Update: Murder Mouth

jasonrohrer · 2019-06-22 02:17:13

I do have a 102 fever right now, so I'll keep it brief (gotta go lay down).

This week's update adds one new major feature, sounds associated with the "kill face" that you make when targeting someone for murder. You can hear them when they enter that state, and you can hear them as they come at you. No more griefers sneaking around off-screen and pouncing.

Polls are also in-game and working, but most of you have noticed that already.

The life limit feature has been tweaked a lot. You now get 12 lives max, with one earned every 20 minutes. With the old 60-minute system, unless you lived 60 minutes every time, you'd always see your count going down a bit, and even if you lived 60, the count would stay the same and not rise. Now your count will generally rise as you play, quickly recovering from any short lives you had.

Also, new players no longer have bonus lives. This was confusing for some, and meant that new players saw a number going down and never going up, which is discouraging. Believe it or not, some players were so angry over their confusion that one is threatening me with legal action over this change. Ah, the adventurous life of a solo game dev! Contesting a $20 lawsuit in small claims court is going to be interesting.

So, new players, like everyone else, will generally see their count going up as they play. Good stuff. And yes, this system will continue to be adjusted in the future. As with the curse system, I kinda see it as a place-holder solution until the heart of the game is adjusted in other ways to make it an unnecessary feature.

A few bugs have been fixed, and there's a major quality-of-life improvement with building stakes. The floor stakes are the first transition (duh, you build O(N^2) floors for every O(N) walls), not to mention the tedium of building long roads. Also, there's always a common stake in the middle as the other stakes move around, meaning you can keep your mouse in the center when cycling through (instead of the hitbox changing entirely with each click).

I spent a good portion of the week on deep design work, thinking about this core problem: how can you really CARE about the survival of your immediate family members? In real life, you'd do anything to save your child or grandchild. In this game, you just kinda shrug and move on. This reduces the potential variety of family-based stories.

The current idea is to add a kind of genetic score to the game, attached to your account, based on the weighted success of your most-recent in-game relatives. They'll be weighted geometrically by birth time, meaning that the success of your youngest grandchild will be worth more than your oldest child (just like real life, where the littlest ones always are the priority, for good reason). Men will base this on the success of their nieces and nephews (the gay uncle gene), and of course your own success will count too. (Success means longevity, by the way.)

There will be a ranking for these genetic scores, so you'll be able to compare with others, and there will also be an in-game bonus for high scores. Currently, the idea (proposed by forum-member Wondible) is that the degradation of your old-age food bar is reduced (hey, you got good genes!). If you manage a perfect score (close to impossible), your food bar will remain at peak capacity all the way until you die. It will be strictly a bonus, and won't negatively affect anyone who gets a low score (the normal age-based capacity degradation will still happen).

Here's a little graph of possible weightings that each sum to 1, where X=0 is your most recently born relative (grandchild or whatever), and X=10 is your 11th most recently born, etc. By varying the severity of this curve, we can control how much more you care about the youngest members of your family.

I'm currently leaning toward the red (middle) curve.

Your mother and grandmother will count a bit too (but less, because they were born so long ago), so there's a mutual benefit effect to helping each other survive.

Now I'm off to bed. Well, actually, my kids are waiting to watch Porco Rosso tonight. Nothing like anime on a high fever!

jasonrohrer · 2019-06-22 02:28:00

For reference, here's the gnuplot command:

 plot (1.0/4.0) * (3.0/4.0)**x, (1.0/10.0) * (9.0/10.0)**x, (1.0/2.0) * (1.0/2.0)**x

Spoonwood · 2019-06-22 03:03:12

Jason, get in cold! Don't stand in the desert or jungle... tundra is best for now!

All kidding about your, no doubt, bad fever aside, I'm not clear on the new system. I checked on dev-changes and didn't manage to see anything relevant to the genetic scores. I don't intend the following as a critique to such a system, and I think it's a good idea (I can't say anything about how I feel about the particulars, but that's minor in comparison to the idea at this point in time). You say there's a score based on parents, so even if someone doesn't have children there still exists a score. Except for one case. A person (probably Eve-chaining or starting one on a low population server) who doesn't have any children or parents. Will that person have a genetic score and if they do, what will it be?

jasonrohrer · 2019-06-22 03:56:06

Sorry for the confusion. The genetic system isn't implemented yet. This is the proposed system. If all looks good, it will probably go live in a week or two.

For the childless Eve case, yes, they will have a score based just on their own lives. That does seem unfair on the leaderboard, so I'll have to think about that.

Probably the servers will only report to the gene server if there are more than a min number of people on the server. So Eve chain lives will just have no effect.

Spoonwood · 2019-06-22 04:36:59

No problem with respect to the confusion Jason.

The change with respect to floor stakes is convenient (and I can now say that on the basis of experience). I like the stake in the middle thing also, as now we can change the stakes as quickly standing away from the stakes as could get done with a mod where you could stand over them and change them quickly before.

Hope you get better soon!

Last edited by Spoonwood (2019-06-22 04:37:31)

InSpace · 2019-06-22 05:11:47

Hmm, high foodbar as an old man, I can get behind that

RodneyC86 · 2019-06-22 05:41:34

Nice, make lots of sense to care for the youngest in the family. We will need to spoil the little ****** to death. But then we get annoying brats that grief but we prefer them alive. But hey that's life

Amon · 2019-06-22 08:31:00

Love some but somewhat skeptical but I'll see when it gets out with hte fam stuff.
And ouch, at least it's not higher, do recover soon though!

jasonrohrer · 2019-06-22 20:29:15

Sorry folks, turns out that the servers didn't get the new setting for murder mouth. That's rolling out now, and should be live in a little bit.

zed · 2019-06-23 12:21:07

I see you want to be able to tune players' motivations, but I worry using
these arbitrary weightings would be difficult for players to learn. If you use
the actual relatedness (as in the formula used at
http://onehouronelife.com/forums/viewtopic.php?id=6804 ), you don't need to
teach the players the mechanic -- because a billion or two years of eukaryotic
evolution have done it for you.

jasonrohrer · 2019-06-24 19:59:52

Interesting, Zed.

For the purpose of this calculation, we pretend that all births involve an invisible father

No pretending is necessary! There is indeed an invisible father involved in all births in the game. In fact, one singular invisible father. And what a proud father I am!

Relatedness isn't the only factor. Their breeding potential matters too, in a complex calculus that I don't fully understand. Thus, when faced with The Good Son dilema (don't want to spoil a classic and shocking and ridiculous and awesome movie for you, if you haven't seen Evil Macaulay Culkin):

https://youtu.be/xqsDUwDwdUM?t=47

Relatedness tells us why we'd drop a cousin to save a brother, but:

Most people would drop an older sibling to save a younger one. Most would also drop a brother to save a sister. What about an older woman vs a younger man, though? What if the woman is past childbearing age? I wonder if the calculus changes there. Like, a 50-y-o brother vs a 50-y-o sister. Save which?

Though I wonder if the age calculus ONLY counts for people of the same relatedness level.

Like, save younger cousin or older brother? Probably save older brother.

Save your own child or brother's younger child (your nephew)? Save your own child.

But some weird ones: Save your mother or your brother? Your mother or your sister? Does it matter how old your mother or siblings are? (Also, assume your mother doesn't let go of her own accord to save her own offspring.) Relatedness would tell us that your mother is a sure thing 50% relatedness, where your sibling has an unknown relatedness (between 2% and 100%, average roughly 50% (depending on whether you share gender with sib or not)). Maybe your favorite brother tends to be more related than the brother you hate?

ANYWAY, even if I do just relatedness and forget about age, I feel like I still need to at least show the weighting numbers to people. I can't count on their intuition working, especially when that intuition is turned into a hard number.

The other problem with relatedness weighting is it doesn't automatically sum to 1 the way a geometric time-based weighting does. So you kinda have to pick a fixed size pool of people, compute relatedness, and then assign proportional weights that sum to one.

testo · 2019-06-25 01:52:55

It doesn´t make any sense to me to add a score or reward system for a game about living a life and being part of something bigger. This breaks the self importance of each life. A reward system is a poor way to fake a bond to obtain a future benefit.

Spoonwood · 2019-06-25 03:23:03

Jason, you should also remove property fences from the game also, and that's related to people to caring about their family members as you've said you want to encourage. Or, at bare minimum, substantially rework them. The biggest problem lies in that property gates take a rope. I just got born into a camp where they didn't have a deep well, having a dry shallow well, or a hand cart and someone was trying to make a gate. Since that's a minimum of three ropes, and plenty more is needed until water is secure, that's a terrible call for anyone wanting to play for their family. On top of that someone was standing around with a bow and arrow, trying to enforce such a structure getting built (I wouldn't have it). Seriously, if you want us to play for our lineages, then REMOVE a stupid object like a property gate which encourages people to consume precious rope. No, they don't create drama, just idiots who don't understand or don't care about how bad property gates are.

And NO, just growing more milkweed won't do. As I said above, the shallow well was dry. And veteran players often enough will just get milkweed instead of growing it, because, in part, it's a better idea water wise to get milkweed from the wild.

Edit:

The town did NOT have sheep either. Can't leave a rope around when making a pen when you have property gates in the game and people wanting to make private property. That's not going to work.

Last edited by Spoonwood (2019-06-25 03:30:42)

ollj · 2019-06-25 14:54:11

approved.
its biased in one way, and not another, but the one way is approved.

this totally should make people hate any pregnant mother, who is jhust way too far away from the warm base, in the nude, doing her own shit, but not getting good food or clothes or many babies in a warmer place.
And of course I am a bit of a hypocrite in the last sentence, when I do something like that, except I was pregnant a lot, while killing ten bears and other clothing animals, and bringing the furs home.

Just saying, we might also need a bear-killing score, as bears are a number one grief cause, eeasily prevented by just having one dedicated bear hunter.
And a score for how many dumb moms you killed, based on reciprocal distance to base, while nude and fertile, even if their whiny surviving kids will hate, curse and badmouth you just for that.
cold hearted dumbass mombs with kids on a vengeance are worst grief cause, as they slowly kill a family by diminishing offspring the most.

Last edited by ollj (2019-06-25 18:46:57)

zed · 2019-06-25 20:18:17

jasonrohrer wrote:

Relatedness isn't the only factor. Their breeding potential matters too, in a
complex calculus that I don't fully understand.

Yes. Giving points for all relations takes this into account to an extent, but
it's skewed versus reality because it scores even those branches which die
out, which are worthless from an evolutionary perspective.

What would really make sense is to evaluate the score for a life at a
particular time as the sum of the relatedness of the *living* relations. But
that wouldn't work for a long-term leaderboard.

your sibling has an unknown relatedness (between 2% and 100%, average roughly
25%

If it's a full sibling and I'm not horribly mistaken, the relatedness should
be 50% (assuming no further knowledge, like gender or agreeableness).

ANYWAY, even if I do just relatedness and forget about age, I feel like I
still need to at least show the weighting numbers to people.

Maybe just as an optional "detailed tally" explaining how the score was
calculated? I'm not sure it needs to be presented in-game.

jasonrohrer · 2019-06-25 22:07:24

Zed, you're right about the expected 50% shared between sibs. Fixed my post.

BladeWoods · 2019-06-26 02:33:37

Does this mean content fix week is pushed back again?

SparkleCake · 2019-07-01 03:42:31

I wanted to add my appreciation for this update now that it's had some time to settle! I think it's wonderful that we have an insightful, caring developer who listens and interacts so closely with the community. Thanks for all your hard work, Jason.

Falsewall · 2019-07-24 04:42:24

Haha, did baby boy Rage finally finish figuring out how to send his letter?
Was reading through changelogs and happened upon this after being gone a few months.
Hope their dick flexing didn't waste too much of your time.

One Hour One Life Forums

#1 2019-06-22 02:17:13

Update: Murder Mouth

#2 2019-06-22 02:28:00

Re: Update: Murder Mouth

#3 2019-06-22 03:03:12

Re: Update: Murder Mouth

#4 2019-06-22 03:56:06

Re: Update: Murder Mouth

#5 2019-06-22 04:36:59

Re: Update: Murder Mouth

#6 2019-06-22 05:11:47

Re: Update: Murder Mouth

#7 2019-06-22 05:41:34

Re: Update: Murder Mouth

#8 2019-06-22 08:31:00

Re: Update: Murder Mouth

#9 2019-06-22 20:29:15

Re: Update: Murder Mouth

#10 2019-06-23 12:21:07

Re: Update: Murder Mouth

#11 2019-06-24 19:59:52

Re: Update: Murder Mouth

#12 2019-06-25 01:52:55

Re: Update: Murder Mouth

#13 2019-06-25 03:23:03

Re: Update: Murder Mouth

#14 2019-06-25 14:54:11

Re: Update: Murder Mouth

#15 2019-06-25 20:18:17

Re: Update: Murder Mouth

#16 2019-06-25 22:07:24

Re: Update: Murder Mouth

#17 2019-06-26 02:33:37

Re: Update: Murder Mouth

#18 2019-07-01 03:42:31

Re: Update: Murder Mouth

#19 2019-07-24 04:42:24

Re: Update: Murder Mouth

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