Messages

[Barrier]

I was away so the official release was delayed a bit... But here it is finally! I know all none of you were anxiously expecting it!

Barrier



A Chinese peasant called Wu has to overcome the Great Barrier of China
in order to get to a girl called Mei. Hilariousness ensues...

This game was made for the 7th One Room One Week Competition in four days. I've enhanced this release version a bit: added fading footsteps and fixed a couple of glitches. So nothing drastic.

I hope you enjoy the game!

Download here!

They're still selling it?  I thought they moved all their products over to Big Fish awhile ago.

Oh yeah, you're right. I just found it on the Playfirst website and didn't notice that buying took me to Big Fish.

Where'd you buy it from this time, AJA?  Steam or somewhere else?

Playfirst.

I know, I suck.

It must've been something like decades ago when I played the hour-long demo. Back then I don't think I had even seen the film Wizard of Oz, probably most Finns haven't since it's not really that big a deal over here. However, I knew the gist of it and found the game very interesting. But I didn't buy it. Can't remember why. It wasn't because of the constant popups, that much I know, I got quite used to them during the hour. Maybe it was because you had to buy it through Playfirst. Anyway...

These commentary videos reminded me how enjoyable the style and atmosphere of the game had been when I played the demo, so I decided to buy the full game, finally. I finished it just a couple of minutes ago and loved it all the way through! We definitely need more noirish adventure games.

Thanks, Dave, for the great game and these wonderful commentary videos! I'm gonna go back to lurking now and wait for your next game.

[Yep.]

Even modern motion capture should be possible to quickly translate to a flat image, if one was so keen on using it.

Yep.

[Aeterna Duel]

Thanks for voting! Winning was fun the first couple of times but now it's just getting exponentially more awesome. Well, the opposite actually.

And now, onto the important part, comments! Time to refresh my memory and replay some of them!

Aeterna Duel
This was actually a very hard game when I first played it since I just went after new skills instead of increasing my stats. Now that I replayed it, it was too easy. Fusion and the other combo skills were an instant win. It's a very nice prototype in any case, just needs a bit of balancing. Good work!

Apple Farm
This one was a nice change of pace after failing so many times at dueling. Lovely graphics and relaxing music. Also, wasn't quite as easy as I expected. Finding the apple in the tree took some time. Nice one!

Barrier
Made in four days and it won? WTF? Actually, I'd like to thank my ancient Aiptek drawing tablet for not being the usual bitch it often is. Haven't had so much fun drawing stuff in any previous OROW.

Dehaunt
I was expecting something epic when I started the game: OMG, tile graphics! But sadly there was nothing much to do expect to go all hobbity and back again. And the game's "intro cutscene" was reading the readme file. But the tile system worked quite well, no crashes and didn't get stuck or anything, so good job with that! What I'd improve though, is that when you move diagonally, you shouldn't get stuck to walls.

Entrapped
Oh hell. This game contains most of the things I love about adventure games: pixel hunting, too many hotspots and too many inventory items. Well done! Oh, and I actually gave up on this a couple of times since the "ORDER FULL GAME" messages led me to think maybe it would all be just one wild goose chase. But I did finish it in the end, thanks to the hint thread! I was stuck because I couldn't find the fire cracker. I also had some trouble with all the items not fitting in the inventory gui. But as frustrating as it was, overall I enjoyed it. Finally finishing it felt like such an accomplishment.

Office Shenanigans
Probably my favorite of the bunch. I really liked the feel of the thing. Everybody moving around on their own business. (Although waiting for them to return to their places, especially when many of them would do so consecutively, was somewhat rage inducing.) The character portraits were perfect and reflected nicely the personalities of the characters. If only the top down views and the background would have received the same treatment. The intro was brilliant too, although the game inside the game looked a bit dubious when viewed from a certain mental perspective.  : Great job!

One Room One Cheese
Death. Dying. Falling. Suffering. Pain. Agony. No, you will not beat me, game! More death. Dying. Falling... Such a hard game and I usually would have given up but since it was a "one room" game I knew it would end eventually and that I would be victorious. And man did it feel good to beat the final labyrinth of spiky death and disappearing blocks. The audio visual presentation was exactly as it should be. Level design was very good. What made it hard was the low friction. I didn't witness any bugs or glitches. A wonderfully fun game (in a tear-your-hair-out kind of way).

ODR3
I still don't know who made this game. Loved the cartoony graphics and the weird as hell premise and puzzles. Just the right amount of vomit, gore and round shapes, too. My only problem with the game was that there was just too much continuous dialogue. Don't get me wrong, the dialogue had lots of awesomely fun stuff in it but after a while it all just started to get lost in a vast sea of vastness. Very good work, nonetheless!

Procrastinator
This one took me right back to the days when I used to make text adventure games with a couple of friends, except without the constant sudden deaths for the most ridiculous of reasons. I enjoyed the game a lot until I hit the point where everything just went black and I couldn't continue (the same point others have already mentioned). I hope you'll fix that, I'd love to find out how it ends!

RapSqLud
20 levels and I managed to finish probably 5 of them. The concept and execution were great but it was just too unforgiving for me. Fail a level and you have to start from the beginning, argh. After the first couple of levels I just couldn't keep up with the pace and trying to find the switch blocks with my mouse. It might have been easier with the tablet. Anyway, the game worked great, it was just too hard for me. Nicely scripted!

Requiem
Another platformer, this one I almost didn't finish. I became frustrated with dying all the time and not making any progress since you had to start from the beginning of the level. It didn't help that I had no idea how long I'd have to keep running before reaching the end. After reading on the forums that somebody said this was easier than cheese, I decided to try again and finished it without much trouble. I guess the problem for me was just being thrown into the game and having no sense of where I was going and how much progress I was making. I liked the simplistic graphical style and technically it worked great. Although, the loud beep at the start almost made my ears bleed.

The Devil Got My Woman
This one benefited from being alphabetically last. After all the other more or less silly games, this game felt sincere and had a lot of heart. It really deserved to win best writing! It could've done with some unobtrusive background music. Also, the WMV didn't play for me. The screen just froze and only the audio played. However, the writing makes up for all of the technical issues. Lovely work!

Okay, I guess that's all of them. Only took three hours to write this post.

Thanks to all the entrants for their great games!
Thanks to Dualnames for hosting the competition!
And finally thanks to bad dubbing for the inspiration to make Barrier!

My nick and ball sucking in the same post... YEAAAHH!!! We definitely need more ball sucking next time.

Oo, such a pretty picture. Couldn't resist doing a paintover. I'm no artist but I tried turning the foreground into the focus of the bg. And well, now it looks like an evening scene.

(I'm starting to repeat myself.) Maybe next time we could get the old voting system back? (Give each game a score of 1-5 or 1-10 or whatever in each category.) It sucks every time when I'd really want to vote some game but there's this other one that deserves it just a bit more and I can only choose one. Hell, I'll even make a voting system for the next time if that's the problem.

Also, being able to see the results before voting has ended is silly.

Anyway, as usual I'll share some comments on the games once the (final) results are in!


PLAY AND VOTE, EVERYONE!

De-Haunt:

Spoiler

Space should work when you're standing over the only hotspot you can interact with.

[close]

Devil:

Spoiler

Yeah, I didn't figure out what to do with him either. Instead I took a peek inside the drawer. At least that'll get you to the slightly glitchy end.

[close]

Ah, figured it out...

Spoiler

As it turns out the player character was the hotspot I was looking for.

[close]

Apples:

Spoiler

Chicken
Hedgehog
Barn door
Bush next to barn door
Hidden in the tree

[close]

De-Haunt:

Spoiler

Walk.
Walk as far as you can.

[close]

Aaand I'm stuck in Office Shenanigans:

Spoiler

I've got the Password Master but how can I catch Jeff?

[close]

I'm back. Might make some bug fixes for my entry. We'll see. Tired.

I did warn you not to watch it.

Everyone, just take deep breaths, like so... ahhh, ehhh, ahhh, ehhh... And now, get back to your doomed projects! Just remember that everybody feels inadequate when they start scripting their game. Everything feels like crap. (And it might even be crap.) But in the end it will turn out not to be quite as crappy as you feared. And that's the thought that will get you through OROW with most of your limbs intact.

And when this is finished we should do a contest called "Who suffered more brain damage by orowing" 

Oh man, I would have won that contest last year... (A reminder for those who've not seen it.) Don't click the link! You should be busy with your game, remember?

Well, my four days are up and I'm happy to announce that I've submitted my entry!

Best of luck to the rest of you! I'll be back on Sunday expecting to begin my week with lots of fun OROW games to play! Don't disappoint me.

Then it wouldn't be such an epic event!

Insanity is the only way to survive OROW.

That said, I fear I may be going sane...

1st of August sound possible, even though I'll only have 3½ days to make something. 8th-> would be better for me but don't postpone on my account. I don't even have the slightest idea for a game yet, and I've been trying to come up with something for weeks. Maybe I'll have to skip this one, who knows...