The following articles take a look back at Heart of the OHR 2018 from the benefit of hindsight. The theme this year was media integration. After years of reviewing the contest entries via screenshots and “fuzzy descriptions,” I wanted to add a new component to the list. YouTube!

This meant not only playing through each game, but also recording my experience for the benefit of authors and players alike. My hope was that this would increase engagement in the voting process, as well as to attract non OHR users and players to the engine. In the end, it did none of these things, but it did increase my YouTube audience somewhat.

Not exactly my goal, but a nice side effect nonetheless.

This was also the year I introduced the Heart of the OHR theme song. Yes, I gave a recurring contest its own theme song. On a related note, I also dedicated a huge chunk of my website to this same contest’s archives. It’s unlikely any of this was necessary. But you know what they say about going big…

Anyone who’s old enough to remember arcades from the late-twentieth century will likely recall the spectator sport of watching hotshot players run through a game on one quarter or token, or, depending on the game’s difficulty, a line of quarters on the cabinet’s shelf just below the screen. These players were usually several years older and several dollars richer, but they were relentless on that joystick, never letting up until the game’s end credits rolled, and watching them beat the game was as exciting as going to any movie or staying up late for any show. In those days, you knew you were good if you attracted a crowd. But you didn’t attract a crowd unless the game was in hot demand.

As the world entered the twenty-first century, however, the appeal of the arcade dwindled. Nowadays, the only place you’ll likely find a row of modern arcade games is inside a playroom at a movie theater or in some concrete bunker at an amusement park, next to the restrooms.

But the spectator sport of watching hotshot players beat the game hadn’t died with the 1990s. On the contrary, it’s alive and well today, but you won’t find it at the mall.

Rather, you’ll find it on YouTube. And on Twitch.

If you search the Gaming categories on today’s freemium streaming sites, you’ll likely discover recordings of players performing speed runs of classic games, or commenting on their first impressions of a new game, or creating an alternative form of television drama using the freeform narrative of a sandbox game. The range is vast.

With several OHR users operating their own YouTube and Twitch channels today, OHR games have joined the ranks of titles represented on videos and livestreams, opening the door for new people to discover the OHR. This new frontier also advances the classic marketing method of producing screenshots and tying them in with articles or store pages. Nowadays, game designers can capture recorded footage of their games, or reviewers can record playthroughs, offering designers an over-the-shoulder view of their players playing their games.

It’s the next great leap in the author-to-player relationship.

With this surge in video playthroughs, it only made sense for Heart of the OHR to join the action. So, for the 2018 season, I recorded an introductory video promoting the contest, and posted four new gameplay videos of each entry each day (in alphabetical order, a couple of hours apart) during “results week.” This trickling of video content throughout the week kept the anticipation of the final results interesting and the viewers coming back for more.

You can check out the entire 2018 gameplay lineup in the following playlist.

One of the staple prizes of Heart of the OHR has been the bug bounty, where potential contestants would request a specific bugfix or feature fulfilled by the end of the year, and James, the engine’s creator, would have to either meet the request or pay a cash prize for failure to deliver. In 2010, James owed a lot of money. In 2012, he got smart and adjusted the bounty according to the size of the request, with harder requests earning much smaller payouts. In 2014, he continued the 2012 trend, for better or for worse, and reached a similar conclusion: a few new fixes and engine features that might have otherwise waited indefinitely.

But in 2016, the demands on James’s time had gotten too great, and he simply couldn’t fulfill any engine requests that year. Maybe the early window had something to do with it, but he had to bow out, and the trend would continue into 2018.

Except…

In 2018, TMC, the OHR’s other lead developer, decided to take the bug bounty prize into his own hands, adopting much of the same conditions that James had. It was an amazing turn of events!

The contestants responded.

Twenty-one games entered via fifteen contestants. Of those fifteen, twelve made requests.

TMC fulfilled three of those requests.

Our new champion!

We all hope it wasn’t too expensive.

Note: In 2020, most contestants had given up on the idea of submitting a bug bounty, and TMC was determined to continue work on his previous list anyway (from 2018), so the 2020 bounty season was small and forgettable.

Over the years, the Heart of the OHR has been modified to accept a more diverse range of games and styles than its starting season had. With 2010 being exclusively about the classic turn-based RPG, later years have certainly kicked it into a new gear, with platformers, strategy games, and walking simulators entering the field and shaking up the competition. With games also skimming the 30-minute time minimum so closely that they could be finished in 15 minutes, some contestants, rightfully, challenged the integrity of the rules.

Are the rules not to be followed? Do they even matter? With games as early as Guo’s Apophenia (2010) and as recent as Prifurin’s Forget-me-not (2020) ending in less than 30 minutes from the starting screen, long before their competitors do, it seems the 30-minute rule, and other “absolute” staples like the “must be an RPG” rule, is meaningless.

And, well, sometimes that’s true. One of my caveats to the 30-minute rule is that a game could be released with less game time if it has a complete story and ending. Including the two listed above, several games throughout the years satisfied this alternative requirement. But because it was never a stated rule, some contestants protested their entries (usually passive-aggressively). And, well, the “must be an RPG” rule has been based on subjective markers since 2012. I’ve boiled the rule down to a singular expectation: “character growth by stats or modification.” As long as a game could demonstrate character growth from start to finish, I was usually willing to accept it.

That said, despite my lenient take on what it takes to get accepted into the Heart of the OHR, some games still don’t make the cut.

In 2018, we had two games that were intended for the contest but ultimately failed acceptance.

One game, Restoration of the K’ab by Kylekrack, was pulled by its author for being woefully unfinished. But even if he hadn’t pulled it, it still would’ve failed entry. Reason? Not only was it unfinished, but it represented the very heart of what we’d call a “tech demo,” which is exactly the kind of game Heart of the OHR was designed to reject. The game had a cool premise, with NPCs entering and exiting buildings in real-time, allowing the player to track their movements no matter where they went. But it simply went nowhere. Playing to the end offered no reward nor incentive to finish. Great start that barely started. It couldn’t make the cut, even if I’d wanted it to.

The other game, Hanu in Hell by Mammothstuds, actually was submitted by its author for the contest, but it had just two playable areas, with one of them incomplete, just a couple of enemy types to battle, and no discernible story driving it. The player could see all there was to see in about ten minutes, and there wasn’t much to see in that time. Even if I had allowed it to enter, it would’ve bombed in the rankings, assuming it would have received any votes at all. In fact, I think that was one of the reasons I pulled it: no one wanted to cast a vote for it.

And those are just the examples from 2018. Other seasons have seen other rejections. Yes, it’s rare, and to get rejected takes a particular skill in of itself, but it can and has been done. Even 2020 had a game that was full of promise yet empty of suitability. Moonday by Prifurin is lovely to look at and has some content to explore, but I rejected it because I couldn’t figure out how to play it. Even if it’s a finished game, I’d still like to understand it. But I had no idea what I was supposed to do or how to advance. Sometimes I’ll reject a game for simply being unplayable.

As of this writing, neither of 2018’s rejected games ever saw an update.

As I’ve mentioned in previous articles, Heart of the OHR has had quite the journey each season getting its contest results out to readers.

In 2010, the contest results debuted on the one site that everyone had expected to find them, HamsterSpeak’s January 2011 issue. It was a no-brainer.

The 2012 season launched with the same expectation, but then HamsterSpeak closed its doors shortly after the contest’s launch, so I had to find a new host for the end of contest report. Fortunately, The Hamster Burrow, the community’s latest and hottest OHR blog, was willing to take up HamsterSpeak’s slack. It posted the 2012 results in their native format in January 2013. Again, I expected The Hamster Burrow to step up again for 2014, but like HamsterSpeak, it closed up shop just months after the 2012 results went live.

In 2014, I brought the contest results back to HamsterSpeak’s host site, Super Walrus Land, and the site’s owner and operator, The Wobbler, agreed to host them again in 2016.

But in 2018, The Wobbler joined the contest with his winning entry, Kaiju Big Battel: Fighto Fantasy. And, because he didn’t want to present a conflict of interest for being a contestant (again, his game won!), he declined hosting for the 2018 season. So, I had to find another host.

This time, it was James Paige, owner of the Hamster Republic himself, who stepped in and took the results into his capable hands.

I was giddy. I couldn’t wait to see what James would do with the page formatting. After all, he’s the one who had put an animated Bob the Hamster waving at visitors on the Hamster Republic homepage. Clearly, I was about to post the greatest contest results in the history of Heart of the OHR, and this was on the lead-up to the first-of-its-kind Results Week, which would reveal my playthrough of each game four times a day. What a turnaround!

I’d sent him the contest document (as I do with every site host every season), along with the screenshots, and waited for his response. Results Week was about to start, and my time to announce the winners was drawing near. Everything was going according to plan.

I’d sent the document, but I needed the HTML files. No problem. After a couple of other false starts, I’d submitted all that I needed.

Then I got the link.

And I saw the results.

…

It was exactly as I had sent it. Plain. Boring. No color. But also pushed to the side.

It was ugly. Ugly.

I panicked. I couldn’t present the results this way. I needed a solution. And time was running out. I needed the results posted by 6:00 the next day. I needed a better format!

Fortunately, the solution was close by.

After a quick dialogue with James, he told me about a site he often used called W3.CSS to find adequate designs for his pages. I still had another day before the first videos would drop, so I took some extra time searching the site for a theme I liked. The one I found had Courier-like fonts and a neat coffeehouse haze over the screenshots. It also had buttons that could pop-out short phrases when pressed. It was perfect for presenting the game achievements, even if I couldn’t figure out how to keep them both open.

The page design wasn’t exactly perfect, however, since Heart of the OHR had nothing to do with coffeehouses, so I swapped out the banner with the photo of a heart etched in wet beach sand. I also changed the titles and spent the next few hours porting all of that MS Word document content into the new template. I’d worked on it until morning.

I passed it on. James corrected some of my HTML mistakes.

A short time later, the changes had gone live.

But I was also out of time. I had to announce the winners. So, I submitted the link for viewing.

Everyone agreed the new page was the best design yet.

Whew!

Fortunately, no one said anything about the mismatched achievement I’d given to Bale (“Indecisive Title Award” belongs to One Pirate: Adventure in the Crystal Cave), or the few grammatical errors that I made in the transition. To this day, the mistakes are still there. But hopefully, I’ve fixed them for this page.

When the OHRRPGCE first attracted budding game designers to its niche community, it came with an unwritten expectation that all games made with it would be free to play. Now, this was not a restriction, but part of its freeware DNA. Because the engine itself was free, then so would every game ever made for it, ever.

And this expectation permeated throughout the early community, especially since the marquee game, Wandering Hamster, was also free. But one user, whose name has been lost to time, dared to buck this trend in 1999 or 2000 with an overhyped, underdelivered title called Fat Frog. No one knows or remembers what this game was about, but a few older users recall it being sold for eight dollars on CD-ROM. For those who weren’t alive in the twentieth century, CD-ROM was how games got onto computers when they weren’t downloaded from Steam or Itch.io (or in 1999 terms, Geocities or Angelfire).

Needless to say, Fat Frog was a pariah in the OHR community for many years. No one remembered the game because so few had ever played it. And so few had played it because no one wanted to buy it. This wasn’t to say it was a bad game. Those who did play it thought it was “fine.” But did they want to spend eight dollars on Fat Frog when everything else on the OHR was free? No.

And that was the problem.

By 1999, the DOS platform was already antiquated. That meant any game built on it would have to tap into the nostalgia vein, because nothing on DOS was modern. Microsoft Windows had been on the market for several years, and games at the turn of the century were making the most of the latest hardware, including those that required accelerated graphics cards. To charge money for a game that had graphics fresh out of 1992 and music straight out of 1982, was a bit like paying ten dollars for a soggy mall hot dog with no toppings. A few people bought it. But just a few, and not happily.

For anyone wanting to monetize their time, the OHR was simply not the right option, and the creator of Fat Frog, much to his insistence that his game would never be free, ensured that it would also never get played. Was the tradeoff of time for the hope of earning money worth it?

I don’t know the answer to that question, but the game’s creator hasn’t been seen since.

That was in the days of the BAM music chip, of course. Fast-forward twenty-two years, and now you’ve got an engine that can play any type of sound file, almost any type of 16-bit graphics, and display any type of screen slice (for charts and heads-up displays, for example). While the engine is still very indie and quite retro, it’s definitely leapt forward far enough that designers today can competently mimic a classic SNES game, with much faithfulness and maybe just a few caveats.

And among its latest leaps is the OHR’s ability to integrate with the Steam engine, which means that OHR games are now fashionably salable, even if most Steam users think they’re RPG Maker games.

Of course, it didn’t quite start that way. One of the early Steam adopters, Void Pyramid (2016, by Willy Elektrix), gained hundreds if not thousands of players quite easily, not because it was amazing (even though it’s quite good), but because it was free. Even on Steam, the earliest OHR games to adopt the platform retained their freeware roots.

But like Fat Frog before them, some dared to tread the premium waters, the “Steamium” waters. Mr. Triangle’s Adventure, for example, dared to launch at…a dollar! (*Gasp!*) Likewise, Red Triangle Games’s other 2016 hit, Surfasaurus, made the jump to Steam also for a dollar.

These were small steps, of course. And, because they were also available on Android (for free), RMZ (the games’ lead developer) didn’t want to charge what they were probably worth. But he charged something. And, while games that command higher prices affect player psychology differently than those priced for pennies, putting a price of any kind on an OHR game and receiving no complaints was a step in a bold direction, and proof that the OHR was ready for its journey into commercialism. The fact that RMZ could do it twice and still get support was just confirmation that our beloved free-to-use nostalgia engine was ready for the majors.

Then again, RMZ’s games sold for just a dollar. Fat Frog had sold for eight dollars. Maybe charging money for an OHR game was not the taboo we thought it was once upon a time. Maybe it had all come down to how much was charged.

Enter 2018.

Void Pyramid was free and Mr. Triangle’s Adventure and Surfasaurus were both selling for just a dollar, so the real test of player willingness to spend real money on an OHR game had not yet been given. The only game that dared to rise above the one-dollar threshold was The Wobbler’s short game C.Kane, but even that was priced low compared to its competition. For just $2.99, a player could get an evening’s worth of entertainment and meta-commentary on the traditional RPG and not feel ripped off. Of course, in traditional OHR style, no gamer was that interested in making it a hit. Maybe it was under-promoted. Maybe too many people had made too many comparisons to the smash hit Undertale to take it seriously. Whatever the reason, the three-dollar game performed about the same as the one-dollar games. Eventually it would be reduced to free.

But The Wobbler had another game in his pocket that wouldn’t be free, or cheap.

It was time to see if an OHR game could command actual money from actual gamers with open wallets.

Kaiju Big Battel: Fighto Fantasy (2018) is not just an OHR game. It’s a game that required licensing and contracted artists and musicians to exist. It’s a game that cost real money to make. So, it makes sense that it would cost a lot to buy (by OHR standards, at least). Thanks to the licensing fees for each sale, The Wobbler has to charge ten dollars just to earn a royalty. Question is, how well does Kaiju sell? It’s 2018’s Heart of the OHR winner and one of the highest rated games on the OHR. If any OHR game can prove its ten-dollar worth, Kaiju Big Battel: Fighto Fantasy is that game.

As of this writing, more than three years after its release, Kaiju Big Battel: Fighto Fantasy has 26 Steam reviews and a 100% Positive rating.

It may not compete with Undertale, not even close, but at least it’s getting some playtime. And sales.

So, the OHR still has mountains to climb before it can churn out a true commercial success, but at least more games are trying to break out now. Since Kaiju Big Battel: Fighto Fantasy’s release, we’ve seen two Willy Elektrix games hit the platform, Alien Squatter (2019, $5.99) and Xoo: Xeno Xafari (2020, $5.99), and two RMZ games, Axe Cop (2020, $9.99) and Red Triangle Super Collection (2021, free to play). In each case, someone out there has bought a copy, and some have even left a review. In Alien Squatter’s case, 41 people have left a review.

Not bad for a game that costs almost as much as Fat Frog.

Yes, the OHR is maturing, and the days of strictly-free hobbyist development are no longer exclusive.

For that reason, I thought it was time to give Heart of the OHR a video intro and theme song. After all, if the games that enter are going commercial, then I might as well give the contest a commercial, too! You can watch it below.

Analytical Note: Willy Elektrix seems to understand how to crack the Steam code better than most OHR users. As of this writing, Void Pyramid has 122 reviews at 96% Positive, and Xoo: Xeno Xafari has 16 reviews at 100% Positive. His non-OHR game, Superstorm Melon Date (2021, free to play), has 62 ratings at 91% Positive. The next highest rated OHR game is C.Kane at 37 reviews and 91% Positive, which started off at $2.99 but is currently free to play. Not sure what Willy is doing differently to earn a stronger reputation faster, but it’s working. And his price point of $5.99 seems to also work well. For anyone wanting to sell an OHR game, it might be worth asking Willy for tactical advice. Not sure what his answer would be, but hopefully it’s something better than “I dunno.”

Thanks for taking this trip down memory lane with me. Hope you enjoyed it. Don’t forget, you can always view the original announcement threads for this and other Heart of the OHR contest seasons by clicking on their respective links below.

You can also jump to the next season’s contest page series by clicking on the button below. There, you’ll find even more nuggets into the life and times of Heart of the OHR. Hope you’ll check it out.

Finally, I want to offer a special thanks to everyone who participated in each Heart of the OHR contest season. It goes without saying, but I’m going to say it anyway, this contest could not exist without you. Obviously. So, thank you for making it possible if you were one of the participants. I also want to thank the prize holders for volunteering their gifts and services, as well as the voters who gave up their time to play these games. This contest was among the most successful contests of the 2010s because of your participation. It came back every even-numbered year because I knew you’d come back, too. So, thanks again for making Heart of the OHR such a special event each time.

I hope that whatever replaces it in the 2020s will be just as special.