a multiplayer game of parenting and civilization building
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My Situation: My town needed Kerosene. We had water to last a while, but our bell tower wasn't quite done, so if we wanted to get kerosene, we'd have to find another town. I packed up a cart of rubber-making equipment and set out towards the Bell Tower town. My town doesn't have dye or blank paper, and we can't make a rubber ball right now either - I'll have to go without a map.
I get to the Bell Town as an elder. I know it's too late to get back to town before I die. Bell Town is full of gingers though - I communicate with a woman, let her know we're about 20 wells north, but I don't know more precise than that. They promise to look for town once they're 40, to bring kerosene with them for the trade.
How it would work in real life: I show up in town, and I sketch them a map to get back home. There are waypoints to locate yourself from, and even different biomes are different enough to be able to make a distinction. My map is good enough to get them to my home.
Why this doesn't work in-game: Communication barriers, both by language barriers and by text limitations, make this infeasible. Additionally, the biomes in the game are not as diverse and tend not to have defining features like real life biomes would.
Proposed change: Allow map-making from a distance, to your home marker. I'm not exactly sure how this would work. Maybe when you title a map, if you include "/home" at the end, it will direct to your home marker instead of where you put it down.
Possible problems:
1. This could be OP - maybe being able to direct someone to your home directly isn't reasonable (though I think that it is realistic enough to consider).
2. People could use this for non-home-marker long-distance mapmaking, by placing a home marker wherever they want to make a map. This would really only be usable near your home base, or by people in a bell tower town.
3. People could troll by placing a home marker somewhere arbitrary.
Possible solutions:
1 and 2. Make the map not-so-precise. Depending on how far away from the home marker you are, add a semi-random amount of error. This would make these maps slightly less valuable, but would still be useful for finding the general area you need to be in. Would likely require parameter tweaking. Would likely need an indication "somewhere around 600m away" instead of "600m away" or something like that.
3. Not really much you can do, and this is already an issue with regular maps.
Anyway, just a thought. It seems silly that there's no way to communicate this piece of information that we have available to us.
Shoooot, I've been accidentally cursing players I didn't want to curse then. Thanks for letting me know, fug!
I believe you can also stand on their bone pile and say "Curse you", can't you?
Happened to me also, by accident. I was also moving southwest. I believe I was click-hold-ing the bottom edge of the screen to start running. There were items around most of the jungle peninsula.
(I'm sorry, I don't know how to add the image, I added to the Github issue #479)
It's been fixed - need to get a new update on steam
@Destiny, Steam built the update wrong and deleted 2700 sprites. The game filled the sprites in with whatever was available. Chaos and Hilarity ensued.
Rope + Dog + Gate - Guard dog. Pitt Bulls, Airedales, Collies,and German Shepherds bite anyone who doesn't own the gate who come within 2 tiles of it. Other dogs bark when anyone who doesn't own the gate comes within one screen of it. (Alternatively, keep track of people the dog has met or been introduced to (say, someone who "knows" the dog and someone who doesn't feed it mutton or a rabbit in short succession, like an elder removal fence) and bark at/bite anyone who isn't that person or a direct descendant of them.
Rope + Dog + Fence - Animal Guard Dog. Collie and Schnauzer prevents sheep or cows from eating the crops within one screen of the fence. Other dog prevents within 5 tiles.
Rope + Dog + Rabbit Hole - Rabbit hunting dog. Collies and Beagles can collect a rabbit from any hole without making the hole abandoned. Other dogs collect a rabbit from any hole, and deplete Rabbit holes but not Family Rabbit Holes. Similar idea for geese and turkeys (possibly certain dogs can kill/collect geese, but the hole will get a new goose later?)
Rope + Any Dog - Guardian Dog. During your travels, if you would otherwise get hurt by a boar/bear/wolf/snake/mosquitos, your dog dies instead. Chihuahuas, Poodles, Pit bulls and Dachsunds have a chance of killing the animal in the process.
Ah, that's what it is. The mushroom makes you high. The sprites temporarily change semi-randomly. It's a feature, not a bug.
Twisted is why I bought this game, and about 25% of why I started streaming (the other 75% consists of Mario Maker and Sims 4, though not in the past couple weeks).
His videos are relaxing and informative, and sometimes funny. The most recent one he went out to be a prophet for the end of the rift - some really nice moments there.
Oooh this sounds awesome! It could add some interesting interactions between players trying to integrate into towns. I could also see destroying a banner (maybe needing some tool to take it apart, and then burning it) being considered an act of war in some way (maybe anyone belonging to that town is now at war with you in particular, and if they attack you, they are now at war with anyone from your town). Towns actually seem like a better way to handle war than families.
In a post-Arc world
Does this mean the rift will stop resetting at some point in the forseeable future? Or that you'll (heavens please) be getting rid of the rift in its current form (and therefore readjusting how well-tapping works), making it possible to Eve and pseudo-Eve again?
Hey, Jason, what if the genetic fitness change was based on:
* Your age at death compared to your genetic fitness score (prior to your death)
* Your child's age at death compared to *your child's* genetic fitness score (prior to their death)
I don't know if that's possible to check, but basically it compares your ability to keep your child alive, vs their and their previous parents' ability to keep themselves alive. It means that if you have a kid that normally starves at 5 years old, but you manage to help them stay alive until they're 20, then holy cow, you're a good parent! Similarly, if they normally stay alive until 40-60, but you let them starve at birth, your score goes way down.
I do like the idea from yesterday about only caring about your child's age until they stop being fertile, too.
I agree that even if wandering isn't interesting for you as a designer, it's really fun as a player. I like pseudo-Eve-ing. I like going and exploring to find resources.
I always make sure to help with some farming or smithing or cooking when I'm young, but sometimes I want to experience the beautiful world you've created. I want to go out and just catch rabbits for a while. I want to go get a cow, or a pig, or hunt turkeys. Sometimes I want to grab two or three people from town, and go exploring for dead towns to repopulate. I want to live off the land like I can't in my city in real life.
Seriously, we play games to escape life. Being able to live somewhat sustainably is a really cool part of OHOL.
The big theme I find among players is that we want options in how to play. We don't want to be hamstrung into going from one "step" to another, always ending up in a massive, hard-to-destroy town. We want to be able to hang out in the early game for a while (which is really well fleshed out and really enjoyable). Or we want to be able to splinter off from our town.
I do think it would be an interesting experiment to set it up so any 40x40 (or 80x80?) square can sustain a fire and wild food for two people indefinitely, maybe even without needing tools except the initial fire bow drill and a sharp rock.
I think you'd still see towns - people want to be able to make something, after all. I think you'd still see towns self-sustaining within their walls, for the most part - it gives projects and purpose, and if you only give 2 people per 40x40 squares, there's no way a town could just last off the land. I don't think you'd see anyone just going and camping out in one spot eating all the food alone - that's no fun. But I do think you'd see more temporary camps being set up, with small amounts of farming. I think you'd see more whole-world projects, like the roads that someone (tarr?) was making a few weeks ago. I think you'd see a slowdown of progress up the tech tree, without a complete halt.
Anyway. This is a really interesting idea that Glassius brought up. I think it's a direction I'd like to see the game go.
Hey, Jason, what if the radius increased with each step, but didn't tap out prior wells immediately?
Imagine, you have two wells, say, 200 squares apart. Each well is built to being a Newcomen, and taps out 160 tiles around it. Town A upgrades to kerosene, and that expands the radius to 200.
Town B doesn't immediately lose its water supply, but some indicator on the well shows that it's no longer upgradeable. They have a little bit of time and water left to decide what to do - do they go attack the other town to take it over? Do they try to disperse amongst all remaining towns? Do they try to find another well spot and rush to diesel?
Some additional options with respect to this:
- Make it so wells are downgradable, and therefore decreases the tapout radius. This would probably need to be balanced (maybe only downgradable by an elder and child together, like a fence, and several downgrade/upgrade cycles taps out your well and all wells at the lower level's radius?), and probably has griefing possibilities that I haven't thought of. This could make raids to downgrade another town's well advantageous to you (maybe not what we want)
- Add a way to continue getting water even when it's upgradable, but at lower quantity
- Add more intermediate/late game well types, and make it so one town can upgrade twice and take the water source back
- Force an intentional slowdown, and make it so that upgrading first puts you at a disadvantage, such that a well in your tapout radius will tapout your well when they upgrade. So if Town A upgrades first, Town B can upgrade to the same level as Town A, and taps out Town A's well. And if Town B managed to tapout Town C, and Town C upgrades, then Town B loses its water.
Only six wells before the rest go dry. Tarr made all six on the west edge of the rift in the first hour, before anyone else could.
I have also thought about stuff like:
--Running the current limited Eve spiral and Eve window and arc stuff, but without any border at all. There's an invisible box where all the Eves spawn, but after that, people can go wherever.
YES!!! Especially if there’s a way to create landmarks to orient us (like the wild roads suggestion, or making the Eve Box in the static corner).
I could also see tweaking the Eve spiral generation to bias towards 0,0. This wouldn’t be useful for a short Eve window, but with a long, periodic, or permanent Eve window, you could make it so that the new spiral center is within some distance of where the old spiral ended, but more likely to be closer to 0,0. I’m sort of imagining it as a random walk with bias, which there are lots of mathematical papers about (I’m a nerd, in case you couldn’t tell).
That unsolicited suggestion aside - I would 100% be behind the no-rift-with-rift-attribute experiment, or the two-walled rift, and 150% behind a riftless variation with landmarks.
To Leah Hoe:
I met you when you were just a wee toddler. Barely old enough to feed yourself, but still opinionated and determined. You and your sister were climbing all over me. Do you remember how fun that was? You saw me adopt my niece after her mom abandoned her, and you knew I needed to be your dad.
I'd already lived a good life, Leah. I'd gone after my aunt - she had gone to get rabbits before I was born and never came back. I finished her task, I clothed the village. The loincloth you wore was probably from my rabbits.
I loved you, Leah. I needed to be your dad, I needed to take care of you. And your mother. Whtiney. She was so beautiful. Her long hair, just barely going grey. Her misspelled first name. I fell in love with you, my child, and with your mother. Your mother and I spent several years courting each other. Feeding each other carrots, being in /love, having you and my nephew, Bill, translate for us. You didn't want to officiate, so we waited a while.
You didn't come to the wedding, Leah. Bill married us, under the tree east of town. We exchanged carrots, and plucked leaves to use as rings.
Bill was in love with you. I don't know if you ever knew. He told me, around when your mother and I got engaged. I was so excited for him to be my son-in-law. I knew you would love him - he was kind and intelligent. But after your mother and I were married, we went looking for you. My daughter, the one I adopted right before you, she said you'd gone north. But you'd died, Leah. You had made your way into a jungle, got bit. I couldn't protect you. I didn't know you were sick. I'm so sorry, Leah. I wish I could have saved you. I should have saved you.
We mourned. We planned a memorial for you. Your mother was heartbroken. She passed away before we could hold your funeral.
I buried her under our wedding tree. I went to find Bill. He was hurting. There was a redhead by the fire. She seemed sweet, had a daughter I think. Maybe a son. You know how babies all look alike. Her name was Whitney. It was fate - or maybe it was grief, but it doesn't matter - Bill was in love again. He still mourned you. He would never have forgotten you, but he was happy. Whitney's child promised to marry them some day.
I knew I was dying. I said my last goodbyes. I was proud. We had brought the town from a tiny camp to a bustling town. Bill promised to bury me with your mother. We'll spend the rest of the eons under our wedding tree. We remembered you, Leah.
It was a good life. I'm glad I met you, Leah.
I really like this idea overall.
Jason, you tend to want descriptions of problems, rather than suggested solutions right? Let me give this a shot with what I think this feature request is coming from.
From what I understand, you had several goals for the rift - to encourage interaction with each other, and to experiment with scarcity being the two main reasons that I've seen. There are problems with each of these in this implementation (and also some problems that exist with them in the pre-rift implementation.
Problem: The scarcity in the rift feels artificial. There's more world out there, we just can't reach it, and we as players don't like being told that there's a place we can't go.
Related problem: The rift gives us the means to interact with other families, but not the motivation to do so - yeah, we could go to another town and help them out, but why bother? It's all going to be gone in two days anyway because the arcs are so short.
Problem: The arcs are short (at least in part because) a decent number of players want the early game experience, which isn't possible in the rift after the first day because the wilderness is always touched, and nothing regenerates or changes without a big reset.
On the old implementation side, I see the following issues.
Problem: There was no scarcity. You could just keep running and you'd find an area where no one else had touched to make a new town.
Problem: We had the motivation to keep towns going (as shown by the several towns that managed to last a couple weeks), but there was no way to find existing towns. This meant that everything was early game, and we had trouble getting to the top of the tech tree or interacting with each other.
It feels like there should be a way to marry those two states. A hard rift is a problem because it constrains us too much. An infinite map is a problem because it doesn't constrain us at all. The "Wild Roads" suggestion seems (to me - I don't know the engine or how much work it would take) like a good way to give us a "soft" rift. Yeah, there's a big wide wilderness out there, and if you want the early game experience, you can go there, or be planted there as an Eve, but the central hub is where the big cities are going to end up - that gives us the means to interact with each other, and the fact that we aren't trapped in a box will reinvigorate the motivation to interact (and decrease the number of murders for attempted resets). Those areas would be consistently visited, and over time the resources around them will get depleted (natural rather than artificial scarcity). You could try to found a new town far away where there are resources, but it probably won't survive long, so that gives us a reason for apocalypse when things get bad for everyone.
Especially if there's a modified resetting Eve spiral (making it more likely that the new center goes closer to 0,0 than further from it), it seems like this would keep us somewhat contained while still allowing for multiple play styles and letting us feel freed rather than caged.
Just so you know, Morti, I really appreciate the work you've done. I'm hoping that the arcs start getting a little longer soon, especially once Jason fixes the horse carts.
I totally get it that you're worn down. Just know that you have one fan here who loves what you do, and I definitely want to help out with the roads once I'm experienced enough to survive while doing it.
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