James Paige

Last week I finished a new game for the 2012 Week Long OHR Random Collab Contest. This was a collaboration, and my randomly chosen team-mate was Sid “Thespazztikone” Tyler. He happens to be a master at making maptiles, which is one of my biggest weakpoints, so I was very happy to be teamed with him, and he didn’t seem too mad about me hogging all the plotscripting and textbox-writing fun.

The game we made is called The Death of Von Stabbingmore, and you can download it from here: slimesalad

The game is intended to be in the style of a point-and-click puzzle-adventure, although there is no pointing and clicking. All the controls are the standard OHRRPGCE interface for running around the map and fighting RPG battles. The puzzles are all built into the battles, requiring you to use the correct sequence of commands to win. I tried to make the dialog funny, and based on reactions I have gotten to it so far, I think I succeeded.

The game uses tall hero walkabouts, based on the WalkTall tech demo scripts that I wrote a few months back. In writing this game I found a fixed a few bugs with the OHR’s support for modifying walkabout sprite slices.

Last weekend I participated in the 21st Ludumdare 48 hour game making competition. It was a lot of fun. Mahlena came over to keep me company, and I programmed almost all weekend. I used the OHRRPGCE, and talked the OHR community into timing our own annual 48 hour contest to be simultaneous with the Ludumdare competition, so that people could double-enter. Several did.

The theme of the contest was “Escape”, and the game I created was called Escape the Wolf: OHR You can download it from here:

(Windows version) (Mac OS X Version)

I also have a page for it at SlimeSalad, and the Ludumdare page for it is here.

Basically, you run away from the wolf, and try to find the cabin. I hacked together some pretty decent-seeming ai for the wolf, and took care to avoid overusing randomness. The map is generated randomly, but the gameplay is pretty deterministic.

Procedurally generating the forest was pretty fun, and not as hard as I feared it might be. I allocated layers 2-7 as overhead, then I generated trees from the top of the map down to the bottom, dynamically placing the tiles in the lowest free layer. That means that seven trees would have to overlap before there would not be room for the tiles (possible, but very rare). Trees layered badly when they wrapped over the top of the map and onto the bottom of the map, but it was too minor for me to care about in such a time-crunch.

In retrospect I really should have added some landmarks scattered around the forest. I did have one landmark, a cobblestone path that lead from the cabin to a well. It made a big difference in finding the cabin, since the cabin was only 3×3 tiles, and the footpath could stretch over as much as half the map. Still, it is a big map, and more landmarks would have helped.

I am also very happy for Mahlena’s brief playtesting. The wolf chomped her rapidly and repeatedly, and that convinced me that the game mode I had been working on should become “Hard Mode”, and that I should add Normal and Easy modes.

So far the ludumdare responses have been mostly positive, and all the OHRRPGCE users who have played it seemed to like it. I will update this post after the voting period is over.

The voting has completed, and out of 509 contestants, I scored in 12th place for Audio (which really surprises me, because I was just doodling and warbling into the microphone) and I scored in 17th place for Humor, which I am proud of, because so very many of the contestants tried to make funny games.

EDIT: 2015-05-18

I made a new version of Vocabulary Mosaic. This version has larger tiles, some visual improvements, control improvements, and perhaps most importantly, it can save your progress automatically so long games do not have to be played in a single sitting.

Download Links:

• Windows Installer
• Mac OS X Application
• Debian Linux .deb package (also for Ubuntu)
• Android Phones and Tablets (also in the google app store)
• Plain zip file (Windows or other Linuxes)

Info and screenshots below are about the old version from 2010:

I was asked to write a game design article for Hamsterspeak Issue #36. Instead of just writing an article, I wrote a game.

I had recently been playing a lot of Words-With-Friends with my Sister and my Brother-in-Law, and that had me thinking about word-tile games.

One thing I don’t like about word tile games is the limited size of the board quickly cramps the word space, and the double and triple score boxes force any winning strategy to emphasize small words on score boxes in favor of long words.

So I set out to make a word tile game that rewards long words most of all. The result was Vocabulary Mosaic.

There is more information about the making of the game in the hamsterspeak article. (old version)

For the 2009 OHRRPGCE 8-bit contest,  I have taken it upon myself to do a public service, and I have created:

DON’T EAT SOAP!

An Educational Game Starring Bob the Hamster

Soap is bad for you to eat. It is good for washing your hands, but very very bad for you to put in your mouth. If soap ever accidentally gets in your mouth, spit it out! This game is an educational simulation using the latest in 8-bit gaming technology so that you can experience mouth-related soap accidents from the safety of your living-room without risk
of actual hospitalization.

August 2013 update:

I am please to announce that an updated version of Don’t Eat Soap has been released for the OUYA Console. This new version features 15 new levels (for a total of 40 levels) and 3 new enemies. There are also an assortment of small bugfixes and tiny improvements. Now you can not eat soap in even more style than before!

Remember! This is only a game! Do not try it at home!

Download it here in a ZIP file

Download it here as a Windows Installer

Download it here as a Mac App

This game is available on Android via Google Play

This game is also available on the OUYA console!

EDIT (2014): There is a new version of this game available for Windows, Mac, Linux, and OUYA Console! See this post for more info

I made Bob the Hamster in the Crypt of Baconthulhu for the 2009 OHRRPGCE Terrible Games Contest.

EDIT: My game narrowly won first place! See the results here: HamsterSpeak Issue 27

To give you a taste of the game, here is a brief “Director’s Commentary” video of it.

Also, I should note that the youtube video doesn’t do justice to the game’s music. It was composed by John Sebastian Willow, and it really makes the atmosphere.

If you want to try this game yourself, the direct download link is here: http://HamsterRepublic.com/dl/baconthulhu.zip

This zip includes an exe for windows, but the game also runs in Linux, as long as you have the Linux version of the OHRRPGCE.

I recently ported some of my ancient QuickBasic code to FreeBasic. One such piece of code was an old unfinished prototype of a Bob the Hamster jump-and-run side scrolling game.

You can move Bob around a single level, and interact with a few objects, although there are no enemies to fight.

This code is notable in O.H.R.RPG.C.E history because, as best as I can remember, it is the first Hamster Republic code to use the multi-directional scrolling code used for the OHRRPGCE’s maps.

I have no plans to finish this code, but I do have another sidescroller in the works

Current mood: coma-ey

I was too distraught to post about this earlier, but yes, it is true, somebody has shot Bob the Hamster!

He’s in the hospital right now, in a coma. The details of the attempted assassination are still unclear. Because the Hamster Republic has no standing police force, we are asking the public for help in investigating the crime. You can find details here. Apparently the shooter was arrogant enough to leave a string of cryptic clues to his identity.

Current mood: pixelated

I drew this inside the OHRRPGCE‘s built-in sprite editor. I drew it for the Castle Paradox Miss Pixel 2007 contest, but I was just a few hours too late for the ending deadline :(

A few more pictures at gilgamesh

Current mood: out-of-sync with something

I usually like to post here about art, and that art is usually in the form of drawings. But I also believe in games-as-art. For something crazy like 9 years now, I have been working on a program called the OHRRPGCE which lets you make your own game with minimal programming knowledge. It is only good for old-school console-style RPG games similar to the NES and Super Nintendo Final Fantasy games– so if you are not into that you won’t be interested– but if you ARE into that, by all means, do play with this new toy.

People don’t often thing of game-making as art, and I think that is partly because the tools of the medium are so hard to pick up, let alone to master. You don’t have to be Rembrandt to pick up a paintbrush and slap some paint on a canvas. Most art is very approachable, even if it isn’t easy to do well. Programming games on the other hand requires you to spend hours, days, weeks, even months reading tutorials and manuals before you can even learn and understand enough to blit your first pixel. That is part of why I do this. This is not the same kind of tool the professionals use, but it is a tool that anybody can pick up.

My game maker used to be a DOS program, but yesterday I released a version that runs natively on Windows, making it that much more approachable for average non-programmers. If you want to try it out, you can download it from http://HamsterRepublic.com/dl/ohrrpgce-win-installer.exe