The RoN Problem--How do we solve it???

[Dave Gilbert]

A repeat personality is fine.  The issue was revealing a TRUE identity for the bum.  The general consensus was that it would ruin the character.

[Ozzie]

A repeated personality wouldn't break any rules, of course.
But like I said, it wouldn't be very funny if the bum was a hippie for the fourth time AGAIN.
I would look for something new, and the list of all the roles of the bum could help.

Rui: There are some walkthroughs, that's true, but I think only for a few first ones.
I was glad that "Defender Of RON" had a walkthrough included because I think that this was the hardest game.
Of course, you can say that not many games make much trouble, and that walkthroughs aren't necessary. But I wouldn't consider this very developer-friendly and I think that most people are turned off from RON because they think they would have to play through all these games.
I think I needed 2-3 weeks to play through the most RON games (skipping some surreal "gems").
Walkthroughs would probably help that developers wouldn't feel intimidated of the mass of games. And I think you could at least cut the time to the half down you would need to play through all them.

You could ignore the walkthrough issue, but then you shouldn't wonder that nobody wants to develop a new RON game.
I don't think that this is the only problem, of course.

[Shane 'ProgZmax' Stevens]

A repeat personality is fine.  The issue was revealing a TRUE identity for the bum.  The general consensus was that it would ruin the character.

Like when the aliens came and took him away?

[Renegade Implementor]

Like when the aliens came and took him away?

Yes, and they also returned him.  That's either a case of mistaken identity or the aliens couldn't tolerate him for very long.

As far as I can tell, it seems like most would like to have tags or classifications of:

1. Canon (games that make up an established history of RoN)
2. Essential to newbies (games that best serve to introduce characters and plots to those new to RoN)
3. Non-adventure/misc (puzzle, quiz, arcade, any game that isn't classified as adventure)
4. Substandard (games that people feel are of a lesser quality and should be separated from the rest) - note: this needs, perhaps, a more diplomatic term.

Is this close to what people where thinking?  If it is, then a small group, say 3 or 4, should get be formed with the purpose of going through the existing games and sorting out what should go where.  If anyone is interesting in this part, let me know.

[DeviantGent]

Instead of 'substandard', how about simply 'other'?

[Anym]

Inspired by this thread, I'm currently in the process of playing all of the 75 RON games with 33 still to go. It has definitely become HUGE and strongly disagree with the claim that the majority of the games can be completed in five minutes or so. Expecting somebody to play them all to get a grip of everything is simply ridiculous, especially considering the questionable quality of a good deal of the games.

Rather than integrating RON more closely with the AGS site and forums, I think an effort should be made to try to reach other game making communities. I think most people here are at least remotely aware that RON exists, even if it's just because they wanted to check out the other games from the guy who made the Trilby-/Blackwell-/Ben-Jordan-/Whatever-games, but I guess it's pretty obscure anywhere else. I'm not familiar with other game development communities and I'm not even sure if they exist, but I think it might worth a try. I'm not familiar with Maniac Mansion Mania either, but noticed that they have Visionaire and PaC-DK (something I hadn't even heard about before) templates in addition to an AGS and character sprites in .PNG-format and not just as .CHA-files. The reaching out should probably wait until the issues of the intimidating large amount of games in general and relatively large amount of games with questionable quality have been tackled, though, in order not to immediately scare away anybody who decies to check RON out.

Ideally, making a RON game should increase your potential audience, however, I think the two factors mentioned above (large amount of RON games and obscurity of the RON project) actually conspire to make the potential audience of new RON game smaller than that of a non-RON game, which I guess can be a pretty big issue if your making freeware games for an already limited audience. I know that I didn't play any new RON games for quite a while because I stopped playing them about five years ago, never had the time to catch up and so when a new RON game came out, I thought that I should play all the games that came out in between first, which by that time had grown to an impressive number, which I didn't want to go through all at once and thus I ended up playing a non-RON game instead.

So, I think we need to lower the hurdles for both players and prospecitve game makers and, as has been suggested before, the best way to do that is probably by making the number of games less intimidating. Rather than having a review board or a set of tags, I wonder if a self-regulating system would be feasible. Bascially, each game (or even each character) gains weight for each other game that references it, thus indicating whether a game has been accepted as canon by the game making community or not.

Alternatively, regarding categories or tags, I think they should be:

• essential games (not just for newbies, games that establish the setting and the main characters)
  
• recommended games (not just those important for the canon, but all good games, that aren't essential)
  
• other games (games you can afford to miss or that you should actively avoid)

Length shouldn't matter. Neither should whether it's an adventure game or not. If an action game in fun or manages to advance character development, let it, if it sucks, ignore it.

Also there should be a suggested playing order within the categories, preferably with optional pointers what game from a "lower" category you could try in between. Bascially, somebody who's new shouldn't have to wonder which game to start with. Currently you can sort the games page ascending by release date, by timeline, by rating or descending by release date. Each giving a different game that probably isn't the perfect starting point. In fact, during replaying all of the games I began toying with the idea of a playing order guide, but I'm far from being done, since I haven't even played them all yet.

Yet another alternative to this (although one that's probably neither realistic nor really thought-through, just one I wanted to bring up) would be something like Reality's version of a Crisis on Infinite Earth (which is what DC comics used to clean up the convoluted continuity in its superhero universe). Basically, a big game (with pretty graphics if you want) that retells (or even reshapes) the "essential" stories in a coherent way, straightening out issues like graphical or geographical inconsistencies or the circumstances of Davy's death, which would then become the central piece of canon from which to start out.

Just my two cents. Sorry, that I seem to be a bit late for the actual discussion, but I was busy playing the games.

Oh, and if you want to start contributing right now, check out http://ron.the-underdogs.info/forum/viewtopic.php?p=3437

[Ozzie]

Like when the aliens came and took him away?

Yes, and they also returned him.  That's either a case of mistaken identity or the aliens couldn't tolerate him for very long.

As far as I can tell, it seems like most would like to have tags or classifications of:

1. Canon (games that make up an established history of RoN)
2. Essential to newbies (games that best serve to introduce characters and plots to those new to RoN)
3. Non-adventure/misc (puzzle, quiz, arcade, any game that isn't classified as adventure)
4. Substandard (games that people feel are of a lesser quality and should be separated from the rest) - note: this needs, perhaps, a more diplomatic term.

Is this close to what people where thinking?  If it is, then a small group, say 3 or 4, should get be formed with the purpose of going through the existing games and sorting out what should go where.  If anyone is interesting in this part, let me know.

The difference between "Canon" and "Essential to Newbies" doesn't seem very big.
The last one seems to have just less games than the first one.
RON may have the problem that you can't play only the five best games. You probably won't have an idea what it is all about.
But I think people who want to have a full grasp of this town should play through the canon. And the ones who want to enjoy only the high points should better play something like the "Recommended Games", like Anym suggested.
These contain, of course, also games, which are fun, but not in any way relevant to the RON history.

Edit: Something like "Crisis on Infinite Earth" would be a very BIG project, so I don't think that there would be anybody interested in making it.
Dylan compiled a nice Timeline and we should see if it is complete enough. I think there are some things, especially in the later games, which got ignored.
However, I think it is enough when we build the future RON games on this one and the city map.

Another thing which I would recommend is a introduction of the important RON characters in your game. This shouldn't be necessarily at the beginning of the game, but as a menu option for the newbies.
I think that's easy to make. You can introduce them on many levels. They could talk to the player in their own manner or appear in a typical scene (like Mika talking to the Chief Editor of The Realiser about an article or Lucca talking to his brother while something starts to scorch in the oven).
This shouldn't be harder than including some character.say and move commands, so it's not a big thing.

I think I will do something like this in my game.

[DeviantGent]

Well, got the ball rolling on the Wiki. Updated the games page with information on Lunchtime of the Damned, and even if I've missed some info (probably have, was just a quick thing) I think I've got a nice idea for a layout.

Come on everyone - let's get cracking on this thing!

Also, Chapter V of my little novella Back to Reality has just been posted. Major kudos to Dylan for his help with this thus far. The first person to guess where I'm going with Julian's story gets a basket of muffins.

[Valentijn]

Hi all,

I'm Valentijn, the guy behind 'Defender of Ron'. It's the only game I ever made and I've been quiet ever since. But I've been lurking on the RON forum ever since, and read about this discussion going on here.

It's really great already that people are thinking about how to revitalize RON! (Personally I'm also really happy to read several people mentioning my game as one of the better ones!!)

I've always loved the whole idea behind RON and in fact I do intend to get back to it one time. I have many ideas for an epic game called 'Lord of the RON' (now what could that be about?). While never actually getting around to start on it, I also sadly noticed the RON-world dying out. I enjoyed the occasional small game but in my opinion, the last really really good game (one of the best even) was III Spy, released in September 2003.
From about a year up until that point and still around the same time the RON site got massively overflooded with very meagre games. I think the-one-person-nobody-actually-mentions-not-to-be-offensive-while-everbody-knows-who-we-mean-anyway sort of killed RON by releasing an overload of games under the pretentious banner of them being 'surrealistic', while those games were -in my humble opinion- really nothing but heaps of pointless empty childish digital manure, quite possibly mainly flawed because of a lack of beta-testing. And also because of a lack of standards.

I recall that whenever somebody raised an argument about quality standards back then, they instantly got the argument back that RON was RON because it was so liberal and it had to have as little standards as possible. That whole idea always put me off a little. And the world got inaccessible indeed exactly because of it.
Personally I have issues with the 'no killing established characters' rule as well: if you could do that you could make games more surprising and thrilling, while you can also use the death of one character to develop another character, but I do understand what made people set this rule and I can see how out of hand things can go without it.
Although, problems are easily fixed if some sort of quality committee is formed. One might put question marks to the justification of who such a committee's members would be, but why not get some sort of election together? It may be necessary. If the presentation of the RON games gets a revamp, it may benefit from people in charge.

And I do think a revamp of the site is a great idea. Getting different categories together and putting the trash out seems to be exactly the thing to be done.

I think categories should be:
-essentials: canon games, games that develop major characters and games considered by many to be the best of the series (Dave Gilbert's games, Creed Malay's games etc)
-quality stand alone games: games which don't do anything for the timeline or major characters but still are of high quality (maybe Grundislav's excellent 'the Chef'?)
-non-adventure games (which could even be removed as far as I'm concerned...)
-collectors only
(Sorting games simply on length won't work. You can have crap long games as well as magnificent short games. A quality division is needed above anything.)

...and of course, there you'll easily get to the questions of who decides what's good. This can be solved easily by getting a good working voting system together, although I'm all up for combining it with giving a group of people some authority. Those people should also check any upcoming RON games to see which category they'll fall under, and perhaps also to check if they can be accepted at all in the series.
Why the latter? Because there have been games like the original 'Intergalactic Life'. It's a text parser game made with poor grasp on the English language, I think it wasn't beta-tested, and many people said it was hardly playable when it came out. But the creator thought of it as being finished and the non-existant acceptance bar made it possible for the game to be incorporated in the RON game list. This is exactly what you shouldn't to if you want to keep the series accessible.

So apart from the re-categorization of games, and having the RON-world governed, I think there should be a reconsideration of rules. The liberal idea of allowing anything that has something to do with RON as long as it doesn't kill of established characters and it doesn't reveal the bum's identity... it simply doesn't work. More rules are needed.

My two cents at the moment. Thanks to everybody again for thinking about it; keeping RON alive is a noble goal! I'll keep following this discussion!

[Dave Gilbert]

It's Templeton Tijn himself! 

I do agree that the whole "no quality control" thing was a sticky issue in the past, but it was something we were willing to deal with because there were still decent games coming out once in a while.  Things have obviously changed since then, and it's painfully obvious that the old ways of doing things no longer work.

The "no killing established characters" rule should stay, however.  Even with a panel or committee, it opens up a large can of worms that would cause more strife than it's worth. 

I'm curious how the newbies of the group discovered RoN, as there hasn't been much of an effort to call attention to it. 

[Ozzie]

I'm curious how the newbies of the group discovered RoN, as there hasn't been much of an effort to call attention to it. 

Well, you're right, there wasn't much, but as you mentioned before, there was an Adventuregamers article. This brought me to RON.
I think though that, earlier or later, I would have found it through this forum.

[LUniqueDan]

+++ An humble n00bie view +++

There's a series of games called 'ROM', 'RON' or whatever.
- Some of the first features 'who sounds sooo important' can't run easily on XP.
- One of the main character is as alive that the Heisenberg's cat.
- The plot are like a sitcom, like The Simpsons. But most of the times, they were yellow, or pink, not to mention 3D, 2D or with no graphic at all.

Are you're really trying attracting new blood with that?
RON games are interesting when you followed it live.
Even with a serious klean-up, starting to built a new RON game is like

(Restricted 18+)

Spoiler

having oral sex with an unshaved whore, after she got some gang bang fun with the US congress

[close]

It's not anyone fault. You just forgot to set proper rules at day 1.

If You really wanna save RON :
Create a new template :
Including : the 5-7 mains characters.
Including : 1 set of all the important townsquare backgrounds. Already linked. Forbidden to modification.
(If people wanna add details they'll use 'object'). Dot.
Too bad if they wanted a 16 frames animation for the chef. It's a Ron game. Dot.

And for god sake erase the timeline and just do a Read-me with 15 characters names followed by max. 2 rules each:

Mr Burns
- Power Plant owner, boss of Homer.
- Must be greedy and rich.
- Can't have physical strength at all.

If you can't make such synthesis because you are afraid of losing too much, that only means that RON died with is first creators. Do something else.

Oh and have a nice day anyway.

LUnique"I will like, but won't do a RON game"Dan

Spoiler

And F*** You, newbies rules

[close]

[Valentijn]

Thanks for your viewpoints LUniqueDan.

I hadn't thought about the problem that some games won't run on WinXP. Does anybody know how about many games have this problem and which of the 'important'ones they are?

The Davy Jones thing seems to be a huge problem indeed, in terms of making the series inaccessible.

RON and the Simpsons/Springfield have always been similar in idea. They make for a good comparison. Are you trying to say that while the Simpsons are always consistent in art and design, RON's art varies between awful and alright? I could see that point. I can also see your points regarding narrowing the 'important' contents of RON down to a handful of characters, similar art and to ditch the complex timeline.
Those measures still seem a little too extreme for me.


I think the steps that should be taken in order to resurrect RON are these:

1. Make RON accessible.
2. Attract attention.
3. Govern RON so it won't fall back to its comatose state.

The remainder of this post I will focus on point 1, so not to become as complex as the RON timeline.

Besides my large post above I recently posted another long post on the RON forum with my ideas and viewpoints (http://ron.the-underdogs.info/forum/viewtopic.php?p=3501#3501). I'll now try to get my main points through here along the lines of these steps.
I may also repeat some of what I said in my above post but I think it bears repeating within this organised scheme.


1. Make RON accessible

Problems:
-too many characters
-too much difference in quality of the many different games on the game pages
-too much difference in styles of the many different games on the game pages
-too much difference in graphics of the many different games on the game pages
-too complex timeline
-Davy Jones is dead and alive and both and neither

Solutions:
Filter the games. Get a list of main games. Get rid of games that won't really appeal to anybody. Separate specific categories. Narrow it down to a list of main, essential games that draw attention and make people want to make their own game.
The timeline is important. I suspect most people love continuity and getting things to fit within the frame. It's what keeps it all together. But while respecting the timeline, don't take it as a basis for getting an 'essential' game list: take into account that nobody would make anyone who has never seen Star Wars watch the Phantom Menace first in order to get into the movies (I mean, everybody would still start out with A New Hope right?).

I wouldn't have thought that Davy Jones' death would present such a problem. There's one really vague game with a unique style wherein he dies (Davy Jones C'est Mort). There's a non-interactive thing which tries to make more sense of it than the notice of Davy being sexually molested to death by a man in a cow suit (the Universal Equaliser). And there's a -quite nice (in my opinion)- game which brings Davy back in a very clear way (Davy Jones Is Back). I don't think it should be so hard to follow but apparently people have issues with the series, perhaps because of the controversial first game (featuring a rather disturbing rape scene)?
My solution would be: separate these games and put them into a subfolder, giving an explanation of the history of the games next to it.

So how should the games be separated? There should be an essentials list with the best of the best. HOW to compile this list should be collective thoughts for later, I would first like to know if others agree with my ideas or not.
Similar to the essentials list, there should be another page with 'the good stuff', featuring all games which are just nice to play but you wouldn't miss out on too much (save for the occasional odd character development) if you'd decide to skip them.
Then there is a bulk of games that are considered to be of lesser quality. All should be heaped in another folder: collectors only.
An obvious way to decide which games go where is to make a rating system or voting system, or maybe go by their current ratings on the RON page although those may be not too reliable (says the guy whose game ranks on the third spot...) Food for later!

Please get rid of the arcade games and the quizzes. They don't contribute anything to the series other than making it a haphazard inaccessible mess. A quiz can be made in HTML. Who would care to download an AGS quiz featuring five questions that you either know if you played the relevant game or don't know if you didn't? What's the point of having a paratroopers game supposedly connected to RON because it's said to be one of the characters' dream?!

Demos should be removed. You see a demo, the first thing it tells you is that it's not finished. That equals inaccessibility, especially since the real games of the couple of demos featured were never finished.

The text parser games could go under another folder: 'non-AGS' games. But it should then be a subfolder of the 'collectors only' folder as that is what they would have been anyway.

My ideal RON game page would be:
(based on some sort of rating system)
-essentials
-good stuff
-collectors only / optionally with subfolders for Non-AGS, Non-Adventure, Das Tobi-as' games
-the Davy Jones debacle (<= possibly a subfolder of any of the above, maybe even within essentials!)

You may notice I'd like to separate the 'Tobi-as' games. This is partly because of subjective, personal dislike of his games but also because I think the unique style, pretentious 'surrealism' (is it, really?), crude graphics, nonsensical puzzles, poor dialogue and most of all lack of critical beta-testing makes these games very inaccessible, and the large amount of DT-games is, at least in my humble personal opinon, one huge factor of the overall RON-inaccessibility. I may be a bit too harsh on the poor guy, I wouldn't like to offend him personally or incite a nasty argument here or a personal attack or anything - I really don't blame him, the lack of rules and (acceptance) standards are what 'killed' RON and it simply had to happen.
My point is that these games are so 'unique' that they shouldn't clog up any of the main folders but get their own space. They probably have their target audience and fans, somewhere. This is just how I feel, I'd be interested in other opinions.

Speaking of other opinions, I'd love to hear what people think of the points I made above.
Do people agree that my 'three steps' are the issues needed to be adressed to save RON?
If so, let's first discuss the accessiblity issue. Do people agree with my folder division idea? If not, please tell me why and share your own ideas; what would make up an accessible RON game list in your opinion and why?
Who is going to take control of the situation? Renegade Implementor, you are the guy behind the RON site, right? How do you feel about revamping the website?

Keep the discussion alive, we might save a town!
Thank you all for thinking!

[Radiant]

In my opinion... since there was already a suggested split between "must play" games and "optional other" games to improve accessibility... throw that C'est Mort game out of canon. Throw it out of the FAQ. Don't mention it at all in any of the places that new users are expected to look first. Regardless of what oldbies think of the game, regardless of what explanation you put to it, just don't mention it there, and put it in the archives somewhere. I'm tempted to quote Steve Ballmer here.

Why? Because for a wide variety of reasons, it is extremely succesful in chasing people away from contributing to RON.

[Rui 'Trovatore' Pires]

So, should we throw away all the other games that involve Davey's death? That includes "Defender of RON", one of the best games in the series.

It's been done, and it's affected the following games. There's no point in shirking out of that.

[Nostradamus]

All early RON games can run on XP if you run them under win95 Compatibility mode (right click--> properties on the .exe).

[Dave Gilbert]

RoN managed to tick along quite fine for two years after the Davy death thing.  That's certainly not the problem.  Several other games used it in their plotlines (or as a joke), so erasing it from existence wouldn't magically revive the series.

The "just make more RoN games, people!" argument does make the most sense, although there should be some effort to call attention to it.  And once people ARE paying attention, there should be something worth looking at.  I do agree that the website is a little inaccessible now with the huge quantity of games, and no idea where to begin (or avoid the - ahem - games of dubvious quality).  I don't see the point of a wiki, since that all can be handled on the RoN site itself.

[Radiant]

So, should we throw away all the other games that involve Davey's death? That includes "Defender of RON", one of the best games in the series.

Obviously not. My point is that it's a horrible first impression. Nothing should be thrown away at all (and note that I didn't suggest that either). You should simply stop advertising it in five or six obvious places. At the moment, you're effectively marketing RON as "that series where the protagonist got raped to death by a cow, which caused a lot of strife in the community, then resurrected which caused yet more strife". Simply move the focus somewhere else.

[Dave Gilbert]

The Davy thing is mentioned on the FAQ because people would naturally ask about what happened. I'd hardly say that it's the focus of the site or mentioned in a number of places.  It was a regrettable incident, but it's something that's part of RoN now and steps were taken to make sure it didn't happen again.

[Radiant]

Well, therein lies the problem, Dave. You would like people to become more interested in RON, but you are essentially unwilling to make minor changes to the site that would help them to catch and keep interest.