One Hour One Life Forums

jasonrohrer

Administrator

Registered: 2017-02-13

Posts: 4,810

Update: Jason's Rocket Ride

All logged bugs and issues have been fixed.

I first started working on this game more than 10 years ago.  My first commit, on May 28, 2015, bears the message, "Got basic client skeleton in place.  It compiles, runs, pauses, and quits without crashing."  No crashing!  Sounds like I was off to a good start.

146,000 lines of code and over 3.5 million in-game player hours later, here we are.  With something like 25 servers coordinating behind the scenes to keep things running, One Hour One Life is a massive, sprawling city of a solo engineering project.  With so many moving parts, it's a miracle that this house of cards works at all, but somehow, it does.  According to my records, the main game server hasn't crashed since July 2024, and it's been running steadily since the last update in January of 2025.  That's 10 months of continuous uptime, during which players made something like 200 million changes to the persistent map.

Along the way, I processed and fixed over 2000 reported bugs and issues.  There were something like 100 issues in this most recent batch, which was itself quite a mountain to climb.

But I'm turning 48 on Friday, and I'm not going to spend the next 10 years of my life working on One Hour One Life.  It's time to make a new game, before my time of making games runs out.  I fancy making something a bit smaller and simpler for the next one.

Of course, I will continue to keep the servers running and fix showstopping bugs as they're discovered, for as long as I'm alive and able.  For the most part, the servers run themselves, but every once in a while, there's a fire that needs putting out.

One last little token before I go:  over 300 people have ridden the rocket to Another Planet, which was always meant to be a "You Won the Game" moment.  Now they will each be immortalized, hopefully forever, as long as the servers keep running.  Maybe if you can get 146,000 lines of C code to compile in 2125, there's a chance at forever.

And lastly, over the next few days, I'll be getting born in the game as a baby and trying to build and ride the rocket myself, as one final salute.  No cheating with VOG or other funny business---I'm going to build the rocket for real.

I may even spawn as your baby at some point, and it will be up to you to take care of me.

jinbaili83

Member

Registered: 2018-06-15

Posts: 226

Re: Update: Jason's Rocket Ride

Looks like it's final FINAL update.

Spoonwood

Member

Registered: 2019-02-06

Posts: 4,384

Re: Update: Jason's Rocket Ride

No cheating with VOG or other funny business---I'm going to build the rocket for real.

Well, then you should also attempt to do so in a way consistent with the rest of the game and with high standards.  This means:

1. Living out every life no matter where you get born.  Of course if you personally need to take care of something to maintain the game or take care of your external family, that's understandable.  But basically, if you get born in a spot where rocket progress doesn't seem possible like being the daughter of Eve, so what?  Players get supposed to accept their circumstances and play for the survival of their own self, and their genetic score families, while also building.  They aren't supposed to kill their characters for some solo end project (OR we have a system which encourages contradicting how the genetic score system works).  Effectively this means: *No uses of /die*.

2. If you do manage to complete a rocket, no leaving early!  You could get into the rocket and launch at 25 years old?  So what!?  It's supposed to be a *survival* game, not some game where the human player kills his character early.  So, *you have to wait until your character turns 59 years old to launch the rocket*.  Alright, that might require an external timer in your "Jason glasses" client, but at the very least your character should be old enough that it stands to reason that such a character is near an old age death, and thus can't benefit his/her family for much longer, if at all.

If you can launch the rocket early, you need to overcome any feelings of impatience so that you continue existing, until your character is near old age.

3. Ghosts live for longer than an hour.  You become a ghost?  But, how have ghosts fit within a one hour context?!  They simply haven't, ever.  It's all a bunch of funny business if you become a ghost.  So, if you become a ghost, you have to move onto the next character (and end the life of the ghost).

---

Danish Clinch.
Longtime tutorial player.