a multiplayer game of parenting and civilization building
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DestinyCall wrote:"You are Hope", huh?
Never heard of it.
/s?
;-)
"You are Hope", huh?
Never heard of it.
You do not need to leave your band as a woman to give your family a fertility boost. It is completely optional. In fact, if everyone did that, the whole family would die. You need some breeders in town to make the babies, after all.
Just keep in mind thst if you don't want any kids, you have options now.
Gotcha - the game has changed quite a bit since that time.
Good news is that yum chains never break, so you should aim to eat a varied diet to stack up yum as high as possible. Also more storage options and new vehicles (trucks, race car). And you were gone long enough to miss dealing with the rift and tool slots, so that's great.
Unfortunately "family specializations" are still a thing, so you will need to learn how that works. We also have a bunch of poorly documented new mechanics - water/oil/iron depletion, leadership, posses, and gene score to name a few.
DestinyCall wrote:How long ago did you play last?
When the war sword and horse wagon basically.
Before or after the rift experiment?
His feelings on this subject may have changed over the years, but in the past, Jason has made it pretty clear that he would rather focus on developing the game on a single platform, rather than messing around with multiple platforms.
Basically, as a solo dev, he doesn't want to stretch himself too thin by trying to do more than he can handle or adding features that would suck up too much dev time to implement or maintain. Porting a game on to a new platform can be a major undertaking. If he had a whole team working on this game, it might happen.
But he doesn't.
You might try reaching out to the people working on You Are Hope. They are already in the mobile game field, so Steam Deck is right in their wheelhouse. Also the idea might be more appealing, since YAH is already built for mobile.
How long ago did you play last?
Time for a few more Jason quotes:
I get that you don't trust me to do this, or that you think I'm an idiot, or whatever. But I don't care. I'm going to do it anyway, or at least try to. That's my job. To make the most amazing game ever.
I'm trying to have a good time. This is my dream job after all. I love this game, and I love working on it.
Somehow you want me to hate working on it. Or make me feel so bad about it that I quit?
Constraints are the game.
Constraints are what differentiate a game from everything else that is not that particular game.
Would monopoly be way cool if you could move as far as you want each turn or what?
OHOL was originally pretty doughy and formless. Eventually, it will be carved out of wood.
Maybe that premise will NEVER appeal to millions of people.
But my job is to make it as good as it can be. And I don't think I'm done with figuring that out yet. How do you make a game where you die every hour and say goodbye to everything insanely compelling? How do you make what players do in that context matter? This is the stuff that I'm working on.
I'm not sick of working on it..... but even if I was....
...why would I walk away from $22K per month?
There's no good reason to stop working on OHOL right now.
Fun is a subtle and sometimes-mysterious thing.
Maybe it's a bit like "funny". You know when you're laughing, and you know what's funny and what's not, but that doesn't mean you know how to write a better joke.
I make my living by writing a better joke. By dissecting "fun" and figuring it out.
And I also believe you that I'm too close to the game to see it clearly. Which is why I discuss the game and design problems constantly with other game designers.
It's also why observational playtesting is so important. I definitely don't do enough of that. I really don't have much opportunity to do it, and for this kind of game, it's especially expensive (b/c people play for many weeks).
But it's a bit like a comedian testing new material. They perform in front of an audience and note which bits make the audience laugh and which other ones fall flat. They DO NOT ask the audience afterward for ideas. They do not ask the audience what they WANT to hear as jokes. They don't look to the audience for suggestions about how to improve their jokes.
Observational playtesting is like that. How they behave is what matters. What they say or suggest is usually irrelevant.
Gonna be the best game ever..... but that's no easy task. There will be MANY more huge bumps along the road to greatness. So buckle up!
But when did the audience acquire the terrible delusion that they were masters and the game developers slaves? Do you really believe that's the way that great games are made? Or great art in any medium? Which great game was made that way? I don't know of any.
Wait, a guy who knows nothing about business single-handedly made a game that grossed $1.4 million in sales over a 20-month period?
It's the craziest story ever told!
And 20 months later, it is still grossing $22K per month.
Yes, you're looking at the world's greatest business failure right here. A guy who is doing everything wrong. A guy who made a game that is a total financial and design failure!
This complete business idiot somehow was successful by pure chance. Like a monkey banging on a typewriter until he randomly spit out Shakespeare.
You know that people have played OHOL for 1.3 million solid hours, right?
I guess that's only $1 per hour at the end of the day, which isn't very much money!
Yes, there are obviously HUGE problems with OHOL. I've never denied that.
That's why I'm working to figure out what those problems are and fix them.
The poll system is not to find out what the majority "want". It is to find answers to questions that I don't know the answer to.
But yeah, why don't I ask you what you want?
Because actually---brace yourself and gird your loins for a truth you don't want to hear---you don't know what you want. You think you do, but you're most likely wrong.
I would really like to see a village layout with two guys in charge of farming a tightly-controlled patch of berries and carrots, and they deliver the results to the shepherds and bakers, who also tightly control their areas. The shepherd delivers wool to the clothing makers and mutton to the bakers, and returns dung to the berry growers.
If you're hungry, you will need to go to the "output window" of the bakery, and NOT wander through the berry/carrot fields helping yourself to a terribly inefficient snack.
Furthermore, each of these areas would "train up" apprentices to inherit them and keep them going for the next generation.
My point is that WOW was like the biggest, most-well funded game in the universe at the time, and even they kinda phoned it in compared to the amount of thought and finesse that I put into my language system (making it actually pronounceable, and not just a cluster cipher), and also allowing babies to learn the language slowly over time, through gradual exposure, and speak with an accent when their learning is incomplete.
And that language system was just ONE of the 64 updates that you've gotten so far.
This isn't a sign of any huge flaw or "down turn" in OHOL. It's just another interesting wrinkle in a multi-faceted world where anything can happen.
You were born as a slave.
Wait, holy crap, you were born as a slave? That's friggin awesome, right?
I mean, how many hours have you played so far, maybe hundreds, and this was one of your stories? And you led a slave revolt and almost rescued everyone?
Are you kidding me? That sounds like a plot to a great movie, not a dumb old video game. Wow, I want to play that game. What game is that again?
So this game is nothing but the product of crazy, bold experimentation.
And that experimentation will continue. Endlessly, as long as I'm working on this game. Don't expect it to stop. Why would you want it to stop?
This is clearly what you paid for. You can't watch that trailer and NOT see a game that dares to try something totally new.
BTW.... you've all had the rift for 4 days now. 4 days out of 465 that the game has been running. That's less than 1% of the days. 99% of the days did not have the rift.
AND THE WORLD IS ENDING, GAME IS DEAD, JASON SUX. THE DRAMA!
I get it, though, b/c this game is so friggin' great and you're all so invested. That's good. The drama is good. It's not boring.
And that's my job. I'm the not-boring man.
Were the past four days the most boring 1% of days in OHOL? God, how many pages of Discord, I can't even scroll back. You guys are bored out of your minds! It's like watching paint dry, this whole OHOL thing. Game is totally stalled. Dev is lazy. Game hasn't had an update in months.
No wait, game is changing every week in interesting and tantalizing and thought-provoking ways. This is actually the most exciting and varied and interesting development process IN THE HISTORY OF VIDEO GAMES. I'm not joking here. If you don't believe me, go back through the weekly update history news posts. Then find me another game that had this much interesting stuff happen in 15 months.
And on top of that, it's all being done by one guy. Just one guy, working alone. EVERY PEN LINE A SUPREME ACT OF WILL.
And on top of that, I'm having the time of my life!
So thank you, all of you, for making this possible. You've all made my wildest dreams come true.
Ahhh Jason ... never change!
Or keep race restrictions but bring back the chance for babies born to a different race than the mother. That way the game has the forced cooperation Jason wants, but dealing with the restrictions isn't as bad because large families could have someone from every race.
Unfortunately, I doubt that would satisfy Jason. While looking back at past posts to find amusing quotes, I've come across several posts written by Jason back when race restrictions were still fairly new. After reading them, I don't think the ultimate goal of race restrictions was really to encourage trade or even forcing us to cooperate with other players.
The Rift experiment was designed to test the idea of "everything runs out" in a controlled way. It was too hard to test resource exhaution in an infinity world, so he built a box. He wanted to test what happened to the game when resources ran out because he was searching for a way to make the game better ... more interesting, more compelling, more engaging in the long-term. He had noticed that the survival focused early game was more appealing than late-game villages, but he was struggling to understand why ... and how to provide the game with a satisfying end-game. But he was pretty sure that the answer was more restrictions.
Race restrictions were the new big idea, replacing the visible rift with a different kind of cage. Jason wanted to add time and distance constraints into the game world as way to kill old towns. Not necessarily because he wanted them to be dead, but because he wanted us to fight to keep them going as long as we could. When a town dies because they have no oil or whatever, that is the game functioning exactly as Jason intended it to function.
Unfortunately, race restrictions are not ... and never have been .. a fun game-play mechanic. They certainly do force us to work really hard to keep our towns alive, but it isn't fun work. It isn't satisfying. It doesn't make OHOL a better game.
At this point, I am afraid to imagine what Jason would come up with as a replacement for race restrictions.
.
.
.
But I am secretly hoping it will involve zombies or bears ... or bear zombies!
Tool slots were worse than race restrictions.
Honestly, I would not consider tool slots worse than race restrictions. They are both bullshit, but at least you could deal with a missing toolslot by asking your own family for help. Or try to raise your meme score to access more slots in future lives, lol. . In many cases, you have no reasonable recourse when you hit a race restricted bottleneck, unless you are willing to spend half your life traveling between villages to make a bowl of ice cream or some yellow paint. With race restrictions, huge chunks of content are functionally inaccessible to everyone each life. Such a waste.
That being said, I definitely do not want a return of tool slots in any form. Some form of skill specialization or actual "jobs" might be okay, but in the current game state, it rarely makes sense to dedicate an entire life to just one task.
I like being able to switch between "occupations" when necessary. Spending an hour doing nothing but baking pies would get old fast ... and bury the town in extra pies. I don't want to feel trapped in a particular position for a whole lifetime because of a decision I made in childhood or, even worse, a choice made by one of my distant ancestors.
How about a PRE-rift server? Back to a time before war swords, property fences, and wells on grids.
But why is Jason spending money on 10+ servers though? we hardly ever use more than 3
Maybe he got them at a discounted group price, so he figured why not?
Nuclear bombs ... for a satisfying end-game, followed by nuclear winter.
As it was previously implemented, hard pass. The rift was genuinely unenjoyable to me.
However, I would not be against the idea of a finite world space, done well. There were some aspects of the rift that worked or could have been fixed with some better load balancing. I also could see regularly scheduled resets being okay, if the game was properly balanced for it and the arcs were long enough to allow towns to naturally flourish and decline. It could even help provide some better structure to game progression, instead of the current drive to hit the top of the tech ladder as soon as possible. I'd like to see slower town progression, so the generational aspects of OHOL can be explored further and there is more distinction between early, mid, and late game towns. This could be accomplished by loosening water restrictions and adding more time-gated structures, like the bell tower.
I was not a fan of the Battle Royale nature of arc resets. And I really despised the "everything runs out" mind-set that motivated many design choices during that time. It was supposed to provide an interesting challenge by make survival harder as the rift got older - how long can your family survive? Will you be able to outlast the previous arc? Who will live and who will die? (Spoiler alert ... everyone dies)
But it actually just made continuing to play in an old rift less and less enjoyable over time ... and death more appealing. There is something inherantly wrong when you would rather die than keep playing ... in a survival game. The game basically rewards you for giving up. That's some quality game design right there.
For me, many of the rift's problems were related to resource depletion and poor game balance. Stuff that would normally be solved by leaving your village in search of fresh supplies. Dumb stuff, like running out of skewers and important stuff like not having enough iron to make necessary tools ... and no enjoyable options for getting more. Even though the rift was large, we were all trapped in a box and it FELT like a trap. Not like a game I wanted to keep playing.
And of course, the rampant bear griefing and entire towns getting murdered by roving bands of coordinated griefers was just the cherry on the top of a lovely shit sandwich.
Bring back the rift
No.
Or just remove race restrictions.
To be fair to the dev, I don't think he set out to dissapoint people. I read that quote as indicating that he is trying to improve the game, but he is really struggling to actually do it. He can tell that something isn't right and wants to fix it. He just does not know how.
Basically, it is a cry for help ... except he isn't willing to accept outside help. Kind of sad, really.
Yeah, that is a classic.
This might not be the right place for that discussion, Spoonwood. How about share a funny Jason quote, instead?
LonelyNeptune wrote:Spoonwood wrote:Really, if we're being honest does there exist a serious way that the game does not pander to the female ego in that the women can do all of the reproducing by their own self, get all of the credit for families, and every woman is somehow just as strong as every man?
Spoonwood is living evidence that sometimes bullying IS the answer.
Bullying has to involve " force, coercion, hurtful teasing or threat, to abuse, aggressively dominate or intimidate. " https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullying None of that gets used in my question which asks about the game pandering to the female ego.
I think you misunderstood LonelyNeptune's post. He is not accusing you of being a bully based on that quote, but rather pointing to that quote as justification for why you have been rightfully targeted for bullying in the past.
Personally, I don't agree. I was taught that "two wrongs do not make a right" or to put it another way, someone else's bad behavior does not excuse your own bad behavior.
Therefore, it is still wrong to bully people, even if they could use a swift kick in the butt for being a real tosser.
Well, it looks like I didn't use quote marks when I wrote that, but I did entitle the post: "What Hamlet Might Say About Recent Changes". And I think that's an exact quote from Hamlet. Thus, I *mentioned* such, and didn't *use* such. Thus, attributing it to me doesn't seem exactly right.
I will let you answer this objection yourself using another quote:
For the record, it's not an exact quote. Hamlet mentioned 'sleep' in Shakespeare's play.
"You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy. We must be cautious"
I was trying to pick my favorite Spoonwood quote, but there are just too many.
In no particular order, here are just a few lovely out-of-context Spoonwood quotes. But let's be honest, would knowing the context actually help?
Trust me, they are better this way.
You aren't Spoonwood. I do think that you were joking though when you called yourself Spoonwood.
I'm sure that this thread wasn't about the same thing as any other thread.
I didn't write this post for Jason. I also didn't write several of my previous posts for Jason.
I'm pretty sure I haven't been stalking a game.
A water griefer might water trees out of town and then never rewater them, nor suggest that anyone else rewater them.
The game is not ten minutes one life. The game is not twenty minutes one life. The game is not thirty minutes one life. The game is not forty minutes one life. The game is not fifty minutes one life. The game's name is One Hour One Life.
I would say that no town death exists in the real world, because there is no town life. In other words, towns don't live, and thus they can't die. Or do you think that towns live, and thus they can die?
Infinity of anything is interesting, because the possibilities are endless. Finite of anything has limited interest at best, since there exist only so many possible combinations.
If lineages could survive updates, there would exist hope.
Really, if we're being honest does there exist a serious way that the game does not pander to the female ego in that the women can do all of the reproducing by their own self, get all of the credit for families, and every woman is somehow just as strong as every man?
I'm too young to be a boomer.
What is a man, if his chief good and market of his time be but to feed? A beast, no more. Sure he that made us with such large discourse, looking before and after, gave us not that capability and god-like reason to fust in us unused.
Either new players experience one hour one life, or they don't. If they don't experience one hour one life, why should they experience 50 minutes one life, 30 minutes one life, or something less than one hour one life? Why should they get an inferior experience the first time? Why should they die instead of surviving (to old age)?
Shredded cabbage confuses people.
It's not a joke that all male characters in the game are incels.
It's simply too easy to have children. The single parent system is overpowered and comes as the underlying reason why teamwork in the game is so weak.
Does anyone reading this lived a few lives trying to get breastfed until one almost turns 5?
Does anyone reading this lived a few lives trying to breastfeed their children until they almost turn 5?
Much of the very foundations of the multiplayer aspect of this game rest on systemic violence to players.
I'm also not the first person to hint at such.
That no one ever dies in childbirth isn't realistic at all.
No incest at all would exist via active player based mating mechanics (via their characters), since no real-world sex would be taking place via such mechanics.
It would make more sense if women had to take their top off to breastfeed. I wonder how difficult it would be to implement that mothers would need to take their top off to breast feed.
How did the baby float?
I guess if there were breasts that had neither benefit nor any serious drawbacks, that would be o.k. but I'm not so sure that such hypothetically exactly neutral breasts exist.
I don't do any drugs.
And of course, this little gem:
I predict that you'll have a better life if you stop playing and never play this game again.
Moving and remodeling was why he stopped updating the game. But the community response to his work over the years has probably contributed to why he did not come back.
I'm honestly surprised it took this long for the dev to give up. This place has been a fount of negativity for years.
Oh in that case, yes. Very sarcastic. Always.
I'm not sure if I have a "favorite" quote. Hmmm actually that's not true.
This is my favorite:
There's only one father in this game.
He is the father of all.
His fertile essence flows forth freely, serving as the seeds for the teeming multitudes. He hath fathered over 7 million so far, and counting. He never sleeps.
He's like Santa Clause, blowing his little presents down every chimney in the world.
Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays this courier from the swift completion of his appointed rounds.
This might sound like a chore, but nothing could be further from the truth! He always finishes his fatherly duty with chuckle and a smile, proud to the core of a job well done.