OHR News: January 2008

Latest releases:
• The Darkest Planet by Kenecchi
• Dummy the Happy Face by Dorumagesu
• Soup Man by Kenecchi

Contest News

• Newbie Game Remake Contest

SlimeSalad.com is hosting a contest in which participants take one of their older, less polished (or completely terrible) games and turn them into something worth playing.

"Pick one of your own "newbie games." This is up to your own discretion, but a good rule of thumb is the more embarrassed the game makes you, the better... Remake the game so that it doesn't suck. To the extent possible, keep it true to the original. In other words, don't make an entirely new game that happens to have the same title and don't make the game a parody of the old version.

The rest is up to you -- you can expand the game if you want, or you can restrict it to just part of the old game.

The deadline is February 1. Upload your game to Slime Salad, with the original included in a separate file."

For more details, see the contest discussion thread.

• For the last two years, I have handed out mystery prize boxes for various contests. As 2007 ends, the tradition continues. While previously the prizes were given out for trivial nonsense questions, this year's is a bit different. The prize will be given out for the best article of volume 11. Submit your votes in this thread from now until January 25th, and the winner will be announced in next month's issue. Good luck to all involved!

Useful Tools

• On the SlimeSalad.com forums, Iblis recently linked to a free sound effect generating program that might prove extremely helpful to game designers that don't want to use stock sounds. View more information on this program here.

Some Words from the Community

Every month, we'll spotlight some comments from the readers regarding the previous month's issues.

"I think Moogle1's article alone gives me encouragement to help me make my beginning of the game better since abilities haven't bloomed much yet. Fenrir's article also has me looking forward to the overhauled version of Vikings." -KittenMaster, SlimeSalad.com forums

"MSW, your article was much better this time. However, it still reads very much like a textbook, and you really lost me when you started giving the heroes letter-names and the enemies number-names.

Job classes and enemy types are all abstractions. They don't really mean anything except what we tell them to mean. We use them as a convention so that the player understands what's going on without having to learn everything by experimentation. This is why I largely relied on Final Fantasy-style naming convention for Darkmoor Dungeon's attacks -- the game was released shortly before attack descriptions were enabled.

What I'm getting at here is that your example would be much easier to follow if you gave these things more descriptive names. The letter-names are better than the number-names because those at least have something to do with what they represent. It's also useful to follow up your own example with examples of how this technique has been used in games the reader might have played." -Mogri, SlimeSalad.com forums