums looking for interesting tutorials and helpful guides. These group discussions are an interesting departure from authored articles showcasing only one viewpoint, but are just as helpful.

Welcome to the first edition of Trawling the Forums! This time, we'll look at three extremely interesting discussion ranging from game balance to graphic design to town planning.

Balance? - Balancing any game is a difficult task, but an RPG can be exponentially more challenging than, say, a platformer. In this thread, quite a few users pitch in as to the best way to balance an RPG, from math and spreadsheets to instinct and practice.

The stuff they don't tell you about making good graphics - shakeyair is one of the most prolific and excellent pixel artists on the Slime Salad forums, so when he tells you how to make good graphics, you should pay attention. You may disagree with his techniques, but the end results are hard to argue with.

Is this backwards? AKA The convoluted town layout solution - This thread starts out with a specific question, but quickly branches out into tips on laying out towns. This is stuff that I'd never explicitly thought about, and brings up some interesting points on the nature and purpose of towns in RPGs.

That's it for now! If you know of any other interesting forum topics that deserve to be highlighted, let me know!

The Seductive Sorcery of the Magikarp

Just like real life, sometimes the best things in games take a lot of hard work before the investment pays off. And just like in real life, sometimes this sucks. In this article, Adam Perry figuratively dissects the Magikarp and the pitfalls of designing one.

Anyone who was introduced to the Pokémon franchise in its first installment will probably remember a man who offers to sell you a MAGIKARP for five hundred Poké-dollars. If you had no outside exposure to the creatures, you might have reasoned (as I did) that anything with "magik" in its name had to have some pretty cool powers.

Meowskivich's Rules of Game Design

Making a game is a lot like playing a game where you get to define the rules. Meowskivich, developer of AR-PUH-GUH, shows us what his rules of design are, and why they're important.

Of all the rules I, as a designer, have, the only rule of mine that has a defined spot is the most important rule of all:

RULE #1 – FUN

This is something that many people don’t seem to understand very well; is the game fun? How do you tell just how fun it is?

This is something that matters greatly as it supersedes all other matters, as even ancient games with poor graphics and mediocre music that are fun are still some of the best games to spend time with.

There are a few subsections to determining fun, and they’re in the form of questions whose purpose I feel appropriate to fulfill.