OROW 8 (July 1st - July 7th) - Results

[AJA]

Played and voted, finally! That was quite a bunch of OROW games. Great work, everyone!

Mini-reviews coming after the official results!

[cat]

Last reminder! Voting closes at 23:59 (BST) today!

[nihilyst]

I am deeply impressed by the quality of this OROW's games. And all of that done in a week ... wow!

[AGA]

37 votes, and about two and a half hours to go.

[LimpingFish]

I have voted! Very hard to whittle my choices down to just three games in each category, though. I feel a bit guilty for leaving some games out.

[Bulbapuck]

Voted!

Those were some fantastic games, well done everyone ^^

[AGA]

39 votes, one hour left!

[Adeel]

So apparently Bulbapuck got here first

Just voted. Playing them was really a fun

Well Done Everyone.

Well done to me for creating my first game.

Oh and I'll hate you if you did not vote for me! (Just kidding )

Congratulations to cat; of course, for organizing such an event with great success.

Best of Luck to everyone!

[straydogstrut]

Wow, seriously impressive, very distinctive entries from everyone! Congrats to everyone who took part 

[selmiak]

still 25%, not voted, had fun already 

[cat]

Results revealed!

First of all, here is the list of the authors:


Betrayal - Bulbapuck and Mathias Niemand
Draconis! - Radiant and Fizzii
Educating Adventures of Girl and Rabbit - Pablo and qptain Nemo
Fly Paper - Limping Fish
Jack Trekker - Sunny Penguin and Alpy
Kanji Gakusei - cat and raeff
MI - calicoreverie
One Dungeon One Week - Khris
Sinking - WHAM and Ghost
Tattooroom - squame
The Addict - Adeel S. Ahmed and Handsfree
The butler didn't do it - Tzach and Noa
The Crystal Ball - oraxon
The Reaper - ThreeOhFour
The Rebirth - Grundislav


And here are the top 5 of every category:

Best Game

Educating Adventures of Girl and Rabbit - Pablo and qptain Nemo
The Rebirth - Grundislav
The Reaper - ThreeOhFour
MI - calicoreverie
Jack Trekker - Sunny Penguin and Alpy


Best Graphics

The Reaper - ThreeOhFour
The Rebirth - Grundislav
The Crystal Ball - oraxon
Educating Adventures of Girl and Rabbit - Pablo and qptain Nemo
Tattooroom - squame


Best Concept / Writing

Educating Adventures of Girl and Rabbit - Pablo and qptain Nemo
The Rebirth - Grundislav
The Reaper - ThreeOhFour
The Crystal Ball - oraxon
The butler didn't do it - Tzach and Noa


Best Sound / Music Design

MI - calicoreverie
The Rebirth - Grundislav
The Reaper - ThreeOhFour
The butler didn't do it - Tzach and Noa
Kanji Gakusei - cat and raeff


Best Programming / Coding

One Dungeon One Week - Khris
Sinking - WHAM and Ghost
Draconis! - Radiant and Fizzii
Betrayal - Bulbapuck and Mathias Niemand
MI - calicoreverie



All entries where great and I'm happy to confirm that every game got votes in at least two categories, with most games getting votes in every category.
Also people did not blindly vote for the same game but really did consider which game would deserve a win in which category. So thank you all for spending the time to make such thoughtful votes!

I am very impressed with the high quality of games and want to thank all game authors and contributors for their great effort. It's amazing what you have accomplished in just one week.

Finally thanks to AGA for setting up the voting system and announcement and the moderators for supporting this event.


I will write a short review for each game in the next few days.
@Moderators: Please keep this thread open for at least another week so people can write comments on the game or this OROW in general.


All game authors are now encouraged to add their names to the game, maybe improve a bit if they want and then upload it to the AGS database.

[DoorKnobHandle]

What a great success this OROW was! So many excellent games. Thank you for organizing this all, cat! Congratulations to everybody that entered!

Also, I guessed a LOT of game authors correctly (as opposed to the last years where I did REALLY bad haha), the ones I didn't get are people that I haven't noticed much around yet which is even more awesome, to maybe see some fresh blood join the AGS game making ranks!

[qptain Nemo]

                                      

I'd like to take a moment from all the gloating and say... guys who made The Crystal Ball, Jack Trekker and The Tattoo Room, I loved your games to bits. I want to kiss you all right in the face. (creepy, I know, but I co-designed Girl and Rabbit, so don't tell me you didn't see this coming)

Especially The Crystal Ball. It was my personal favourite in every aspect. Hell, the music was so moody and fitting, if only it was original, I'd nominate it for best music too without second thoughts. Oraxon, you have my utmost respect along with interest in your further gamemaking endeavours. Quite saddened by seeing your game not win anything, as in my eyes it was the best.

Also The Rebirth was damn splendid, but Grundislav doing splendid things goes without saying, so I'm going to mercilessly underplay it like that.

Having said that, my music didn't even get into top 5? The soundtrack of Butler Didn't Do It didn't win the music award? Bah, you guys clearly have no taste.

All in all, it was an honour to compete alongside such great entrants! And I heartily thank all who voted for us. Perhaps later I shall join the discussion and provide some more verbose mini-reviews. But now if you excuse me, I have to return to ecstatically, triumphantly pouring champagne all over my body and practicing the condescending stare of superiority.

[Adeel]

I am happy to see that the game I voted for Best Game and Best Writing has won both awards, i.e., Educating Adventures of Girl and Rabbit. 

    Hilarious game, especially the rabbit's slaps can't be forgotten easily . Actually, I am impressed by its quality and length considering it was made only in a week. Good Job, Pablo and qptain Nemo! You deserve respect!

I am somewhat surprised that MI got the votes for best sounds. Yes, the voice over was good and as such but I thought "The Butler Didn't Do It" deserved it more. Oh well...

I am eagerly waiting for the Grundislav's Rebirth. High Quality Graphics and Story seems interesting as well. Especially liked the main character.

Don't know why but the first thought (when I listened to the music and singer's voice) was that this game is definitely made by cat.

Congratulations, once again, to everyone especially the winners (where's treat now? ).

P.S:   For those, who are wondering (or who care) about my game: The game will be more polished. New puzzles will be added. Animations will be added. Jokes will be included. You'll get to play those original puzzles which were opted out owing to the lack of time. One or two bugs were found which will be eliminated.

    This was my first game and therefore it contains hiccups of first game. However, OROW provided me to release my game within a deadline and this has encouraged me to work on my (previously intended to be first) game which I had left in the middle.

A big thanks to Handsfree without whom, the game would have been absolute trash. (He saved my neck ).

[Vince Twelve]

Hey qptain Nemo, you want to borrow some of my trophies?

Woo! Congratulations everyone! And congratulations to the organizers! You did a great job bringing this together!

Here are the reviews that I hastily typed up while playing the games:

ODOW:
Wow, I really appreciate the amount of coding that must have gone into this.  As someone who also loves doing weird experiments with AGS, this impressed me greatly! The 3D presentation was very effective. I'd love to see this expanded into a full rogue-like with randomized levels and more enemies, weapons, and magic!  Two thumbs up! (Please release your source code!!!)

The Addict:
Some cute writing and graphics here. Obviously with more time you would have gotten a walk-cycle in, but the sprite is nice as are the backgrounds.  If you continue with this, get someone to quickly proof-read and edit your writing a bit.  Lot's of people on the board willing to help with that (though I understand not doing that during the one short week you had to make this).  That being said, you committed several "cardinal sins" of Adventure Game Studio game making.  I see them in lots of first (and second and third...) games and they're easy to fix.  Fixing these things will make all your games infinitely more playable:

1) Make sure your mouse cursor is easy to see.  It doesn't stand out from the blue background enough and it's sometimes difficult to see where you're pointing.
2) Hotspot markers on your inventory items. It's really hard to tell if I'm clicking an inventory item on something because there's no clear indication of what part of the inventory item is my cursor hotspot! This issue is one of my pet peeves and it's really easy to fix!
3) Make responses to wrong combinations.  When I try to use the bar on the door, tell me why it's not a good solution.  This is especially annoying in combination with #2 because it makes it so I'm not sure if I missed when I tried to use the pink box on the hand dryer or if there was just no response to my incorrect guess.  It's very easy in AGS to put in default responses so it at least says "That doesn't work." when I try something wrong.  Make sure you add it to all your games and it will be a big improvement!
4) Too slow walking! Just a minor point, but I thought your guy walks annoyingly slow.  The default AGS speed is too low and makes a lot of people's first games annoying to play because they don't know that they can crank it up!

All of that is meant to be constructive criticism and not insults towards your game. It feels like a first game, and that's fine.  Everyone has to make one.  (Most people never even get that far.) I hope you keep at it and improve with each new game!  There are some great ideas in here, and now you've got something done.  Time to take the lessons you learned from OROW and make another short game!  Each time you learn new stuff!  Good job!

Butler:
Oh god, I was laughing from the very start when the brother was repeatedly admitting to the murder.  Great horse sound fx!  Love the cute graphics! I got stuck not noticing the individual book hotspot.  I cracked up the first time I went to the left and then came back to find the doctor dead.  Each time was funnier than the last.  Very funny writing.  A couple spelling errors to fix up, but that's no big deal.

I'm going to harp on the hotspots for the inventory cursors again.  It wasn't a huge deal here since the characters were pretty big and easy to hit and there was the hotspot label at the bottom of the screen making it easier.  But still, make a little arrow on the inventory cursors or something! 

It's also a little bit tricky to walk left and right in the room without clicking on something else.  And you have to walk away from the center of the room and then walk back to it if you want to go to the other side which is a little annoying.  That could be polished up a bit.  Maybe just have an arrow on screen that you click to walk to one side or another instead of using a walkto cursor at all.

Overall, a well-concieved, hilarious short game.  Very impressed!

(Edit: I'll tip my hand. I voted for Butler for best game.  Something about it! I hope it gets polished up a bit and given a proper release!)

The Crystal Ball:
Very nice atmosphere and implementation of the verb coin (Although it took me a little bit clicking around before I figured out it was a verb coin. They always trip me up!)  Good writing.  I liked how you can look at the cop and get a bunch of details from his physical features and then use those in conversation.  I didn't try to say different things in the conversations, so I'm not sure if there are any branches or not.  But I hope there are!  I wish there was some kind of conversation with the cop at the end to wrap things up or a twist or something.  But it ended alright.  Well done!

Mi:
Loved the presentation.  Great color pallete on the backgrounds and awesome Anime-dub voices!  At the start I thought it was going to be some kind of action platformer.  The puzzles were alright.  Psychicly sending items to Akemi from her cat was a cute idea.  It was a short, but nice experience.  Great job for one week!  I will take a moment to again wish that there were hotspot indicators on the inventory items! But at least there was a mouseover indicator label, so it wasn't so bad.

Great job!

Flypaper:
LOL. I was like "Man, I am into this! This dude spent some time on these graphics, I- oh wait..."

Kanji Gakusei:
Very cute little game.  I'm also going to pick on this one for not having hotspot indicators on your inventory items.  It's my pet peeve!  Hard to hit a three pixel duck with a stick when you're not sure which pixel of the stick is the pointy part!  Other than that it had cute simple puzzles and a nice idea.  Kawaii, etc.  I would have liked to have some kanji lesson in there, like someone explaining how the tree kanji looks like a tree and if you draw three of them it means forest, etc.  Could be expanded into a nice educational game.  Well done!

Sinking:
Very nice idea!  It took me a couple rounds to figure out exactly what was going on and what I was supposed to do.  But I think I figured it out.  Never managed to beat it on Normal though.  THings go to shit really fast!  I think falling off stuff might be a little too sensitive.  Especially when something's broken but you don't know where and have to go looking all around for it.  I fall off stuff a lot!  Very cool stuff though.  It's really fun and challenging (I never even bothered attempting hard mode!).  There's a nice variety of stuff to do.  It becomes a nice little time-management thing.  Too bad the other crew are useless and there's no reason to keep them around.  Or is there?  Two thumbs up!  Great job!

Jack Trekker:
Now that's how you fucking make an introduction.  Great stuff.  Love the guitar riff.  Great graphics in the room.  Love the out-of-focus foreground.  Hilarious writing.  Cracked up at "French or somethin'."  And OH SHIT, LOOK OUT NOW! INVENTORY CURSOR HOTSPOTS. THAT'S WHAT I'M TALKING ABOUT! TAKE NOTES Y'ALL.  Ahem. Sorry.  Well done on that.  Great polish all around.  Couple a' decent puzzles and some great style and junk.  Well done.  Two thumbs up!

Draconis:
Some more great scripting on display here!  It took me a while to get used to the rule set.  It seemed weird that falling gems would kill you and you could only collect them while they were still.  Using fire was a little weird too.  But the concept is good!  I liked the first two levels, but they were a bit hard.  I'd like to have a couple simple ones to teach the basics as you build up to the harder ones with lots of ways to die.  It also feels really bad when you get really far in a level and then make a dumb mistake and have to start over.  Bad enough to make me not try that second level for the fourth time!  But I felt like I played enough to get it and it's pretty great.  This could be refined into a very cool thing.  And you have a custom level editor text file!  That's pretty great!  A little more and it could be an in-game editor!  Sweet!  Good job!

Girl and Rabbit:
Hooray! I'm now marginally better prepared to face the challenges of the world.  I loved the hand-drawn-but-pixels look on the backgrounds.  The character sprites were great, too.  Right off the bat, I just sat there talking to the rabbit to hear all the funny shit he said.  Loved the score going increasingly negative.  Some decent dialog puzzles.  Liked the shooting thing at the end.  Bam. Serial killer out the door.  Well done!

The Rebirth:
To be continued! Great stuff here! Loved the character animations. Especially THAT animation.  The backgrounds were great as well.  An interesting plot that only HINTS at a grand conspiracy with mass casualties and world-wide implications?!?! That's right up my alley.  If I had one complaint it's that the main character walked a bit too slow for me.  That and the fuse puzzle should have involved on over-complicated wiring task that involves math and requires people to take notes so that everyone gets pissed off and hates you.  Two thumbs way up!

The Tatoo Room:
Really clever idea! Could be expanded with more customer requests and pictures to choose from!  Great art.  I love the creepy guy's face, though the audio grated a bit.  Took me a couple tries to figure out exactly what I was doing, but I was able to satisfy the dude on my fourth try.  Neat concept.  Good job!

The Reaper:
Whoah.  A far-future sequel to The Rebirth, perhaps?  Did you two work together? Great stuff here, obv.  Art is all around stunning.  The raven flying away was tops.  And how did you do that refraction effect on the jars? That's awesome.  If I had to come up with a complaint, it would be that you have to walk back and forth from the panel to the pump one too many times and the walk speed is too slow.  Or maybe that removing the rubble hotspot after getting a piece would have made walking easier.  But you know I'm just nitpicking there.  Groovy stuff.  Super creepy ending!  Two thumbs up!

Betrayal:
Damn, that was disorienting.  And I mean that in a good way.  The whole thing is supposed to be that way.  The perspective, the weird audio near the start.  The doors.  That was a great effect.  Some clever scripting to make that work, I imagine.  Well done.  Interesting way of rolling out the story in glimpses and hints.  The art isn't great obviously, but you make up for it with lots of other stuff.  It was unique!  Great job! Just slap some hotspot indicators on those inventory graphics and you get two thumbs up!

Did the game end with the Dick quote?  I couldn't get anything to happen on that screen, and never had a use for the pendant, so I just quit.  Was there something else?

[Adeel]

Thanks Vince for your detailed analysis on my game. I really appreciate it and never (ever) consider it as an insult.

[kaput]

A big congratulations to the winners and everyone that took part! Really an excellent bunch of games and I'm glad I could have mine stood by them. Roll on OROW 9.

I want to kiss you all right in the face.

Jack Trekker:
Now that's how you fucking make an introduction.  Great stuff.  Love the guitar riff.  Great graphics in the room.  Love the out-of-focus foreground.  Hilarious writing.  Cracked up at "French or somethin'."  And OH SHIT, LOOK OUT NOW! INVENTORY CURSOR HOTSPOTS. THAT'S WHAT I'M TALKING ABOUT! TAKE NOTES Y'ALL.  Ahem. Sorry.  Well done on that.  Great polish all around.  Couple a' decent puzzles and some great style and junk.  Well done.  Two thumbs up!

That really made my day and junk. Cheers Vince! 

All in all a fun experience. For anyone who is interested, most sound fx in Jack Trekker were made by using a Granite Pestle & Mortar, closing a microwave and swinging a skipping rope. Oooh yeah... That's how I roll!

[Ubel]

Well, this made my day! Working with qptain Nemo on this game was tons of fun. So much fun in fact that we finished the game in just under 4 days. I did have quite a strict personal deadline going on. Thanks to everyone who voted!

I'm not at home right now but when I am I will write some of my opinions on the games. One thing I will say though is that I enjoyed most of them thoroughly and was very impressed by a few! Amazing job everyone!

[Stupot]

Jack Trekker had puzzles?
I liked what I saw, but I didn't actually come across any gameplay :/ It must have broken on me and I assumed it had ended before it had begun.  I'll try it again.  Sorry Sunny an Alpi.

[kaput]

Jack Trekker had puzzles?

Cheeky bugger