Better Than the Worst:
A Newbie’s Guide to Sidestepping Ridicule
The 2008 Revival
Part Eight

By Jeremy Bursey (Pepsi Ranger)

And now for my last trick, we’ll discuss what happens when there’s nothing left to do but submit. Don’t everyone get emotional on me at once.

Lesson #16: Vision is the Root Word of Revision.

So you’ve done everything right. Your playtesters agree that your game is good. You just need to fix the few errors they found…like turning the third floor of your dungeon into a sanctuary, making your king look less like a transvestite, and implementing that fighting monkey scene you only alluded to in dialogue. It’s all very simple stuff.

Okay, maybe not, but it’s necessary to revise your problem areas before you submit your game.

Perhaps the biggest downfall of all newbie developers is the premature release of a buggy and/or inconsistent game. We learned in Part Three that this can (and often) mean submitting a game with grammatical problems, missing wallmaps, etc. But it doesn’t have to stop there. Submit a game with a choppy story or inappropriate characters and you may as well face the same harsh criticism.

Revise your game! If King Trout is the leader of the free world in one scene, but an outcast in the next, make sure you have a transition in there somewhere that shows (not tells) why. You submit your game without that and you may as well inform the community that you don’t give a crap. If those fighting monkeys have a good explanation about how they became fighters, but not great, make sure you step it up; make it great. Remember, laziness has no place here.
   
Lesson #17: Advertising is More Important than Presentation.

So you’ve really done everything right. Your game is stellar, or at least up to the standard you want for it. Now you’re ready to release it. Fine. Create your entry on Castle Paradox or Slime Salad and go to town.

But now you have to write a game description. “Oh crap,” you might think. How do you summarize your game without making it sound like garbage? No one wants to play another “win one for the king” type of dungeon crawler. So how do you make your “win one for the king” dungeon crawler pop in the crowd?

Well, for starters, you don’t write the words: “This game is crap. Please don’t download.”

If you don’t want people downloading it, don’t upload it. The biggest newbie mistake of all is not writing character dialogue with elite speak or putting lava tiles in your hero’s living room, but in telling people you don’t have the common sense to leave what you don’t want touched out of the public eye. If you’re only posting it for friends and family, ask Inferior Minion to host it on private web space so a bunch of strangers won’t know it’s there. Or better yet, get your own space somewhere and leave IM out of it; or email it to your friends and family if the file is small enough. Don’t mar your ego or your game with defeatist statements. In the end, people will still download your game, and those same people will hate you for wasting their time. It’s counterproductive for everyone.

Assuming you like your game, however, and assuming you want people to download it, now you have to figure out what will sell it.

Always look for the unique feature first. If your game is like everything else the community has played, then go straight for its best feature. For the OHR community, the words “completed game” seems to walk for miles. If you’re releasing a demo, highlight unique locations or unique heroes. If you have a solid battle progression, highlight that. Players get sick of the Spacebar mashers, so if your game requires strategy, exploit it.

When summarizing the story, only reveal the intro. If you explain the whole thing in one paragraph, you won’t leave any mystery to the player. “A boy wakes up in a forest to find his shorts missing…” is a better description than “A boy’s camp was ransacked and now he wants revenge. Follow him as he hunts down his rival camp and kills them one by one in a bloody reign of terror.” Though people will probably download the game anyway, they’ll have more fun with it if they’re merely enticed by the premise, rather than blitzed with it. This applies to any genre, any style, and any story line.

Also, consider checking other websites for release possibilities. Castle Paradox is the staple for OHR games, with Slime Salad now coming up the pipeline. But both sites are strictly OHR (for the time being), and thus only expose their games to OHR players. Considering the time and hard work that goes into making a game, the idea that only a couple hundred people will download it (with only a fraction of that number playing it) seems pretty disheartening. Now that the OHR is Windows based, however, its ability to win over players from other indie game communities is higher, and thus could fit comfortably into other libraries. Off the top of my head, Abandonia Reloaded might be a place worth checking out. It has freeware games of all genres, most of them independently made; though, I’m sure there are others.  Whatever helps the OHR get the attention of outside communities will also help your game’s popularity, and then more people will play it.

In Conclusion:

I hope this series encouraged those of you new to the OHR (and those old, but notoriously bad at game making) to spend extra time with your projects before giving them to the community. A waste of time is a terrible thing to have in life, and I hope each of you consider this before subjecting players and reviewers to torment. Of course, this doesn’t mean you should expect your work to be perfect because not even the creator of the OHR is perfect. Just be wary of what has quality and keep all that doesn’t to yourself.

And with that, get back to work.

Resources:

Check out the original February 2001 versions of “Better Than the Worst” Parts One through Four on Operation: OHR. They can found in the Articles Archive.

http://www.castleparadox.com/archive/operationohr/articlearchive.php

For free sound effects you can upload, download and share, check out Soundsnap for thousands of ideas.

http://www.soundsnap.com

For alternative freeware games (RPGs, point-and-click adventures, etc.), check out Abandonia Reloaded and other sites like it.

http://www.reloaded.org

To use Bugzilla, go to the Hamster Republic main page, click the OHR button, and go into Project Info. The button marked “Known Bugs” will take you there. Or, if you don’t like hunting, click this:

http://hamsterrepublic.com/ohrrpgce/buglist.php

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