OROW 9 - *Winner(s) announced!*

[Bulbapuck]

But for me I guess the most amazing feat is the double entry (and even crossover) games by Wyz, Baron and Handsfree!!! Truly an incredible thing to make two high-quality entries in a single week AND have their stories crossover! I doubt this has been done before and probably will never be attempted ever again. You guys are insane to even try it but awesome as hell to actually pull it off.

In OROW 8 something similar happened actually. Ben304 and Grundislav made two games in the same universe that was a prelude for a larger game they were collaborating on. Still, an incredible feat to be sure. Funny thing is, you drew the parallel between those two games before I did, and I knew they were from the same creators xD

Congratulations on winning the best concept Mandle

[qptain Nemo]

Congratulations to all winners, good show all around!

I want to personally praise Dislocation, which seems to not have won any popularity votes, but it definitely won my heart. The cheeky defiant intentionally idiotic humor completely won me over and firmly planted a grin on my face. In other words I loved it the most. Would love to see more of that silliness.

[AprilSkies]

Congratz to all winners!
They deserved!

Personally I also enjoyed "Sunrise Paradise" and I'm sad it didn't get nothing.. So I wanted to say "bravo" to the authors.

[Wyz]

Wow, now lets get this crazy ride to a conclusion!

First of all I want to thank Bulbapuck greatly for his hard work organizing this and then also finding time to do LPs; it has been a blast and you did an amazing job!

Secondly I want to thank my fellow OROWneers uhm OROWnauts? erm... colleagues for all those great entries: I really had a lot of fun playing them!

Thirdly: anyone who played and voted: Thank you all! I hope you had as much fun as I had.

And lastly well this is something special, you see our entry was special as Mandle already guessed:

What you might not have known
We (Baron, Handsfree and I) made two games! This was not coincidental there was something to it!

Spoiler

Your games are connected!?
- Yes see, crossover games have been done before but what we did was a cross-game puzzle so a puzzle spanning two games! To my knowledge that has not been done before which was why it was so tempting to do. The OROW was the perfect setting for this since both games would have been played without the link immediately be clear. We actually went through some trouble to make the games as disconnected as possible like the style, feel and we even used different versions of AGS for the games.

Was it hard to connect the games?
- Well I can only guess it was but we left a few breadcrumbs (see below).

What was the cross-game puzzle like.
We made Crash Course as a joke game; there was no way to really have influence on the outcome of the story which is connected to the theme: uncontrollable. This game however contains a very important hint for Alien Escapade.

Was the game beatable without knowing about this link?
- Yes, but it would have required some brute-forcing. There was simply one piece of the puzzle missing which would have made it easier to solve knowing about the link.

So what is this piece of the puzzle?
- If you really must know:

Spoiler

In alien escapade after making the core boil the right set of vents must be plugged. When all mushrooms are picked up you will find out you are one short; this is to hint that only one vent must be left open. The map shows which hole to leave open but this map is actually UPSIDE DOWN! Yes the aliens read upside down but you can not know about this until you play Crash course. Here the mayor is handed a chart that bears some similarities to the alien map but guess what: he is holding it upside down. This is made clear to the player and should hint that the map in the other game should have been read upside down as well. There! now you know!

[close]

So what are these breadcrumbs that link the games together?
Well it is actually quite clear the stories are connected once you see the link. The aliens live on an asteroid that is uncontrollable and about to crash on a familiar looking planet. They change course just in time. This is in fact the asteroid the mayor has to deal with and when you played both games you are in fact the reason why it did not crash leaving the situation not entirely uncontrollable after all.
But more generally, a list of breadcrumbs:

Spoiler

• The planet in the background of AE is earth.
• The asteroid in CC changes course without reason to.
• The mayor mentions he likes 'vaping' and it will solve all problems.
• The map in AE and the chart in CC have a similar colour scheme and both feature a round object.
• When looking at the picture in CC the mayor mentioned his wife would only shout and flings things at his head,... just like the alien wife did in AE.
• One of the books in the mayor's office refers to aliens.
• But my personal favourite is: both the mayor and the alien wear a top hat!

*looks at Baron and Handsfree* Did I forget any?

[close]

[close]

So we are going to give a medal to whoever figured this out the first!
So I'm proudly presenting on behalf of our team the U-asteroid medal for impressive out-of-the-box puzzle solving:


And well we're giving it to Mandle! Congrats!

Geez this OROW sure had some deception going on: well played Mandle: you also did the thing were you reviewed your own game making it virtually impossible to guess you made it. Well played!

And of course I also want to congratulate all winners with a special cheer to Team Party Wagon. Good job all!

[Stupot]

I want to personally praise Dislocation, which seems to not have won any popularity votes, but it definitely won my heart.

It won my heart, as well as my vote for best game. Cracking effort. And it wasn't even finished!!!1!

But seriously good efforts everyone. I'm sad I couldn't take part, but glad to have been around to spectate and speculate. And big-up to Bulbapuck for taking the initiative and hosting this crazy thing.

[round of applause]

[Bulbapuck]

I want to personally praise Dislocation, which seems to not have won any popularity votes, but it definitely won my heart.

Personally I also enjoyed "Sunrise Paradise" and I'm sad it didn't get nothing.. So I wanted to say "bravo" to the authors.

I should point this out as it isn't shown on the top 3 lists, "Dislocation" actually scored fairly high in all categories, and hence it takes a lot of 4th place finishes. Same goes for "Sunrise Paradise". For instance they tied for 4th in the "Best game" category just 2 votes behind the 3rd place finisher.

Also, thank you Wyz and Stupot! It was a real pleasure organizing this

[Ponch]

Congrats to all the teams that got a game together in such a short time. It was a lot of fun, like OROW always is!

For the record, we had a secret fourth member: IntenseDegree, who did the music for our game on very, very short notice.

I now plan to take our prize money and get the station wagon tricked out into the sweet ride it was always destined to be. Then we're gonna drive this thing from Texas to Australia, where no doubt the BlueCupTools podcast awaits with baited breath to interview us!


TEAM PARTY WAGON FOREVER!!!
When we make the return drive to Canada, we'll probably let Mite out. Maybe. I suspect his family misses him.

[Cuiki]

Congratulations people, great work!!

I think having a theme turned out to be a good choice as it created a really nice thematic bundle. I really enjoyed how a lot of participants tried new things and moved away from the classic Sierra/Lucasarts feel. Is this what the future looks like???

A little attempt at writing some reviews:

Spoiler

Alien Escapade:
I'm sad to say I never finished this one properly - every time I played it, I managed to click on something that took the game straight to the ending scene. But I had fun watching Bulbapuck's let's play and seeing how it was supposed to be played. The screen bending thing looked really impressive, and the graphics were cute, and that one puzzle also wasn't bad at all!

Cornelius Cat:
That seemed like a great kids' game! The finger puppets and their little jumping up and down when they talked were really adorable, and the water effect also looked pretty cool. I wouldn't mind a better indication of the hotspots (like a glowing paw, or the text for the hotspot names being a bit bigger/not right at the bottom of the screen), or maybe a more personal design of the dialog options. I'm kind of embarrassed to say I didn't expect that twist at the end at all!

Crash Course:
What I liked about this game was that the dramatic music and the countdown timer gave it a real sense of urgency. Shame about the lack of puzzles, though. The graphics looked pretty nice and polished (maybe apart from that mayor's face that might give me nightmares ).

Dislocation:
Some pretty cool sci-fi themes in there, and quite charming graphics and animations, full of little details. I had fun interacting with the main computer, but I kind of cringed talking to that clichéd hipster girl.

Flophouse Hijinks:
It wasn't difficult to guess who made that one.
Apart from really good writing all the way through, I was impressed with the sheer amount of puzzles you managed to squeeze in that one room. Shame about a few potentially game-ending bugs. The graphics looked like there were 2 or 3 people working on them at the same time. But most of them looked really nice, with some really cool animations in there. It was also the most relatable of all the games (granted, I don't have any kinky girl-roommates or crazy Texan landlords, but I probably have a bunch of Upper Slobodian neighbours!)

Hybrid:
My personal favourite. Honestly, I'm rather surprised it didn't even make it into the top three.
Really, it could easily pass for a demo of a proper commercial release. The graphics were breathtaking, the game was consistently good (I didn't come across any bugs), it was immersive, well-written and had some really disturbing sound effects! The only possible downside (and even that's just a matter of opinion) was that it didn't seem to bring much new to the table in terms of original game design. But never mind that! Please team up again in the future and make a longer game together! Don't give up, you're the true winning combo!

Rogered:
I didn't think this one was too confusing once you got into it. I quite enjoyed the clear sense of direction and the meta qualities of the game, and was sad to see it finish so soon. Bonus points for being so damn stelthy about being the game author. I could never guess, not even with all the Japanese menus. (At the time, I thought you were only using that to justify the appearance of the apple fruit in one of the puzzles )

The Quiet Game:
This game was hilarious just for its brilliant voice acting and writing (unless it was mostly improvised, in which case it's even more impressive). There seemed to be quite a few ways in which to break the game, so that was a bit of a downside, and the graphics seemed a bit rough around the edges. But it was fun. Even made me burst into uncontrollable laughter once or twice!

Uncontrollable:
The first 3 seconds were AMAZING!! I hoped that restarting the game might generate a different screen, though.

[close]

Thanks Mandle, Stupot and AprilSkies for your lovely comments, and thanks Bulbapuck for a hilarious let's play! I was pretty much laughing all the way through.

Stupot, I haven't played Foundations until just after you mentioned it, but yeah, I can see a bunch of similarities now! Sorry Matt Frith! Amazing game, by the way.

Me and Ultra Magnus had a really fun week, working pretty much day and night on the game and breaking the boundaries of our usual, extremely slow workflow. It was really a great experience and we're already thinking about how to expand on the game (if anyone will be interested in that ), but for now, we'll probably fix a few things and upload it as a demo.

[cat]

What a great OROW!

First of all, thanks to Bulbapuck for organising this - you did a great job as a host!

Thanks to qptain Nemo for choosing such an inspiring topic.

Congratulations to the winners and congrats to everyone who participated and finished a game within one week. I think it's great that so many different games won in the various categories. This emphasises the overall high quality of all entries. From a player's point of view, I'm also happy that all the games were adventure games in one way or another. From the given topic I was afraid that there would be mostly code-heavy non-adventure games in this competition but you awesome guys proved me wrong!

Thanks to everone who played my game and maybe even voted for it! I had lots of fun crafting all the items and I'm glad that many of you seemed to enjoy the result. I also want to point out that raeff helped me a lot by making all the photos required for characters, backgrounds and the various animation frames and object states.
Please note that the music was taken from public resource, namely from Kevin MacLeod's http://incompetech.com/, as mentioned in the credits. I can only take credit for listening to music from his archive and picking a tune .

I'll write some short reviews later on.

[Ponch]

Thanks to everone who played my game and maybe even voted for it! I had lots of fun crafting all the items and I'm glad that many of you seemed to enjoy the result.

You made those little puppets! Those things really made that game stand out from the crowd. Great work! The plastic wrap water was a nice touch too.

[cat]

You made those little puppets! Those things really made that game stand out from the crowd. Great work! The plastic wrap water was a nice touch too.

Thanks! In the first draft of the script there was even a black and white cow, but it was later replaced by Cuppit.

And if Aardman uses cling film for water, I can do that as well

[Ghost]

And if Aardman uses cling film for water, I can do that as well

A childhood's worth of Augsburger Puppenkiste makes me question if there's any other way to make water AT ALL. I really loved the visuals in that game, and you got to some great length with the detail too. The filled Cuppit looked downright adorable.

Also, thanks to everyone who got a little smile out of Uncontrollable. It is by no means a serious entry but at least it is as uncontrollable as it could ever be. Fun fact, for three days I was making a physics-based game where Iron Man had to put a cork into a bottle, which did not work because the bottle was UNSTOPPERABLE. Since the theme was not unstoppable, I had to stop. Control was seriously lost at that point.
That I actually made first place in the ONLY category my entry could even qualify for makes me a very happy Ghost indeed.

Also, the animations of the BASS template girl in FLOPHOUSE cracked me up so hard. Most awesome walkcycle ever. Even better than Ben There Dan That.

[Ponch]

there was even a black and white cow, but it was later replaced

Oh noes!

Alas, what could have been.

Ghost: Kconan did our high quality sprite animations. He deserves all the credit for that.

[yamipanda]

Woohoo!! Thank you so much everyone for voting!
Also, sorry Ghost for forgetting to give you credit for the BASS template. I put in the credits in quite literally the last minute. Stoopid me. >_<

[Ghost]

No credit needed, yami. People using that stuff is all the reward I need.

Kconan: Kudos for cracking me up, then!

[kconan]

Awesome comp fellas!  I enjoyed playing all the games, there was a lot of originality and risk-taking on display.  Thanks to Bulbapuck for hosting and my teammates for a fun week of developing.  My caffeine jitters are just now subsiding.

EDIT: Thanks Ghost, most of the sprite animations were based on ideas that we came up with as a group.

[MiteWiseacreLives!]

Wow! What a rush
Big thanks to all who voted for Flophouse Hijinks! Thanks to everyone who participated and voted in regards to all the games, what a great showing. Hurray to my teammates, we really experienced synergy in the creation process
I think Sunrise Paradise should get a special award for being passed over, you know like DiCaprio

[SilverSpook]

First off, awesome jobs all around, my fellow caffeine fiends!  Caf-fiends!  Big thanks to Bulbapuck for hosting and diligent, highly entertaining playthroughs (I particular lol'ed at your voicing of Dislocation's 'Detective Bohr'.  Spot on, bro, we'll keep you in the loop for voice acting on Neofeud. )  Also I really enjoyed playing all of the entries.  Laughed, cried, spat Rockstar on my laptop, all that good stuff.  Let me know if any Kickstarters are in the works! 

I'd also like to give a special props to Sunrise Paradise.  I felt like the designers really put themselves in it, and it gets the Feels award from me.

I want to personally praise Dislocation, which seems to not have won any popularity votes, but it definitely won my heart. The cheeky defiant intentionally idiotic humor completely won me over and firmly planted a grin on my face. In other words I loved it the most. Would love to see more of that silliness.

Thanks qptain Nemo!  There is at least 2x more silliness in the fully materialized version of Dislocation, which I regret falling short of finishing in time for the OROW 2015 due date.  I felt pretty crap knowing that Bohr and Belle would run through all that cheeky idiotic banter and yet the OROW players would never find out who the mysterious quantum murderer was until AFTER the week of OROW voting! 

Having got 9/10 of the work done in the final 36 hours, it was a case of tortoise-and-hare syndrome, at least on my end.  I'll try to be more slow-n-steady next time! 

Anyway, here's another link to the complete version of Dislocation.

It won my heart, as well as my vote for best game. Cracking effort. And it wasn't even finished!!!1!

Thanks also Stupot for playing and the shining review of the game, despite its faults!  And to answer your earlier question: we'll see about a sequel / prequel.  You know these quantum events are a crapshoot: anything can happen

Dislocation Episode -1: The Case Of The Nerd Coke Junkie

[selmiak]

congrats to team party wagon. I didn't vote for you but hey, cramming that many puzzles and different and funny characters in there is amazing. I had lots of fun with it and was frustrated because I'm missing some $150 and tried everything! EVERYTHING! Somehow I saw an end though and I'm in debt now

congrats to all other winners!

Thanks to Bulbapuck for hosting this OROW, what weird fun this is!

Thanks to everyone who voted for Hybrid for the gfx, yeah, I spent quite some effort on this

Thanks to yamipanda for getting along with my weird ideas and constant nagging and new animation frames here and changes there. Team Awesome rocks!

I liked Conelius the cat the pbest, the cute puppets, the funny soundtrack and the isane plottwist did it for me.

props, kudos, hattips, respect, what have you to Wyz, Baron and Handsfree for the 2 connected games and the effort to obscure this. Even using 2 different AGS version, I'd never suspected these games to be from the same team, even if you had used the same AGS version and used the same characters. The alien language made alien escapade a completely different game to me. Cool beans

[Mandle]

So we are going to give a medal to whoever figured this out the first!
So I'm proudly presenting on behalf of our team the U-asteroid medal for impressive out-of-the-box puzzle solving:


And well we're giving it to Mandle! Congrats!

Geez this OROW sure had some deception going on: well played Mandle: you also did the thing were you reviewed your own game making it virtually impossible to guess you made it. Well played!

AWESOME!!! I feel like Wreckit Ralph!!! Finally got a real medal!!! I'll be putting it on ASAP!

The trickiest part of my "deception" was writing the "replies" from "the creator of Rogered" that Bulbapuck posted for me in this thread. I had to make sure I didn't get caught by writing/punctuation styles and even threw in some consistant spelling mistakes of words I can actually spell right, and a comment about having finally released my first AGS game... I felt a bit creepy talking to myself in the forums but it was all in fun and absolutely not indicative of a deeper underlying mental problem at all...

Right, me?

* Mandle says "Right!"