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#2 Re: Main Forum » Please clarify no_copyright.txt » 2019-03-08 02:00:00

I'm reminded of Douglas Crockford's JSON license, which to this day says "The Software shall be used for Good, not Evil."

And supposedly IBM asked for a special exemption so that their clients could do "evil" and Crockfrord granted it. Supposedly.

As hilarious as this seems, it actually turns out to be terrible for anyone who wants to use the license because now they're completely dependent on the whims of the license holder. https://tanguy.ortolo.eu/blog/article46/json-license

#3 Re: Main Forum » Open Letter From the Mobile Developers » 2019-03-07 17:07:23

I don't agree with a lot in here and the behavior from the Chinese publishers looks horrible, but this point rings 100% true:

What I meant was what I had written a bit earlier. "Any other developers could make their own version of OHOL as an app without consulting Jason. They would become the “authorized” version in people’s minds."

According to what Jason has laid out:

1) Unacceptable behavior: make a mobile port of OHOL called One Hour, One Life. Put your name on it and not Jason's name.

2) Acceptable behavior: make a mobile port of OHOL called One Hour, One Life. Put no one's name on it.

Someone else could come along and do (2). They get 100k downloads. People still confuse their game with the original game. Erroneous bug reports are still filed. Reviewers still get confused. Hundreds of thousands of players of people play Jason's game without knowing who he is.

But that's an acceptable outcome?

In situation, this "anonymous" publisher does have a huge leg up over Christoffer because they don't have "Unofficial" in their name and they don't have "not approved by" disclaimers, both of which make players extremely uncomfortable.

#4 Re: Main Forum » Open Letter to the Mobile Developers » 2019-03-05 00:22:59

Hmmm, I know you expect to elaborate if given the chance, but you don't think these takedown notices are misleading?

I made the game One Hour One Life 100% by myself over four years, and they are making use of my code, graphics, sound, music, game name, etc. in their unauthorized version.

Even their Icon contains a character, rabbit, basket, and background texture that I drew by hand myself.  I have all original artwork here at home in a file box (all artwork was drawn by me on paper and scanned in).

Beyond "game name", which as far as I can tell is the pivotal issue here, all of those things were permitted by what I thought was an irrevocable public domain license with no restrictions. You did not mention the phrase "public domain" once.

These kinds of processes are notoriously hamhanded and I would be surprised if it got the careful human attention that it deserved. But if someone does inquire about these claims to Christoffer, Christoffer would immediately link to your public domain license, particularly important since you haven't mentioned or clarified it in the requests. I would be extremely surprised if they dug further than that and gave the matter the nuance it received in this thread. Of course, they could be biased strongly towards one side by default as a CYA measure. Who knows!

I'm not convinced by this argument about onetech, terminal heist, or 2HOL. Besides none of them using the original game name as their name, the latter two don't have a large playerbase (this is equivalent to making a fan game you have NO rights to... safe until it gets popular and the owners get wind of it) and onetech is a tool that solely benefits the OHOL ecosystem.

(And by the way, my definition of "harmful" may be different from yours.... an OHOL comic book, or film adaptation, or completely different game using the engine, or RPG using the characters, or YouTube animations made with the editor.... those are awesome and not harmful, in my eyes---none of these things muddy the waters about what constitutes the official OHOL game.  None of these are "horrifying" to me.  Someone else making money isn't horrifying to me, the way that it apparently is to so many other people.)

But any game regardless of genre that uses the same name could be assumed to be connected to you, no? And if someone made a racist/sexist One Hour, One Life comic book and you start getting flamed for it, are you saying you have no qualms about that?

After rereading the thread, I shifted views a bit. I still think the name is central issue here and if the mobile version were named something completely different, the entire thing would be irrelevant. However, I no longer believe Christoffer had the rights to use the name in the first place... outside of an email exchange (since there exists no contract, formal written statement, or license on usage of the name), which should be clear in hindsight to everyone was not a great idea. Now in fact the request is to change the name by adding "Unofficial", a much worse outcome than having a different name to start.

#5 Re: Main Forum » Open Letter to the Mobile Developers » 2019-03-02 23:41:41

Where I disagree with Jere and a few other people is this point:  I don't think the public domain grants people the right to mislead people.  When I waived my rights to control what is "done" with my work, I didn't waive my rights to ensure that the truth be told about me and my work.  "Do whatever you want" meant do what you want "with the work."  I didn't say, "say whatever you want about it," or "feel free to take false credit for the entirety of this work" (which is what happened with the Chinese version before I stepped in).

I don't understand your position on credit, clearly. Someone is free to remix your work without attribution... but they can't also put their own name on it without risking "fraud"? Are you suggesting the "no attribution" part applies so long as people release works anonymously? Do you think that is a reasonable idea?? Do you think people releasing anonymous works is commonplace?

Are these third party developers taking credit for the "entirety" of OHOL? It sounds like they put work into their game, not only infrastructure, mobile development, translation, and new features. It sounds reasonable to expect them to put their names on it. On the other hand, it's expected that works with non-attribution licenses are not attributed except possibly as a courtesy and especially not on main menus.

Or is it that they are free to put their names on it and not yours as long as the derivative work is sufficiently different? But what is sufficiently different? 1% different? 5% different? Who decides? Jason Rohrer I guess. Whoa, now that's a murky situation for anyone considering using your public domain works in the future. Consider the chilling effect this has. One day it seems that it really is "do what you will" and "no attribution" and the next they see you demanding your name in a game "flashing in red, or permanently on the menu screen, or whatever it takes", even after other agreements were made. It doesn't look good from the outside.

Regardless of what you choose to do, it would be really great for your position on these matters to be defined somewhere (your website, the OHOL website, somewhere other than a forum post) in more clear and specific terms. And if you want attribution, I think it's reasonable to demand it up front.

A reasonable Chinese person is now likely to believe that you are the originator of One Hour One Life.

I hope you understand how horrifying that is.

Yes, it is! Which is why I can never imagining putting works into the public domain myself. Nor do I understand why you're doing it when the thought horrifies you.

Can you help me understand how I am misreading this court case, which seems open and shut on the issue of attribution on public domain works: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dastar_Co … _Film_Corp.

The U.S. Supreme Court, ruling only on the "reverse passing off" claim, reversed the decisions of the appeals court and district court, ruling 8–0 in favor of Dastar. The Court reasoned that although the Lanham Act forbids a reverse passing off, the rule regarding the misuse of trademarks is trumped by the fact that once a copyrighted work (or even a patented invention) passes into the public domain, anyone in the public may do anything with the work, with or without attribution to the author.

#6 Re: Main Forum » Open Letter to the Mobile Developers » 2019-03-02 14:54:58

I strongly disagree on this one.

This work is not copyrighted.  I place it into the public domain.

Do whatever you want with it, absolutely no restrictions, and no permission
necessary.

Jason Rohrer
Davis, California
March 2018

I wouldn't have assumed the name "One Hour, One Life" was included in that, but you're confirming now that it is. "Absolutely no restrictions".

I still have no idea why the name is an important thing to relinquish rights to. For the code and art, you're saving people literally years of work by putting these in the public domain. Allowing people to reuse the name is not helping them whatsoever, but it is causing you significant grief. They could come up with an acceptable name in 5 minutes.

And yet you relinquished rights to the name. In that case, I don't see this "port" as misleading. They aren't suggesting that the game is associated with you. They have created a similar game using assets you have released and given away rights to. They have made a similar game and have happened to call it the same name you gave away rights to. You can't say you don't want to control people and that anything is permitted and then send mockups to a developer with specifications on how many seconds a splash screen should be shown in their game.

You're worried that the new changes, which weren't approved by you (except in the sense that you've permitted everything by releasing it into the public domain and also restated such through email), might be tied back to your work somehow. But they had not said it's your work! Your name wasn't on it. You're actually now asking for it to be tied to you.

Along the way, the design changes continued, culminating around the holidays with an NPC Santa character who was running around, handing out presents.  Santa kinda looked like one of my drawings.... kinda.  A Peace Lily was also added, and I got an email from a player who said the Peace Lilly was ruing the game, and that I should remove it.  Sorry pal, not my game.  I was also getting Mobile bug reports on GitHub.  Clearly, people were still confused.

I mean, this kind of stuff happens all the time even when things aren't named the same. But most of this confusion could be prevented by having a totally different name. This is why trademark exists.

And changing the title entirely, calling it "Eve's Wilderness" or whatever, would only further confuse things, and mislead even more people.  This is a very direct adaptation of my work.  It's not just a trademark issue, in other words.

How? When the game is called "Eve's Wilderness" or "Carrot World" or whatever, almost no one is going to accidentally google your game. No one is going to file erroneous bug reports. Reviewers won't be confused.

So why would this be a problem? It sounds like you're concerned about attribution at that point. More concerned that the 100,000 Chinese players will never know who you are, rather than make an invalid connection to you. Isn't that what you signed up for?

The best solution going forward seems to be trying to protect the name and encourage the mobile developers to choose a different one. "One Hour, One Life" is not just a bundle of assets. It's a piece of art. It's a persistent set of game servers. It's a promise about future development. Why not make that clear?

#7 Re: Bug Discussion » World kept resetting » 2018-11-14 19:06:35

Same. I had lots of items today that could not be picked up and then reed that kept resetting.

Edit: Yea kept happening across 3 runs. Makes the game pretty unplayable. Guessing that servers are being inundated with new people.

#8 Re: News » Update: Tutorial » 2018-06-30 20:22:16

Hmm, it crashed once on me. I thought it was because I was alt-tabbing in the middle of the download. I closed the program, tried again, and it worked fine.

#9 Re: News » Update: Tutorial » 2018-06-30 14:26:35

Wow! What a change from the "learn it yourself" approach to the last few games.

The tutorial is awesome and the end is hilarious. Somehow I was thinking the torch would save you.

You have to get through the tutorial, and solve that last crafting challenge, to actually play the game, so I'm really betting the farm on this one.

You have to be very nervous about this right?!?

Players in general tend to hate tutorials, especially if unskippable and especially if labelled explicitly as tutorials. I wrote about this a bit when I was deciding how to handle a tutorial. Have you seen this excellent talk by George Fan, How I Got My Mom to Play Through Plants vs. Zombies?

So I would be worried about fall out rate here. Maybe you can track it per stone in case certain parts need to be optimized or removed. It's hard to gauge the difficulty of the last challenge as a new player. The firebrand feels like a jump in logic to me. And there's also an argument about how much discovery this takes away from the player. I dunno, it's a hard balance. A few random thoughts:

  • The bonus meter thing could be more prominent. I was expecting green hunger pips or somethings.

  • Something that always confused me in game and here as well is how to stand on fire. You have to click on the tile but not on the fire. Why not automatically walk into the tile if you don't something to craft on the fire?

  • A bit annoying and confusing that you have to wait to bleed out and the wound system is not explained, is it?

  • One thing that currently feels subpar: the game icon! No idea what it is and doesn't feel iconic of anything in the game.

Oh and the filter thing is HUGE. If no results are relevant to what you have, could it show the steps anyway?

#10 Re: Main Forum » The mono diet » 2018-06-08 00:10:45

Heh. I was obsessed with bread as a kid and at thanksgiving would continue eating like 5+ rolls after consuming everything else. I don't have a healthy relationship with food. These days I'll finish off the last bite of potatoes/rice/chicken out of the pan by dousing it with salt. I've probably not explained the thanksgiving phenomenon thing well, but it's absolute a thing: http://wholehealthsource.blogspot.com/2 … n-pie.html

I don't think the game should be made any more difficult than it already is. It's already bewildering for a new player. If you add any additional constraints to how food works, it's only fair to make the beginning game easier to balance it out. And remember it's not just different food types having different thresholds, but the repeated consumption of foods reducing the thresholds. You could make berries start by filling to 75% but quickly dropping with each bite (different foods could drop at different rates .... maybe pizza never gets less appetizing).

Having dozens of foods that feel really distinct is a challenge certainly. The foods that give you effects (warmth, fertility) is interesting. I'm for it. But I don't see it extending to too many combinations. Even 20+ distinct food items is a high bar.

Ultimately you're limited by the one hour life. Implement either the reduced satiation or hunger threshold and it won't matter much because .... how many times do you even eat to fullness in a lifetime.? 60 times? 30 times? Less? if You have 10 "levels" (whatever that means) per food, you're still not ensuring much variety. If there's a deterministic optimal route, players will use it. Maybe what you need is a system that extends beyond a single lifetime. Each character could have a favorite food that gives double satiety. That would definitely encourage people to diversify. Or maybe the boredom from each food extends across generations. Many generations in and carrots become useless. Berries become useless. Corn becomes useless. Force people to move up the tech tree? The cool thing about that is you could very easily control how fast people move away from the basics. Instead of limited resources by what's in the environment, it could be determined by what they've eaten in the past.

#11 Re: Main Forum » The mono diet » 2018-06-07 12:30:11

That first carrot is DEEE-LISH-US, but that 99th carrot is making you feel green around the gills.  You can hardly eat it.  Ugg.

Remember Tom Hanks in Castaway, the first time he cooked a crab.  "Oh boy!  Crab!  You gotta love crab!"  Four months later... more crab...

This could also motivate spices and other things.  You're getting sick of burritos, and then you craft hot sauce and give them a new lease on life, for a while at least.

A more realistic and satisfying interpretation of this would be the type of food and its novelty affecting how hungry you have to be to eat it. Think of Thanksgiving dinner. If I'm hungry, I'll eat some peas and carrots. If I'm near full, I don't want vegetables anymore. But I'll eat turkey and ham and stuffing. Now I'm full. Maybe a buttered roll? OK, now I'm super stuffed and I shouldn't really eat another bite and I really don't want real food. But I will definitely eat desert!

This is interesting mechanically because a food that you can only eat when super hungry is inconvenient and risky. Say carrots can never be eaten above half hunger and if you eat enough of them, you'll only be able to eat another on your last pip of hunger. That food becomes dangerous. Rely too much on the berry bush and you'll grow tied to the berry bush. To fill up for a long trek, you'll need a more novel food supply. As food evolves and you get things like candy and sweets, that should allow you to push your hunger way above full. Then you can ignore food for a while.

This is something you see in roguelikes anyway. in DCSS, trolls can eat raw meat all the time but other species have to be near starving to consume it. That becomes a problem because the food you find rots while you're waiting to get hungry enough to eat it.

Similar to your hot sauce example and more practical, salt could be an easy way to increase the flavor of foods.

On the messaging: hunger thresholds might be easier to communicate too. While holding a carrot, your hunger bar could indicate the threshold at which you'll be able to eat it (and it could be momentarily animated lower when you do). Having discrete hunger pips would help with this though.

Then I want to add turnips.  Rutabagas.  Spinach.  Kale.  Broccoli.

Something I've been meaning to ask... are you worried about over-engineering the stone age part of the game? Does it have to be perfectly balanced and massively deep if there are other stages of the game one can reach? I assume the 10,000 objects has to eventually be filled with more advanced technologies instead of thousands of different food items.

#12 Re: News » Update: Family Tree Browser » 2018-05-14 10:59:29

If your last words contain a ' character, it essentially counts as an SQL injection, breaking the insert query for your life and failing to log you as dead, so you never appear in the family tree.

*yikes*

#13 Re: Main Forum » Dissatisfied with OHOL? Try 2HOL » 2018-05-02 02:22:16

That is the only reason that killing is present in OHOL, because I cannot envision how player-generated laws would function without it.

Well, that certainly says something. tongue

How about allowing killing but only if the victim is not revived? The griefer hits you with a club, you are knocked unconscious for let's say 1 minute (your hunger could be sped up if needed), and if you aren't revived you die of starvation. This would still allow killing to happen (and all the emergent stories that go along with it) and going out in the wilderness alone could be a death trap, but staying in a village should offer strength in numbers. As long as you have one adult nearby, you are somewhat safe, but actually the lone griefer puts himself in a lot of risk.

Imagine a modern day serial killer. They don't run into downtown and start stabbing people willy nilly. They plan out their murders very carefully and catch people when they're alone.

Also it gives some time for due process. You can knock someone out and then spend 30s deliberating with others about why they deserved it. If the griefer is the one knocking someone out, perhaps she doesn't have a plausible reason and the village can respond appropriately.

You could have the same mechanism with other weapons like knives by having medicine that heals wounds and eventually guns that kill immediately but are hard to manufacture and load.

[edit] Oh duh,of course you should be able to drag the unconscious body around like you can drag a cart... potentially concealing your crime or maybe dragging someone into a prison. At first I was thinking the game really needed restraints for law/order/prisons to function, but dragging them around would probably do it.

#14 Re: News » Launching a game Off-Steam: Sales number from Week 1 » 2018-04-04 12:00:47

Any update to your numbers? The game seems to have really taken off in the past few weeks.

If this was a Steam game, I would guess you've nearly breached $1M based on the number of reviews you have. But then again I don't know if more or less people are willing to review with a bespoke, in-game review editor.

#15 Re: Main Forum » Would you consider adding WASD controls? » 2018-03-01 01:51:59

Same reason you see mouse pathing and no arrow keys in games like League of Legends, I think.

#16 Re: News » Early alpha testing coming » 2017-05-15 02:03:23

Whoa! So cool to see the speed picked up. I was checking for a few days when it was stuck at like 4 objects and a little worried.

In Rust, I had people cement over my front door countless times.  Funny... no one has EVER cemented over my front door in real life!  If you follow the logic through, you realize that it's because someone who keeps cementing over front doors will eventually be hurt or killed to make them stop.  But in Rust, they'd just respawn again and keep doing it.

But is the consequence here worse than in Rust? I've not played it, but I assume if you die in Rust you lose something and it's somewhat of a pain.

In OHOL, what do you lose exactly? You could potentially, maybe even with high probability depending on the circumstances, spawn right next to your previous area. Your items would be stored on the ground or in containers presumably. It's also interesting to think how your knowledge of locations/buildings might carry over to the next life. I'm thinking TCD all over again. Maybe not traps, but you could hide your old possessions in obscure locations or even mazes.

You could imagine an MMO with permadeath and people would be really nervous about griefing in that kind of setting because they potentially lose months of work. But you lose a maximum of ~1 hour of work here. It'd be nice if there really was some sort of investment that caused you to care about your actions beyond one hour. For instance, what if you can name yourself and any offspring you create will permanently be labeled with their lineage? Or there's some online viewer that will show your old characters as long as they still have living descendants. Something along those lines, so you're more invested in what happens to future generations.

Also, couple questions:

1) Will there be signs like in Minecraft? It's hard to imagine a society developing with a complex set of customs and rules without being able to quickly communicate those rules. Imagine a group of players want to outlaw certain items from being crafted (e.g. no guns). It would be really tedious to explain everything in chat over and over again.

2) Will any items require huge/realistic numbers of items to craft? Or will all items require a cartoonishly small input? imagine you want to build a nuclear bomb. You have to acquire a huge amount of uranium. Yes, the crafting is of the form A+B, but I'm sure you could have items representing 2, 4, 8, 16, etc. uranium ores. If the numbers are indeed huge, will there ever be machines that automate routine harvesting/crafting like Factorio?

3) Are you worried about scaling the game in case it gets really popular? This is a notoriously hard problem and one of the reasons MMOs are so hard to develop, right? I remember in Asheron's call that if enough people gathered in one area, then a "portal storm" developed and people would be randomly teleported away.

#17 Re: News » Early alpha testing coming » 2017-04-09 00:40:41

Bummer to hear about the downsizing of the team! At least now you'll have no more dependencies. And better to make that transition at object 250 than 5000.

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