The following articles take a look back at Heart of the OHR 2016 from the benefit of hindsight. The theme this year was change. No matter how long a contest trends in this community, the expectations of its participants never alter.

This year, I wanted to challenge the status quo by moving the contest window around and allowing more controversial titles to enter. Apparently, I wasn’t the only one who wanted a change. We also saw a change in how prizes were handled. Whether these changes were good for the contest can be left up to debate. But the turnout doesn’t lie. This season had the lowest participation and lowest average score of the entire Heart of the OHR.

Maybe change isn’t always for the best.

Since 2010, the community has debated the nature of the RPG and used its corporate definition to justify whether a game should enter the Heart of the OHR. The basic consensus in 2010 was that an RPG on the OHR had to play like the original Final Fantasy, since that’s what the OHR was built for. I’d used this very argument to reject a capable adventure game called Saminaster and Sorcery from the original contest, despite liking it, because it lacked the “required elements” that went into a traditional RPG. But then I allowed the rule to bend in 2012 to allow a side-scrolling adventure called Stand and a puzzle RPG called Silhouette to enter. Even though they were nothing like Final Fantasy, I had a hard time claiming they weren’t RPGs. They were, for the most part. They were just designed differently than what we’d normally expect from a traditional RPG.

I’d argue that my 2012 decision started the slippery slope toward classifying any game as an RPG if it maintained certain conditions, but looking back, I don’t think that’s fair. The actual slippery slope began in 2014 with the inclusion of T4R4D1DDL3 under the “In the Spirit of 1999” rule. That game was not an RPG in the classic sense. But it did capture “the heart of the OHR” as it played like some of the OHR’s oldest titles.

But as much as these games challenged the core rule and stirred up healthy discussions about what should be allowed to enter, none of these allowances launched the Heart of the OHR’s greatest RPG debate and ultimate controversy.

No, that honor would have to go to the 2016 contest winner, Surfasaurus.

Here’s the thing: Surfasaurus is an RPG. Sort of. But what it’s not is a Final Fantasy-style RPG. Rather, it’s a Rockstar Games type of RPG, or more accurately, a mobile game RPG. It’s a game that has no battles, but it does have noticeable character growth dependent on player actions. For example, learning surf moves from specific townies (which is possible only after fulfilling certain conditions) leads to permanent skill acquisitions. Some may connect this feature to the modern roguelike. But Surfasaurus tracks all types of stats like strength and endurance, which determines how much action Brown, the dinosaur hero, can accomplish in a given day. The fact that certain actions or purchases can increase these stats rather than battles and monster-fighting makes no difference to the RPG nature of the game. Brown’s character still increases by player action, and that’s the most important part of an RPG.

That’s always been my defense, at least. For that same reason, I see games like Bully and Grand Theft Auto like sandbox RPGs because they, too, increase character ability and track stats as certain actions are performed. Maybe this is similar to how scored games like the old Metroid works, but that’s what makes genre defining sticky. Interpretation ultimately comes down to personal perception, and whether a game can be qualified as an RPG depends on what conventions are required to make a game an RPG. As far as Heart of the OHR is concerned, an RPG is a game where the character increases abilities and/or stats throughout the course of his or her journey, and Surfasaurus definitely has all of that, even if some voters couldn’t see nor reconcile that.

Also, you can furnish Brown’s apartment with swag. I mean, if that’s not the mark of an RPG…

I don’t think my justification ever settled well with certain voters, though, and Surfasaurus, despite winning, suffered in the votes as a result. While most players judged it on the quality of their experience playing it, some couldn’t get behind it as an RPG and knocked off points in protest.

In the end, they could score a game under whatever conditions they wanted, and if not satisfying their idea of what makes a game an RPG were to lead to it losing points, then so be it. But that’s one of the challenges with allowing conflicting perspectives into a common contest. We won’t always agree on the principles behind the rules. We just have to deal with the final outcome.

Then again, that’s why this contest has just one host and rule-maker. At the end of the day, Surfasaurus was given permission to enter, and because it was the best game of 2016, it was allowed to win. RPG or not.

While most contests are built on a produce-everything-during-the-window system, which means that no work can go into the game until the contest period begins, Heart of the OHR ignores that principle and just asks participants to upload whatever game they deem ready within the window, regardless when they started. For this reason, authors who suspect their eligible games may be ready during that window will volunteer their titles as entries. At that point, they’ll announce their intentions, claim their bug bounties, and then do something else until about two months before the window closes (if they don’t work tirelessly day after day, racing for the finish line).

In other cases, the contestant may wait and see how progress goes before committing anything. If it looks like they’ll have something ready before Heart of the OHR closes, they’ll volunteer their game, and then they, too, will become part of the contest. Again, simple and straightforward.

Then there are the people who release a game within the window and say nothing of their intention to join. This is the part where I have to track them down and ask if they’d like to participate. Most of the time they say yes. If I can get their attention. Or, rather, if they check their private messages before voting begins.

But sometimes I can’t get their attention. Sometimes they release a game as someone might lower a bag of smelly bananas onto a picnic table: they back away and maybe even make a run for it.

In the case of the bag of rotten bananas, I’ll have to suggest the game’s entrance as an “unofficial entry.” What this means is that I’ll allow people to vote on the game as part of the contest, but I’ll leave it open to interpretation. If one-third or fewer of the voters choose to rate it, then I’ll leave it unranked. But if it gets substantial playtime among voters, I’ll include it.

This year, we had our first unranked unofficial title, Fruity Quest.

I should mention that the only reason I nominated Fruity Quest as an unofficial entry was because it had a release date that fell within the contest window. But it wasn’t an easy nomination. In short, it came with a few red flags.

1. It was a Castle Paradox-only release. Even though I search Castle Paradox’s game list for potential entries (again, those RPGs that have an eligible release date), games that go exclusively to Castle Paradox are the ones by authors who haven’t joined the Slime Salad ecosystem, which has been the main hub of the OHR community since 2008. It’s basically like posting exclusively to MySpace in 2016. Why not just use Facebook like everyone else (not because it’s trendy but because that’s where the audience is)? Ignoring Slime Salad leaves me to wonder if the author even knows about it, and this would be the case only if he hasn’t spent much time developing in the last ten years.

2. This particular title seemed suspiciously “older.” It had the hallmarks of a newbie game, like blocky graphics, crammed dialogue, and immature themes. But it also had Bush-era criticism (again, the contest is in 2016), which makes me wonder if the game was sitting on the author’s hard drive for the last eleven years before he finally shrugged and just released it for the heck of it.

3. Because it seemed both older and discarded, I wasn’t sure if it was even a 2016 release. The release date on Castle Paradox showed 2016, but sometimes old files get new uploads, so I couldn’t be sure. Nothing about the game seemed modern. But a release date is a release date.

I’d offered the game to the community to make its own judgment about it, but I was clear that no one actually had to vote on it. Too many questions surrounding it, and the only reason I didn’t reject it outright was because the 2016 participation level was lower than usual, and I needed as many titles as I could find to make the contest sufficiently competitive.

In the end, the community spoke. Fruity Quest got three votes, well below the required voter threshold to earn a rank. So, I left it on the list as an honorable mention, but I never ranked it with the other, more official entries.

To date, no one has complained that it remains unranked, and the creator, as far as I know, doesn’t know his game had even made the contest.

Heart of the OHR began as an idea in early June 2010 and quickly gained traction as a contest worth trying. Once I got all of my resources together (a.k.a. my “prize commitments”), I decided on a July 1, 2010 launch. Because I wanted the contest to run long enough to include plenty of eligible entries, I set the end date far beyond the usual contest ending, from one month to five. This put the end of the original Heart of the OHR at November 30th.

Originally, I’d wanted games ready for voting by December 1st, but as the contest drew to a close, I saw the need for a small bonus window for bugfixing. If players downloaded a game on December 1st, played for a few minutes, then encountered a bug so egregious that they couldn’t continue, then that game’s score would likely suffer. That is, unless the player informed the designer of the problem, and the designer promptly fixed it, thus uploading a new, more playable version. Sometimes, between the report, the bug hunt, and the patch, that bugfix would take days to come out. And depending on how far into the game the glitch happens, it may take days for anyone to discover it. In those cases, what’s a designer to do? Well, I gave contestants extra time to fix bugs before the voting could officially begin. I called this the “bugfix period” (more on that in the next article).

So, between the official window and the bugfix period, Heart of the OHR didn’t actually end until mid-December, when schools were getting out for the holidays, and families were prepping for vacation. It was a time when priorities shifted from work to holiday-thinking, and more people could find just a little extra time to play a game.

In other words, it was a good time to start a voting period.

But more importantly was the window itself. Starting in the middle of summer meant some participants could get a running start. For those in school, the summer meant fewer priorities, so they could put more time into early development. If they established a routine, then even when priorities compounded in the fall, they could still keep up with some development tasks. Of course, not everyone could take advantage of this season’s perks, but some did, and that was obvious in late November when it became clear the contest actually worked.

The turnout was healthy enough that in 2012, I decided to add a month to the schedule. Beginning on June 1st, contestants had the entire summer to gain momentum, not just part of it. In turn, they produced even more games than they had the previous season. Again, it worked.

So I copy/pasted 2012’s season onto 2014. The turnout was the same as 2010. Good, but not as good as 2012. Maybe the season had bitten too deep into the holidays. Maybe by Halloween, designers wanted to work on something else. Or maybe they were just too busy to finish. Maybe their strong start whimpered off past September.

Because I wanted to find the best window for the contest season, I decided to experiment with a new window for 2016. Instead of running from June to mid-December, I changed the window to March to mid-August. I figured this would give the Spring Breakers a running start, but it would also allow all designers to keep the momentum going throughout the summer. This meant no holiday distractions and fewer school conflicts. I figured it would increase participation by several degrees.

Nope!

To date, Heart of the OHR 2016 has the lowest turnout of any season. When I reinstated the original release window for 2018 and set it to begin in May (making for a whopping seven months of development time), participation literally doubled from the previous season.

So, May to December is a good window, apparently. March to August, not so much.

So, as I mentioned in the previous article, I created the bugfix period to help authors fix any game-breaking bugs before voting began, allowing them a chance for maximum favor with players. This meant players could start playing as of December 1st and report any bugs they found. In theory, this should’ve worked well. If authors had one to two extra weeks to fix those bugs (or wrap up loose ends, which was another permission given to those participating in the bugfix period), then they could enter the voting phase on a much stronger foot.

However, the problem was that not all players were willing to go back and play the bugfixed version. Once they played the original version, they were ready to vote, even if they held off giving their numbers until the voting window began. So, even with the game now offering a better experience, not everyone went back for that improvement.

The point of the bugfix period was to create that better experience for the official vote.

Because the risk of bad judgment was too high under the current system, I decided to roll the bugfix period in with the main window. This meant that contestants no longer had to release a game by the end of the official window (November 30) to become eligible. Rather, the bugfix period marked the new official contest ending, with November 30th being the new guideline for finishing core gameplay before fixing bugs and tying up loose threads (or in 2016’s case, July 31st).

Even though 2016 didn’t necessarily benefit from this new policy, the following two seasons were some of the highest rated of the contest’s history. So, it likely made some impact on the quality of each game’s final results moving forward, and that’s all most of us can hope for.

There are two guarantees in life: people will always expect the usual, and time will always move faster than our projects can progress. There are actually more guarantees in life like death, taxes, and Taco Tuesdays, but these are the two we care about for the sake of this article.

To motivate participation in the first Heart of the OHR, I asked James if he could offer a targeted bugfix or feature request fulfillment for anyone who submitted a game before the deadline. Not only did he say yes, but he even orchestrated a “bug bounty” list, where he recorded the potential contestant, the announced game, the bug or feature request, and the amount he owed the contestant if he failed to deliver by the end of the contest.

When the contest finally ended, however, he owed a fair amount of money to people.

Come 2012, and he offered the prize again. And like before, the contestants had to make their requests by approximately the halfway mark to ensure he had a chance to finish the requests.

And like before, when the 2012 contest ended, he owed even more money to people (but he’d learned his lesson from the previous contest and set the bounty amount according to likelihood of completion, with near impossible requests getting the least amount of return).

Rinse and repeat for the 2014 season. But two years, dozens of unfulfilled bug and feature requests, a fraction of fulfilled requests, and personal and occupational responsibilities later, James came to the conclusion that he would not have the time in 2016 to work on bug bounties and stack his to-do list yet again. So, he declined to offer the typical entry prize that year.

*Gasp!*

Perhaps the early window contributed to the change in offering this year, or maybe the measure of time commitments fell out of balance for the OHR, but James was not able to offer the incentive this year, which meant I had to come up with a new incentive if I wanted to satisfy the expectation that entrants would get something for entering.

So, I asked TMC for help.

Or, rather, I was tempted to ask TMC for help.

But let’s be honest; the bug bounty was James’s thing. I couldn’t expect TMC to start paying other people for the bugs he couldn’t fix on time. It’s supposed to be a hobbyist engine!

So, I took all bugfix and feature requests off the table and gave contestants free copies of my e-books instead.

In a community focused on homemade RPGs, my e-books weren’t a popular offering.

*Gasp!*

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.