How to fix OHOL?

Harmi · 2019-11-23 15:13:32

Hello, let me introduce myself first:
I am a noob, I bought the game yesterday. It doesn't mean that I wouldn't have good ideas and I will share them with you now.

This is a great game, but it has some major core problems that all the players struggle with. The new players and old players, but especially new players.

I've been lurking little on this forum and I've seen that people, for example, wanna born back to some specific family tree, because there is a positive "problem" of steam rushing. However, allowing players to spawn where ever they want to is not a right solution imho. It would only generate few elite families. (those will eventually be generated anyways, but not by that way. This is supposed to be a life simulator anyways.)

Many new players just join the game and destroy entire villages, because they don't know what they should be doing. They don't do it because they didn't want to help. I think most of the players wants to help, but they just don't know what can they do or where to find items they need to help. I am one of those new players. However, I still understand the core mechanic of this game and what I should logically be doing (gather food and technology and let the bloodline continue).

The problem of not achieving those is in these 3 problems in OHOL core mechanics, which I introduce you next.

- Inventory management

The problem of not having proper inventory management is one of the main reasons why people die. It is a huge problem. For example, if you have a backpack and you don't have access to the items in it, you might die because of that. No one in real life dies because of that. If there is some sort of a box on the ground and you have no access to the items in it, it's also a huge problem. Today the "best" solution for this is that you have a huge land area only filled with single random items. How on earth that makes sense?
So if you're for example looking for a needle, you might need to walk more than 20 sprites to the other side of the town to find it lying on the ground. You could also invent a perfect management system for the items, but new players can destroy it accidentally in minutes when they don't know where to put the items. Life simulator shouldn't work that way.

Instead you should be able to create inventories. Chest, backpacks, boxes, and you should be able to look inside of the inventory without taking items from it. Also, you should be able to write signs to introduce players what's inside of some inventory.

- Crafting

The crafting is the next big problem, that in fact goes together with the GUI problems. The game is trying to help you to craft new items by adding recipes, but the problem is that it still is very unintuitive. You should have a GUI for crafting so that you don't for example accidentally "craft" new items by just placing them together without knowing what on earth you're doing. I leave it to developers what the GUI for that could be. Maybe something little similar as it is in Minecraft since people already know it?

- GUI

This is for the non-English speakers the biggest problem that goes to crafting. I, for example, am from Finland (päivää päivää), I know English quite well but this game introduced me to many new words which I have never heard of. So that's why especially for the crafting items you should have icons. Let's say your recipe is to craft carrots and potatoes together to create "Something" (Don't ask why would one mix those, it's just an example), but you don't have any idea what "potato" is. You know it in your native language but in English, you have no idea. For example, in Finnish, it's "peruna". (Try to imagine a situation where you have to find carrots and "peruna" to progress in the game.

So, someone asks you to do "something" and you start doing it. You found or created a bowl, you found carrots and then you see the next step in your recipe and you have no idea what "peruna" is. So you have to alt-tab away from the game to find it from the dictionary to continue the progress. Very unintuitive.

All that struggle with non-English speakers could be fixed by just adding an icon to every item in the recipes.

You say that telling with icons what "peruna" is, is cheating, but remember that in this game 1 minute is 1 year. If your mom told you to find "perunas", she would also explain what "peruna" is. This game doesn't allow us to have this deep conversations with other players.

All game features should be achievable from the GUI. For example, naming your newborn should be allowed to be done also from, let's say drop menu that you get from right-clicking your baby. etc.

Last edited by Harmi (2019-11-23 15:52:31)

arkajalka · 2019-11-23 16:33:04

Torille perkele!

The inventory system doesnt sound right for this game, as everything is visual and always "existing" and taking its space in the world. This may feel bit akward first, but you get the feeling of it pretty fast and it comes really natural. Its one of the spices of this game imho.

The thing with the language barrier is that everything in this game that is craftable makes pretty much sense after you figure it out. You really dont need any words for it, just visual clue should be enough. I mean in normal world it doesnt read potato in perunas...

Just hang on a bit and you get used to it, nothing to make better here.

These suggestions would just kill the uniqueness of this game and make it like every other gather, craft and survive game.

Spoonwood · 2019-11-23 16:37:27

There's a mod getting developed by an Asian named Alec on the forums which has a visual crafting reference system as you suggest. There's a site called onetech, here: https://onetech.info/ which has visual images to aid in crafting, which people use. But, both are external to the default game. The game developer, there's only one, has more or less not seemed to have had much interest in providing more opportunity for new players to do more things in a life, or more complex things in a life, when that issue has arisen before, which such a system would enable.

Kinrany · 2019-11-23 16:49:12

I'll try to sum up the problems:

It's hard to find stuff in the village. There's entropy in the form of other players who don't see that the layout of items is intentional. There's no way to communicate the system behind the layout.
It's easy to accidentally and irreversibly craft something you don't need.
Many items are named with rare words. Someone who doesn't know a word will not understand the item's behavior or purpose, and won't be able to recognize it visually. The best solution is to alt-tab and google.

I'll add an observation. Most items fit into one of the following two broad categories:

Consumable items like food and resources. They're often mass-produced.
Multi-use items like most tools. They're often expensive, there's only one instance of each at a time.

Mass-produced items are often stored in stockpiles. Stockpiles are easy to recognize, even though they have fuzzy borders and can become fragmented.
There's no similar natural way to reserve a place for a multi-use item.

DestinyCall · 2019-11-23 16:55:22

Inventory management - Yes, I think that we need better ways to manage inventory in OHOL. There is too much clutter and too little organization. The design direction for this game avoids using menus or other interfaces for displaying information. However, this is still a problem and I think it can be improved without significantly changing the game design. More containers and more types of containers that are visually distinct or able to be labeled would be a great improvement. More items that can be stacked into clearly visible piles. More ways to store liquids and other "bowl" items in larger containers.

Crafting - The crafting system in OHOL is one of its most distinctive features, so I don't think this is likely to change. I would like to see more options to REVERSE crafting, whenever it makes sense. If you put together two items by accident, it would be nice to be able to pull them apart. For some combinations, this wouldn't work because combining them causes a radical change. You can't uncook a pie, for example. But there are other things that could be reversible, like removing the rope from a curved branch, if you accidentally start construction of a second firebow when you were trying to do something else.

GUI - Icons or visual crafting hints would be very useful for non-English speakers AND English speakers, since it would help people quickly identify the item they are looking for. You might know that you are looking for a potato, but that doesn't mean you will be able to recognize what a raw potato looks like in OHOL. You may not have noticed yet, but the crafting system already tries to help people find the items they need in the world. If you do a search for a particular recipe, a blue arrow will point at any nearby items that fit that description. I haven't played around with this system very much, because I have most of the important recipes memorized by this point. But it should, theoretically, help you identify a peruna, if any perunas are available in your village.

Spoonwood · 2019-11-23 16:58:15

arkajalka wrote:

Torille perkele!
The inventory system doesnt sound right for this game, as everything is visual and always "existing" and taking its space in the world. This may feel bit akward first, but you get the feeling of it pretty fast and it comes really natural. Its one of the spices of this game imho.
The thing with the language barrier is that everything in this game that is craftable makes pretty much sense after you figure it out. You really dont need any words for it, just visual clue should be enough. I mean in normal world it doesnt read potato in perunas...
Just hang on a bit and you get used to it, nothing to make better here.
These suggestions would just kill the uniqueness of this game and make it like every other gather, craft and survive game.

I think Jason would say something similar. However, there exist other gather, craft, and survive games which are more popular. They work better for more people. I don't think Harmi plays this game because of reasons related to the effects of uniqueness of a game.

No, visual clues are not enough. There are many examples of how that fails. The common burning of a rabbit over a fire. When a cistern is completely full it looks a clay bowl can get used to draw water from it. It looks like burdock or any other food could get put into a pie. It looks like you could heat clay bowls inside of a forge, because the fire stands out the most.

arkajalka · 2019-11-23 17:10:54

True dat. It's not perfect and theres lot room for improvement, but i dont think you need to just adopt a thing from other game when theres something totaly new forming in here.

The burned rabbit isnt a visual clue that the fire was too hot?

Clay bowl really should be able to be cooked also with coal too. Or if its "too hot for baking clay" then the bowl should breake to indicate you did something wrong.

The rest are true tho. Theres really some wonky mechanis build the stack system of this game and not enough variety food recipes added cause it would totaly break the game by yums overpowerment that it would create.

arkajalka · 2019-11-23 17:16:15

Also most of the game mechanics are broken by people mass spamming something and doing the thing that wasnt expected XD

It felt good on a paper... rift baby apocalypse, dogocalypse, memerscore, babyteleporters, human breeding pens...

Kaveh · 2019-11-23 18:31:01

I too am not a native English speaker (although fairly fluent) and had the language issue for a little bit. One of the words I remember not knowing was 'adze', but I learned what it was by hovering over items. The game taught me new words like that a few times.
My advice for this issue: if you don't know a certain word and there's wayyyyy too many items on screen to check, ask people "do we have an adze?" or "where is the adze?". They'll either bring it to you, or point you to where it is. Helps narrow it down a little so you don't have to waste time looking at every item or going to onetech to figure out wtf that thing is.

Funny thing is: rn I know the English word for adze cuz of OHOL, but actually have no clue what to call it in Dutch cuz it's not a common item (looked it up btw, it's 'dissel')

DestinyCall · 2019-11-23 19:37:57

If it makes you feel better, I am a native English speaker and also learned the word "adze" and "froe" from OHOL. I have never heard it used outside this game.

mina · 2019-11-23 19:45:23

DestinyCall wrote:

If it makes you feel better, I am a native English speaker and also learned the word "adze" and "froe" from OHOL. I have never heard it used outside this game.

Same here, lol. Never seen/heard it before online or IRL. Ya learn something new every day!

wondible · 2019-11-23 20:25:14

Along with the namings, there is the spelling issue for filters. "Tatoo" doesn't help me make a "Tattoo"

Generally though Jason has a minimal UI philosophy and I appreciate that. (I was also sad about all the modality that got added to the astroneer ui) This doesn't mean there aren't problems, and talking about them is good, but "standard" solutions are usually a no-go.

Harmi · 2019-11-23 21:53:32

I understand and even like the minimum UI philosophy. Simplicity is beautiful. But on the other hand, it cannot be expected that all the players learn some command prompt -kind of things to do some tasks.

Spoonwood · 2019-11-23 23:31:41

arkajalka wrote:

True dat. It's not perfect and theres lot room for improvement, but i dont think you need to just adopt a thing from other game when theres something totaly new forming in here.
The burned rabbit isnt a visual clue that the fire was too hot?

You're right that I'm off on understanding visual clues on that one. Cooking over real fire doesn't work like that, it's a rookie mistake.

I checked the tutorial area. There's a room now at the start with kindling, hot coals, a long straight shaft, and a snake pit. It was possible to not make a stone hatchet to exit there before, but it did require more running around than walking into that room.

Saolin · 2019-11-24 19:25:37

In response to OP, you do have access to items in your backpack or any (non-locked) box: just right click to pull out an item, and continue right clicking to cycle through them.

It would be nice if more items were stackable in multiples of themselves, like round stones, flint chips, and carrots are.

And if I had a nickel for every time I was on route to light a long shaft and ended up making a sledge by accident on the way there... I'd probably have like 35 cents.

One Hour One Life Forums

#1 2019-11-23 15:13:32

How to fix OHOL?

#2 2019-11-23 16:33:04

Re: How to fix OHOL?

#3 2019-11-23 16:37:27

Re: How to fix OHOL?

#4 2019-11-23 16:49:12

Re: How to fix OHOL?

#5 2019-11-23 16:55:22

Re: How to fix OHOL?

#6 2019-11-23 16:58:15

Re: How to fix OHOL?

#7 2019-11-23 17:10:54

Re: How to fix OHOL?

#8 2019-11-23 17:16:15

Re: How to fix OHOL?

#9 2019-11-23 18:31:01

Re: How to fix OHOL?

#10 2019-11-23 19:37:57

Re: How to fix OHOL?

#11 2019-11-23 19:45:23

Re: How to fix OHOL?

#12 2019-11-23 20:25:14

Re: How to fix OHOL?

#13 2019-11-23 21:53:32

Re: How to fix OHOL?

#14 2019-11-23 23:31:41

Re: How to fix OHOL?

#15 2019-11-24 19:25:37

Re: How to fix OHOL?

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