The release of this issue marks the end of the second year of HamsterSpeak magazine. We've had a lot of great content over the past two years, and while the number of contributors has decreased from when we started, we're still going strong, and are happy to welcome new blood (See Mariel's reviews in issue 23 and Callahat's solid plotscripting article in this one).

The OHR engine has grown, and a lot of quality games have been released since we started. There are still a lot of stupid community feuds, and there are still some mind-blowingly horrible games unleashed on us every now and then. Still, through good and bad, I'm happy to be working with this engine and on this magazine. We've got a lot of good people putting out good products, and I'm happy to see it continue.

We've had lots of suggestions about how to shake things up and attract new users and contributors. I've been told I should actively advertise for writers, and I agree, but this leads to a lot of difficulties, since a lot of people, especially on gaming forums, aren't very open minded, and it takes a good deal of open-mindedness to want to write reviews for a niche magazine dealing with a niche game design engine. The number of times I've seen people on non-OHR forums say "Oh, it's an OHR game, not worth playing" or "A game about a fish? Screw this" is high and disheartening, and a good reason why I'm not aggressively advertising.

Say what you will about this magazine or the OHR community in general, but even the worst games get a fair shot. I will say that Yo Ghost is among the worst amateur games I played in 2008, but it was still given a legitimate review and legitimate criticism. It was still given a chance, in spite of looking and sounding terrible. That's pretty rare in any gaming community, and I'm proud that even if a lot of us hate each other, we're still open to helping each other make a better game.

I've been told I should expand the magazine to cover more game engines. Right now, we seem to get an average of around a thousand readers a month, from various countries around the globe. If we expanded to cover, say, RPG Maker games, we'd no doubt get a lot more, but we'd also lose what makes this monster unique. I'm all for the growth of the OHR engine's userbase; in fact, this was one of the reasons I started this magazine. However, I feel that if we covered any independent game under the sun, the focus on OHR games would shrink until there was nothing left, and I'd hate to see that.

There are a lot of cool features in the new engine updates, and I'm sure there are many more to come. As long as this engine has any life left in it, and I feel it has quite a bit, I want to keep writing about it. It's been fun, frustrating, rewarding, and disappointing at different times, but all in all it's been worth it, for both personal and professional reasons. I'm going to keep at it, and I hope you will too. Make games, review them, draw art, and have fun. Let's make it another two years.