One Room, One Week Competition 2 - WINNERS ANNOUNCED

[pcj]

Yeah, I think that was a bit off, too.

[Fuzzpilz]

No puzzles, no. I can't imagine why anybody voted for it, let alone the plurality. Same goes for the music - unless you count writing the synth I used, which you shouldn't, it took pretty much exactly as long to make as it takes to listen to, which makes sense considering it's just me basically hitting a virtual pot with a virtual wooden spoon at random for two minutes. I thought GQ was the obvious winner for music... there must be some sort of curse on Ghormak.

The writing is really all there is to it. It's not that good either, but I guess if people liked it I can't complain.

[bluber]

Strange result.  I think Kong Over Baghdad is total underrated in my opinion. Best Puzzles winner result is also a little unexpected.  I have to say a lot of great games in this, even some of them look so good that it I doubt that they are made in only one week. 

[Rui 'Trovatore' Pires]

I was one of the ones who voted Baloonface for puzzles, so I thought I might as well say why - I read "puzzles" as "gameplay", which is the closest. I think the quality of the puzzles largely define the gameplay experience. Balloonface had two puzzles - a dialog puzzle, and a "figure out how to move and where to go" puzzle. No, they are not the best puzzles I've ever seen by themselves, but in the context of the game I found them great. I don't know why, either, I guess I'm wacky - but there must be other people out there who agree, looking at the results.

Maybe it's not so much a matter of "people not knowing how to vote" as "people not being able to vote for what they really wanted and so make do", hmm?

[Privateer Puddin']

IMO Gladiator Quest deserved scripting, music and probably art, even if it was too hard.

The difficulty pretty much emulated the old games as well as the graphics and music did, hard going on brutally impossible. I kinda liked that though, it was the same feeling of getting past a difficult puzzle, when you beat a champion it felt totally worth it. The presentation was great too, the whole cracked warez group thing was good. Heard some complaints about the parser too which i think are unjustified.

[Gord10]

Well, congrats to the winners... (OMG I'm the last  )

[Rui 'Trovatore' Pires]

I only have one complaint on Gladiator Quest, but it's one that stoppped me from wanting to play it further - no save slots.

[Privateer Puddin']

I think the patched version with wuss mode had saving.. or if you died it wasn't game over or something.. i didn't mind no saving, after all when i was young i didn't know how to save in mi2

[edmundito]

Well, that was fun!

I think the voting system for future OROWs should be more like a poll, rating the games from most favorite to least favorite... instead of giving them an actual judgemental score. Or perhaps that should be another category. at times I found myself voting for it as the quality of the game, not which one I liked best. Maybe some people did the opposite of what I did.

[Pumaman]

Good work to everyone who made games, great stuff

Some of them, like Gladiator Quest, I really couldn't believe had been made in a week... you guys' productivity is quite amazing!

And finally, my guesses about who had made each game proved to be completely and utterly wrong, so none of you are as predictable as I thought

[Helm]

Congratulations to the winners from me too.

I'd like to point out that Gladiator Quest was not made by myself only, it was made by Ghormak and I. I know the orow games are supposed to be single person efforts with the help of one person allowed, but GQ was very much an evenly shared creation, myself doing most of the designing, the writing, the puzzles and the art, and gore doing the scripting the implementing of the puzzles and the SID music. Which I guess explains a little what CJ is talking about: it's the product of long hours work by two people for a week, not one.

a few words on some of the games:

Anna - One of the best AGS games I've played so far, I was completely sold on the premise, enjoyed the subtle effects like the 'layer' walking and the grayscale, the writing was very good and all that. Good pacing, the dialogue, although heavy, was on a topic I enjoyed and it delt with it pleasingly, if not a bit predictably towards the end. This is exactly the sort of game the AGS scene can release, but very difficultly would ever be in a commerical context ( unless it were IF ). Congratulations, Vince. I loved it, and hope you make more. Only complaint would be that, as smart the puzzles were, it was very apparent that they were 'puzzles' puzzles, which sorta killed the suspension of disbelief. On the one hand, they made up for it by being smart ( the 'not completely solvable' text puzzle was brilliant ) but on the other hand, they did seem more artificial than would be allowed ( towers of hanoi, mostly). But it was I bet a lot of scripting, and maybe the complaint is with the genre and not your game particularily. Thank you for making this and giving it to us.

Alone in the Night: Nice graphics, and probably the best rotoscoped main character I've seen in a graphical adventure of the kind ever, bar none. Good work on that. I was dissapointed when the game turned a bit silly, with the ghost, the picking up of burning logs and the breaking of the fourth wall : "It's an adventure game! LOL!", "This would never work in real life!" thing. It got a bit generic on the puzzle end, really. But the presentation was solid, and being the first game to play for most people on this orow compo, it set the bar high on terms on graphical quality.

Dance 'Til You Drop had a main problem for me. Although it's well made (I'd do without the gradient dithering on the walls, though) and it shows there's much care and effort that has went into all aspects of it's making, it's too straight (to make a bad pun). Meaning, it's a honest-to-god day-in-the-life-of Richard Simmons, and this premise, regardless of how well it's executed, will never be one of my favourites. However, I played through a significant portion of it, and when I voted for it, I voted on the objective work that had gone into it. Perhaps I would expect less dancing and more hilariousness, but each to his own.

Sheet could have made a great game if the author had more time, I guess. It looked neat and the premise was fresh. I dug the expression on the pen. I urge the author to extend this into a more fleshed out game.

[Kweepa]

My thoughts:

Alone in the Night:
Like Helm, I liked the animation. Nicely bluescreened - I don't think you could really describe it as rotoscoped as that means tracing animation frames from video frames. It did seem like the game was just tacked on to showcase the main character though.
[I didn't have a guess for the author.]

Anna:
Great scripting and a fantastic visual style. I thought the philosophical dialog was rather weak, and forcing the pacing (no text skip) very cruel. I liked the twist at the end.
[I guessed Helm.]

Another:
Nice interface, but too short to get into.
[I guessed AJA.]

Baghdad:
Made me laugh, but didn't seem like a lot of effort was put into it.
[I guessed Grundy.]

Balloon Face:
I thought it was highly entertaining. I played through it twice. Obviously it wasn't much of a "game" but it was a great experience.
[I guessed DG MacPhee.]

Dance Til You Drop:
Great concept and beautifully crafted but a rather loose plot and the safe puzzle is internally logically impossible to solve. I think I enjoyed it more NOT knowing who Richard Simmons is. I imagined the character Don 'No Soul' Simmons from Amazon Women on the Moon.
[I guessed Gilbot (because of the graphics) - but it seemed too American.]

Gladiator Quest:
Awesome presentation, down to the readme, "hacked by", music, etc. I couldn't be bothered with the combat though.

Hiyah:
Clearly made by an excellent artist. Seemed very rushed through.
[I guessed Vince12.]

In Limbo:
Not really a game, more a failed experiment for a novel inventory system

I Think:
Great music and eerie sound, plus some freaky speech made up for some rough graphics. The game ended before it got started.
[I didn't have a guess.]

Sammy Sperm:
Certainly a memorable game. The punchline was pretty good, reminiscent of Woody Allen's old ...Sex... film. The music seemed particularly unfitting.
[I guessed SSH, mostly because of who was doing the voice acting.]

Sheet:
An interesting concept, but hard to see where it could be taken.
[I guessed Hellomoto.]

The Find:
I liked the setting, the graphics and the music. I thought this game showed a lot of potential for expansion into a larger game.
[I guessed Chicky.]

Overall, I enjoyed the variety of the games, but I was disappointed that puzzles took a back seat this time around.

[edmundito]

Baghdad:
Made me laugh, but didn't seem like a lot of effort was put into it.
[I guessed Grundy.]

Sammy Sperm:
Certainly a memorable game. The punchline was pretty good, reminiscent of Woody Allen's old ...Sex... film. The music seemed particularly unfitting.
[I guessed SSH, mostly because of who was doing the voice acting.]

That's interesting because one of the many reasons I guessed sammy sperm was Grundislav was because of the voice acting. I knew that if AGA and Ghormak and Grundislav himself were involved, then it had to be the Grundislav game.

As for Baghdad, I must admit that I didn't work on it as much as I wanted. It did take me a long time to make that background, which is not a real picture but instead it's a photoshop, BY THE WAY, but then I ran into the problem where I didn't have enough pieces to build the full characters, so at the last minute I just used Roger's body to get it done.

I also wanted to use a different method for moving and flying, which I had to throw out because I realized that it was just not going to work on AGS if I wanted to use the mouse.

Though if anyone has suggestions for the stand-alone release of Baghdad, send me a message! I'm open to some ideas but nothing that will take it further than one room, cuz you know... I gotta work on other stuff.

[Gord10]

I Think:
Great music and eerie sound, plus some freaky speech made up for some rough graphics. The game ended before it got started.
[I didn't have a guess.]

Well, I thought people would like the game  :'( Guess I shouldn't release the game apartly.

[Traveler]

I found 'Balloonface' the most entertaining game of all; granted, graphics, music and puzzles were behind other games, but as a whole, I enjoyed it the most, mainly because of the entire surreal situation and the wacky dialogue.

I liked 'Dance till you drop' a lot, mostly because of its atmosphere; the music is great, just as the graphics. I didn't mind that the game was linear (it's a short game, after all), but the UI was a bit on the rough side (very small controls made it somewhat hard to work with the inventory, etc.)

One particular thing annoyed me: the safe bug with the impossible date of birth. I didn't know that Richard Simmons is a real person, so I never realized that I could've searched for the date, so I tried figuring it out, but couldn't. This took most of the enjoyment out of the game. 

The other game I loved at first was the Gladiator, but then I didn't finish it: I already talked to the characters in the cell, but then I had to leave and there was no save. After getting home, I just couldn't get myself to start all over again. I think omitting save in an adventure is a huge mistake (no matter that old games worked that way - people didn't like it even then.) I was amused by the whole cracked-game idea, though and loved the way the game started

[AGA]

The voice acting of the narrator was me in Sammy Sperm, in case anyone was wondering. Think Grundislav himself voiced the main character.

[Kweepa]

Well, I thought people would like the gameÃ,  :'( Guess I shouldn't release the game apartly.

I did like what I saw - it was just too short to release as a game. Keep going!

[Gord10]

Thanks Hearing this made me feel better. Yes, you're right about the length of the game. Because I couldn't came up with a good idea until the 5th day of the competition, and I couldn't came up with something good about what would happen to the campers after one of them got lost.
Though I am still not thinking of releasing the game even as including the next rooms and events which makes it a real adventure game...

[bspeers]

I can't remember how I voted now, though I'm surprised Gladiator didn't get more votes.  It had a lot of substance.

As far as balloonface and puzzles, I don't really understand how it could be said to not have any puzzles.  At first, there is no way to progress.  Through interacting with the interface and following the next logical steps, you manage to progress.  Just because you don't use the whistle on the buiscuits doesn't mean it's not a puzzle.  I can't recall who I voted for on music, I wouldn't have voted on Balloonface because of music "quality" or craftsmanship, but on ambient feeling.  It just fit the game pefectly, made the whole thing feel a bit like an avante garde art instalation.  Technical proficiency is important, but these aren't coffee tables, they're games, and that means sometimes style should win over substance.

Not that substance isn't good too

[Rocco]

we should establish a new categorie - experimental art
which fits some games more precisely then the traditionell categories.