OHR
Icons: Dogero
A Feature by FyreWulff
A Feature by FyreWulff
THE
BEGINNING
Dogero started out his life like many of my other characters - in a gigantic notebook that my mom gave to me and my brothers to doodle in. It was one of those super thick college-style things that I can never find anymore.
Anyway, we used these notebooks for everything but homework (an issue that was sure to annoy her to no end, forever). I started making "platformer" games out of these notebooks. I seem to remember Donkey Kong Country 2 was fairly recent at the time, so the games were based off that. I would draw the levels out, including collectibles, cannons that would fire the "player" around the level, and so on. We didn't have a computer at the time (or any one that had easily usable game creation languages) so the games were entirely played by me pointing the cap end of a pen at the paper and having one of my brothers play
the level by saying stuff like "move right", "jump", etc. They had "save files" (their last page, coins, etc) written in the first couple of pages of the notebook.
Our favorite pet at the time was a basset hound named Otis, so naturally the game was called Dogworld. I think you can see where this is going.
It was something that we would probably all say is extremely dorky today, but we had fun doing it.
As these games started to evolve, I decided to make some characters around them; this would make them more complete experiences. At this point though, I only named them.
LEARNING HOW TO SELL IT TO PEOPLE
Around this time I stopped making the platformer games in the notebooks and moved onto making a new series that I just simply called "Mazegame". Mazegame was just a series of mazes with power ups, checkpoints, and story pages thrown in. I even had "3D" mazes where I carefully cut holes out of the paper with the pen (by pressing into it really hard). The player would encounter the hole and flip the page over to continue.
I made this game inside of a yellow notebook that was smaller than the other ones in size, but still had quite a few pages. I seem to remember that I filled about 70 pages of that sucker with mazes, with a complete story and so on.
This was also the first game that I'd "release" to anyone outside of my house or friends. In our 6th grade class, the teacher let us bring in games or just make ones out of the "games corner" that we wanted. I asked her if I could put the maze game book into the corner, she looked over it and said yes. A few of my classmates played it and said they liked it. Success!
Sometime after that though, I lost track of that thing :(
BACK TO THE DOG WORLD
The N64 had just come out. People cared more about characters than before, so I finally drew the main character, aptly named Dog Hero. (Once again, you can see where this is going.) He had on a trucker hat, a vest, some pants, and shoes. It was probably the best ever drawing I made of him. His villain at this point was an evil robot with tuning-fork style spikes coming out of his head and a Vectorman-esque body. It was a pretty impressive villian for that time
(and fairly easy to draw).
I got ahold of another massive notebook and started making the 6th version of "Dogworld". I gave the hero friends and other enemies. Katina, John (now Johan), Paul (now Pyrus), a prototype Mi'la character, and a shop character with a name that I won't ever reveal and didn't make it to the actual game version were all made here. Every 10 levels or so was a "shop page" where the player was allowed to upgrade or buy new levels (completely on the honor system). I
probably worked on this version for a few months before starting on "Dog World 7: Dogquest", which was in an even bigger notebook. I have no idea where I kept getting these notebooks. This notebook had the new villian of "Gahn" and an RPG-esque level up system.
It was around this time that I was watching my brother browse Pokemon sites. You know, all those Geocities sites that had the same copy/pasted line about finding Mew under the truck? I saw a banner for an OHRRPGCE "RPG GAME ENGINE" site there. I told him to bookmark that so I could check it out later. This was before the days of usable search engines, so if I hadn't have been there I probably would have never seen it.
GETTING USED TO THE ENGINE
This site was one hosted on the AOL member servers, I believe. I'll cut out all the drama that people probably know about; it's not important. From there I found certain other forums that the community posted at.
At first I lurked the community and watched it. I noticed that the usual game release cycle was a post, a week later a "demo", and then the game never updated again. As a result, people that ran the various sites started making fun of new users and started calling a demo a "newbie game". I swore at that point that I would never release a "demo", that my "newbie game" would totally blow them away! Fight the power!
I made an initial test version of my project. You can probably find this screen buried in Jade somewhere in the SVN version. At that point I considered this a sequel to my notebook game so I called it Dogquest 2: Secret of the Gold Crystal, complete with MSPaint gold crystal and a totally awesome 2 wrapping around the crystal. I set out by making the first area first - a simple house in a single 16x10 screen. The inside of the house came later as I figured out doors. Then I made the overworld (quite fancy I might add - an entire 3 tiles) and the first "town", which was a few houses around a big lake. Guess what the town
was named?
"Biglake Town".
Yes, I didn't really put much effort into naming things.
As I continued to pound away at the game, I attracted the attention of another person named Mike, Mikael "Royal" Hogstrom. You may know him from such games as Memoria, which was probably the most intensively fake-scripted game ever in the engine's history. He drew some tiles for me to use so that people would actually look at the game, and drew up a cartoony version of Dogero based off my description of my notebook drawing. You see, back then scanners were expensive! Not like today where you could probably just take a cellphone pic or buy a $10 webcam. You can play with this cartoony version of Dogero through the secret 'bonus' area in Jade, or if you're lazy you can just look at it in the game data.
BUILDING A NETWORK
Drama was at an all time high in the community at this point. I think there was up to 5 different message boards that claimed to be the main one, and now people were forming into "companies" and working together on games. A community member asked me to join his group, and I did. I brought along Dogquest with me.
Soon after that, Charbile joined this company (foreshadowing!), and asked me about the game. Around this time was when I renamed Dogquest 2 to Sword of Jade: Parallel Dreams. The game still had the House -> Overworld -> Biglake setup. A community member named Mew drew me a new title screen graphic with her interpretation of the Sword of Jade, which made the game feel even closer to being done.
Soon after that, I had Charbile asking me questions left and right about the game. He made me two sketches of Dogero: one of him sitting down and cleaning a sword and the other in a battle pose. I was instantly sold, since the sketches literally looked like the character did in my mind! To this point, the game itself had just implemented the new OHRRPGCE feature of vehicles, and a new forest town due to the lifting of the map count limit.
Some stuff happened and me and Charbile ended up on our own with the game. After some discussions, the story for this game was thrown out and 'moved forward' so to speak from my outlines for the game's sequel; the game got officially named Sword of Jade 2: Parallel Dreams at this point to indicate that we were going to come back to the prequel story later.
REBUILDING A CHARACTER
Around this point, I finally renamed Dog Hero into Doghero and then Dogero. I was horribly attached to the name! I shuffled around the characters - K. Lee was no longer the main character's girlfriend, Dart Yujo became a nemesis instead of a friend, etc. A selection of about 15 heroes was reduced to a sane amount of 4. Dogero was the main character, his parents killed, a guy trying to make things right in the world. Mi'la was the obvious love interest and a warrior. John was the geek and technology guy. Paul was the brute.
Over our next discussions, we constantly went back and forth with the character of Dogero, rebuilding his story to better fit the plan for the game. The other characters got tweaked; while half of them had shades of my personality, the other half had shades of Charbile. It instantly improved them, and it didn't hurt that Charbile was majoring in a field that lent itself to writing. This was about late 2001 or early 2002 when all the characters were nailed down. Charbile
eventually came up with the idea to rename Paul to Pyrus and John to Johan, which I agreed with to make their names less plain. You can still see their old names attached to unused music in the .RPG file as "Paul Death Theme" and "John Death Theme" (intended to be heard if the player Game Over'd while playing solo with that character).
Soon after that, we sat down (or rather, I was forced) and I outlined the entire game from beginning to end in a gigantic ICQ conversation. It was this ICQ log that was converted into the game's design document - there's even tidbits of the original conversation left in the pages. Other parts of the conversation were converted into tables, outlines, and more useful data.
I think it was round this time that we finished the idea of the Real Time System, and I had released a tech demo/proof of concept to the OHR Help Me forum for feedback. Thanks to testing by Harlockhero, I was able to quickly fix bugs for it. I think we also released a later tech demo to Rinku's monthly OHR magazine that he was running at the time. The tech demo was definitely a hype tool and got the response I wanted.
FINISHING THE STORY
At this point we thought Dogero would see the world in a short amount of time. We were unstoppable! And then real life happened. Charbile went to school and could no longer afford his own internet; I also went off the internet for a bit, but the other times I was just completely out of contact. The project slowed to a crawl as it was a pain to self-test the game; you could no longer bounce ideas and updates off the other person. I prototyped out the towns and some of the story while I waited for him to get internet back so the actual final graphics and so on could be implemented.
About 6 months later he finally got back on the web, and we were off to the races. We finally decided on the story you see in the final game. The beginning of the game was 100% locked down in about late 2002-2003, with Dogero entering the first town, being annoyed by Mi'la, the decision if you wanted to take her with you to the dungeon or not. We definitely wanted a 'choice engine' at that point, where players could actually affect the game and remove the hard linear
nature of most of the OHRRPGCE games of the time. This was probably not a sane decision.
We had setbacks after that point. It's drama I won't get into, but it was hard to get anything done when we had to fight people that were supposedly working with us. A certain person or two even apparently had to spend their time trying to prove the game didn't exist or was a prank (which I actually found humorous). Comparisons to Duke Nukem Forever were posted and PM'd to me. We carried on.
Eventually Dogero came together with some last minute changes to the character and the addition of the Proem. The Proem was a "secret" project that Charbile had been working on without telling me. It essentially replaced the theoretical "Sword of Jade 1" and gave a good backstory to justify and frame Dogero for the game, although at this point I had already dropped the "2" from the game's title. Needless to say, I was impressed, and I hope the players were impressed by the proem and how it fit into the narrative as well. It's a good thing Charbile made it in secret, because there's a good chance I would have shot it down as another section of the game we couldn't waste time on.
The end result of the character (well, at least I hoped) was one that was down on his luck but learns to never give up. Thanks to the writing ability of Charbile, everyone spoke in the game without stunted rhythm and sounded more natural. The character of Dogero had come a long way from being the cap end of a ballpoint pen. He was now a living character on over 50,000 computer screens and counting. It's a fact that still floors me.
ADVICE ON CREATING YOUR OWN GAME AND CHARACTER
1) Make the game you want to play, not what you think everyone else wants to play. If you are working on the game and isn't fun for you, you can't make a good game.
2) Trolls, naysayers, supporters, and middle-of-the-roaders - they will all exist. Read the criticism but don't take it personally.
3) There's nothing wrong with hype, but don't hype the same feature too much. Feel free to gently remind people that the game exists, however.
4) Don't be afraid to open your character to changes by other people. It was extremely hard for me to get used to the idea of letting Charbile even modify Dogero one bit, but the suggestions and little changes here and there improved the character. Get a second opinion.
5) Know your character's destiny from the start. I won't spoil the ending to SoJ here, but I planned for what happens to Dogero from the start. It gives you a goal to work towards. If you can't decide what their destiny is, you'll end up in a LOST type situation where you'll have to somehow convince people that they should keep caring about the character (and you don't have millions of dollars to sit around for 10 hours a day to decide this on the fly)
Dogero started out his life like many of my other characters - in a gigantic notebook that my mom gave to me and my brothers to doodle in. It was one of those super thick college-style things that I can never find anymore.
Anyway, we used these notebooks for everything but homework (an issue that was sure to annoy her to no end, forever). I started making "platformer" games out of these notebooks. I seem to remember Donkey Kong Country 2 was fairly recent at the time, so the games were based off that. I would draw the levels out, including collectibles, cannons that would fire the "player" around the level, and so on. We didn't have a computer at the time (or any one that had easily usable game creation languages) so the games were entirely played by me pointing the cap end of a pen at the paper and having one of my brothers play
the level by saying stuff like "move right", "jump", etc. They had "save files" (their last page, coins, etc) written in the first couple of pages of the notebook.
Our favorite pet at the time was a basset hound named Otis, so naturally the game was called Dogworld. I think you can see where this is going.
It was something that we would probably all say is extremely dorky today, but we had fun doing it.
As these games started to evolve, I decided to make some characters around them; this would make them more complete experiences. At this point though, I only named them.
LEARNING HOW TO SELL IT TO PEOPLE
Around this time I stopped making the platformer games in the notebooks and moved onto making a new series that I just simply called "Mazegame". Mazegame was just a series of mazes with power ups, checkpoints, and story pages thrown in. I even had "3D" mazes where I carefully cut holes out of the paper with the pen (by pressing into it really hard). The player would encounter the hole and flip the page over to continue.
I made this game inside of a yellow notebook that was smaller than the other ones in size, but still had quite a few pages. I seem to remember that I filled about 70 pages of that sucker with mazes, with a complete story and so on.
This was also the first game that I'd "release" to anyone outside of my house or friends. In our 6th grade class, the teacher let us bring in games or just make ones out of the "games corner" that we wanted. I asked her if I could put the maze game book into the corner, she looked over it and said yes. A few of my classmates played it and said they liked it. Success!
Sometime after that though, I lost track of that thing :(
BACK TO THE DOG WORLD
The N64 had just come out. People cared more about characters than before, so I finally drew the main character, aptly named Dog Hero. (Once again, you can see where this is going.) He had on a trucker hat, a vest, some pants, and shoes. It was probably the best ever drawing I made of him. His villain at this point was an evil robot with tuning-fork style spikes coming out of his head and a Vectorman-esque body. It was a pretty impressive villian for that time
(and fairly easy to draw).
I got ahold of another massive notebook and started making the 6th version of "Dogworld". I gave the hero friends and other enemies. Katina, John (now Johan), Paul (now Pyrus), a prototype Mi'la character, and a shop character with a name that I won't ever reveal and didn't make it to the actual game version were all made here. Every 10 levels or so was a "shop page" where the player was allowed to upgrade or buy new levels (completely on the honor system). I
probably worked on this version for a few months before starting on "Dog World 7: Dogquest", which was in an even bigger notebook. I have no idea where I kept getting these notebooks. This notebook had the new villian of "Gahn" and an RPG-esque level up system.
It was around this time that I was watching my brother browse Pokemon sites. You know, all those Geocities sites that had the same copy/pasted line about finding Mew under the truck? I saw a banner for an OHRRPGCE "RPG GAME ENGINE" site there. I told him to bookmark that so I could check it out later. This was before the days of usable search engines, so if I hadn't have been there I probably would have never seen it.
GETTING USED TO THE ENGINE
This site was one hosted on the AOL member servers, I believe. I'll cut out all the drama that people probably know about; it's not important. From there I found certain other forums that the community posted at.
At first I lurked the community and watched it. I noticed that the usual game release cycle was a post, a week later a "demo", and then the game never updated again. As a result, people that ran the various sites started making fun of new users and started calling a demo a "newbie game". I swore at that point that I would never release a "demo", that my "newbie game" would totally blow them away! Fight the power!
I made an initial test version of my project. You can probably find this screen buried in Jade somewhere in the SVN version. At that point I considered this a sequel to my notebook game so I called it Dogquest 2: Secret of the Gold Crystal, complete with MSPaint gold crystal and a totally awesome 2 wrapping around the crystal. I set out by making the first area first - a simple house in a single 16x10 screen. The inside of the house came later as I figured out doors. Then I made the overworld (quite fancy I might add - an entire 3 tiles) and the first "town", which was a few houses around a big lake. Guess what the town
was named?
"Biglake Town".
Yes, I didn't really put much effort into naming things.
As I continued to pound away at the game, I attracted the attention of another person named Mike, Mikael "Royal" Hogstrom. You may know him from such games as Memoria, which was probably the most intensively fake-scripted game ever in the engine's history. He drew some tiles for me to use so that people would actually look at the game, and drew up a cartoony version of Dogero based off my description of my notebook drawing. You see, back then scanners were expensive! Not like today where you could probably just take a cellphone pic or buy a $10 webcam. You can play with this cartoony version of Dogero through the secret 'bonus' area in Jade, or if you're lazy you can just look at it in the game data.
BUILDING A NETWORK
Drama was at an all time high in the community at this point. I think there was up to 5 different message boards that claimed to be the main one, and now people were forming into "companies" and working together on games. A community member asked me to join his group, and I did. I brought along Dogquest with me.
Soon after that, Charbile joined this company (foreshadowing!), and asked me about the game. Around this time was when I renamed Dogquest 2 to Sword of Jade: Parallel Dreams. The game still had the House -> Overworld -> Biglake setup. A community member named Mew drew me a new title screen graphic with her interpretation of the Sword of Jade, which made the game feel even closer to being done.
Soon after that, I had Charbile asking me questions left and right about the game. He made me two sketches of Dogero: one of him sitting down and cleaning a sword and the other in a battle pose. I was instantly sold, since the sketches literally looked like the character did in my mind! To this point, the game itself had just implemented the new OHRRPGCE feature of vehicles, and a new forest town due to the lifting of the map count limit.
Some stuff happened and me and Charbile ended up on our own with the game. After some discussions, the story for this game was thrown out and 'moved forward' so to speak from my outlines for the game's sequel; the game got officially named Sword of Jade 2: Parallel Dreams at this point to indicate that we were going to come back to the prequel story later.
REBUILDING A CHARACTER
Around this point, I finally renamed Dog Hero into Doghero and then Dogero. I was horribly attached to the name! I shuffled around the characters - K. Lee was no longer the main character's girlfriend, Dart Yujo became a nemesis instead of a friend, etc. A selection of about 15 heroes was reduced to a sane amount of 4. Dogero was the main character, his parents killed, a guy trying to make things right in the world. Mi'la was the obvious love interest and a warrior. John was the geek and technology guy. Paul was the brute.
Over our next discussions, we constantly went back and forth with the character of Dogero, rebuilding his story to better fit the plan for the game. The other characters got tweaked; while half of them had shades of my personality, the other half had shades of Charbile. It instantly improved them, and it didn't hurt that Charbile was majoring in a field that lent itself to writing. This was about late 2001 or early 2002 when all the characters were nailed down. Charbile
eventually came up with the idea to rename Paul to Pyrus and John to Johan, which I agreed with to make their names less plain. You can still see their old names attached to unused music in the .RPG file as "Paul Death Theme" and "John Death Theme" (intended to be heard if the player Game Over'd while playing solo with that character).
Soon after that, we sat down (or rather, I was forced) and I outlined the entire game from beginning to end in a gigantic ICQ conversation. It was this ICQ log that was converted into the game's design document - there's even tidbits of the original conversation left in the pages. Other parts of the conversation were converted into tables, outlines, and more useful data.
I think it was round this time that we finished the idea of the Real Time System, and I had released a tech demo/proof of concept to the OHR Help Me forum for feedback. Thanks to testing by Harlockhero, I was able to quickly fix bugs for it. I think we also released a later tech demo to Rinku's monthly OHR magazine that he was running at the time. The tech demo was definitely a hype tool and got the response I wanted.
FINISHING THE STORY
At this point we thought Dogero would see the world in a short amount of time. We were unstoppable! And then real life happened. Charbile went to school and could no longer afford his own internet; I also went off the internet for a bit, but the other times I was just completely out of contact. The project slowed to a crawl as it was a pain to self-test the game; you could no longer bounce ideas and updates off the other person. I prototyped out the towns and some of the story while I waited for him to get internet back so the actual final graphics and so on could be implemented.
About 6 months later he finally got back on the web, and we were off to the races. We finally decided on the story you see in the final game. The beginning of the game was 100% locked down in about late 2002-2003, with Dogero entering the first town, being annoyed by Mi'la, the decision if you wanted to take her with you to the dungeon or not. We definitely wanted a 'choice engine' at that point, where players could actually affect the game and remove the hard linear
nature of most of the OHRRPGCE games of the time. This was probably not a sane decision.
We had setbacks after that point. It's drama I won't get into, but it was hard to get anything done when we had to fight people that were supposedly working with us. A certain person or two even apparently had to spend their time trying to prove the game didn't exist or was a prank (which I actually found humorous). Comparisons to Duke Nukem Forever were posted and PM'd to me. We carried on.
Eventually Dogero came together with some last minute changes to the character and the addition of the Proem. The Proem was a "secret" project that Charbile had been working on without telling me. It essentially replaced the theoretical "Sword of Jade 1" and gave a good backstory to justify and frame Dogero for the game, although at this point I had already dropped the "2" from the game's title. Needless to say, I was impressed, and I hope the players were impressed by the proem and how it fit into the narrative as well. It's a good thing Charbile made it in secret, because there's a good chance I would have shot it down as another section of the game we couldn't waste time on.
The end result of the character (well, at least I hoped) was one that was down on his luck but learns to never give up. Thanks to the writing ability of Charbile, everyone spoke in the game without stunted rhythm and sounded more natural. The character of Dogero had come a long way from being the cap end of a ballpoint pen. He was now a living character on over 50,000 computer screens and counting. It's a fact that still floors me.
ADVICE ON CREATING YOUR OWN GAME AND CHARACTER
1) Make the game you want to play, not what you think everyone else wants to play. If you are working on the game and isn't fun for you, you can't make a good game.
2) Trolls, naysayers, supporters, and middle-of-the-roaders - they will all exist. Read the criticism but don't take it personally.
3) There's nothing wrong with hype, but don't hype the same feature too much. Feel free to gently remind people that the game exists, however.
4) Don't be afraid to open your character to changes by other people. It was extremely hard for me to get used to the idea of letting Charbile even modify Dogero one bit, but the suggestions and little changes here and there improved the character. Get a second opinion.
5) Know your character's destiny from the start. I won't spoil the ending to SoJ here, but I planned for what happens to Dogero from the start. It gives you a goal to work towards. If you can't decide what their destiny is, you'll end up in a LOST type situation where you'll have to somehow convince people that they should keep caring about the character (and you don't have millions of dollars to sit around for 10 hours a day to decide this on the fly)