One Hour One Life Forums

First, I wanted to say I love this game. I've enjoyed my time and playthroughs on it, and I think it was absolutely worth both the money I paid for it and the time I spent playing it. It is wonderful to be part of such an ambitious and experimental game. Thanks a ton for making it! I hope what follows is constructive criticisms and that none of it will be construed negatively.

The reason I personally played the game, and my most enjoyable moments, were when the constraints of the game naturally induced players to construct narratives together. This might be a little long-winded, but I wanted to describe a life I have lived in your game.

I was born a boy to a single mother traversing the wild by herself. She was near starving. We ran through the ruins of a village, but there was no food there so she could not stop. Eventually we found a few modest berry farms and started building a small farm there. "Mom. I want to go back to the place with adobe walls." "No, we survive. We farm, and we live here." My little sister was born, and she, too, joined us in building our modest little farm. We didn't necessarily thrive, but we did get by.

One day, our camp was overtaken by bears, killing my mother instantly. I grabbed a small basket of carrots, my sister grabbed her newborn child, and we ran off. I told my sister about "the place with adobe walls" and she asked me where it was. I said I didn't know and asked her if she wanted to try and find it. We ventured NE for what seemed like too long, and, in another tragic moment, she lost her child to another bear. At this point, I felt too ashamed to admit I was lost, so I said: "Just a little further." We got separated as we were exploring, and I couldn't find her, or even her body.

There didn't seem to be any meaning in crafting something of my own life, as I was a lone male unable to produce a legacy. I put my basket down and wailed text to no one until I starved to death in the grave of my choosing.

This anecdote was meant to emphasize the fact: I love this game because it is a storybuilding game that was not explicitly a storybuilding game. For me, the game was always a push-pull between the fact that living in a civilization was a way to live more comfortably, but living a meaningful life might mean grabbing a basket of carrots and exploring the unknown.

The other reason to play this game is to see things I haven't seen before. The unknown is a very strong pull; I want to climb the tech tree. I think this is a common reason people were drawn into this game; in particular, the min-maxers that showed up and wanted to learn every new system and the most efficient way to use it. They liked finding new content and engineering the best way to utilize it.

Both of these internal drives for gamers basically rely on new content to keep interest. In my opinion, it was optimistic to expect gamers to be actively engaged for two years. I think a natural expectation of the majority of your more engaged players is to log on once a week to "see what's new". Probably for a few hours or so. It's unlikely there will be a significant number of players constantly playing the game and keeping the world alive.

To me, modifying the survival mechanic doesn't build on either of these two drives.

From the narrative-seeking perspective, changing the survival mechanic can mean I die for different reasons, but not in a way that significantly adds to my stories. It's not how I die, but who I die with. And, in particular, for me, there is nothing aesthetically added to my narrative if the peculiarities of how carrots and soil function change some minor details in how I die.

From a new-stuff-seeking perspective, changing the survival mechanic only makes it harder to find the next new thing at the top of the tech tree, and, since some of the game feels a bit grindy already, only pushes me away from the game. It makes the same prize cost more time investment, and requiring too much time investment to see not enough content is arguably part of why my attention has atrophied.

In my opinion, the best strategy is to release content in big batches, even if this means the updates are more sparse. Again, I think it won't be possible to keep players active for sustained period of times, but perhaps OHOL can be characterized by 10 or so big events, where a giant patch with tons of new content was added, a lot of the players logged on again, rebuilt their civilizations from carrots and dirt, to find out what's changed in the world. We get lively worlds for a little bit of time after each big content drop, and accept that attention will die down in the moments in between.