Update: Author Credit
February 16, 2024
Content made with the Editor now tracks authorship using a hash of your account's email address or Steam ID. When you export contents as OXZ files to share with others, your authorship hash goes with your content. Thus, over time, we can keep track of the portion of the content that each person contributes. This will be important in connection to the plan for Another Hour Another Planet, which I will explain here.
Another Hour Another Planet will be a separate game, released for real on Steam.
First of all, how will people gain access to Another Planet? For the time being, there will be a hard-to-build object inside One Hour One Life which requires some kind of server-wide collaboration and consensus: a rocket ship. Once this rocket is built, there will be room inside it for one lone traveler. Whoever is chosen by the collective action of the players on the server will ride the rocket and gain permanent access to Another Planet. For each rocket launched, one additional person will gain access.
And the content on Another Planet? It will be entirely conceived, designed, drawn, animated, and assembled by the player community. Each person who has access to Another Planet will also get the right to vote for the current Content Leader---the person in charge of curating, assembling, and testing the content submitted by the player community. And yes, the Content Leader might make bad choices, try to sabotage the game, or even just burn out. A new Content Leader is always just a vote away, and the entire process will be organized through an immutable Github repository, meaning that a future Content Leader can roll back bad content changes if needed.
Over the years, lots of people have disagreed with various content design decisions that I have made. This will be a chance for the community to make their own decisions, chart their own course, and make the game their own.
Only the content will be modifiable by end-users. Another Hour Another Planet will use exactly the same binary client and server code as One Hour One Life, and I'll still be maintaining that, and fixing bugs, into the future. So we don't need to worry about player-submitted virus code.
Finally according to Steam's policies, games that appear in the Steam Store and in people's game libraries must eventually be sold. They don't want prestige items, only accessible as prizes earned outside their usual sales channels, clogging up their store and confusing their customers. So yes, while Another Hour Another Planet will only be accessible by rocket from inside One Hour One Life during it's beta development period, it will eventually be sold to the general public as a real game. I've set a deadline for you folks, in fact: roughly two years from now, on February 13, 2026. Of course, you can all keep working on it and adding content to it after that release date, but you should shoot to have a solid, compelling Another Planet game experience by then.
But if it's sold, that means it might make some money, and then what?
Coming full-circle, that's where the Authorship Tracking comes in. I promise to share 60% of the revenue from the first year of AHAP sales with each and every person who contributed content to the game world, based on the fraction of the total content that they contributed. Details still need to be ironed out, but sprites, sounds, objects, animations, transitions, and music will all be factored in. But even if you only contribute one thing, you will get some money during the first year.
During future years after that, I will make a good-faith effort to continue sharing 60% of revenue with content contributors who's portion of the revenue would total more than $500 for the year. In other words, I'm not going to continue paying thousands of people a few dollars per year forever. I will do that during the first year, however. Regarding the "good faith effort" part: obviously, I won't live forever, etc.
And the point of all this?
I've dedicated eight years of my life to One Hour One Life. I'm now 46 years old, and I may not have that many big software projects left in me. It's time for me to move on to other things, before it's too late. I could just turn One Hour One Life over to a dev team, or even sell it to a company, in order to keep it going. But given that I drew every pen line, played every piano note, and recorded every sound myself, it's a very personal work. It is exactly how I want it to be, and I want to leave it that way, going into the future. People who play One Hour One Life should be playing my One Hour One Life. But how can the game really live on, and the community keep thriving, if I stop working on it? Another Hour Another Planet is an outlet for that future vitality.
One Hour One Life also maintains a certain degree of visual consistency, in part because everything in it was drawn by the same hand, using exactly the same tools (heck, even on exactly the same paper stock). Any collaborative effort would obviously deviate from that consistency. In fact, I imagine that Another Hour Another Planet will be a bit of stylistic mish-mash. But that's perfectly fine, given the theming: it's supposed to be an alien world, after all. Alien worlds can be strange.
There are obviously lots of details to iron out, but that's a broad overview of the plan.
| Update: Methman Memorial
February 3, 2024
We recently received some sad news. Methman, a friendly pillar of our community and Discord moderator, died late last fall.
The One Hour One Life community has been remembering him in various ways this week.
His primary online handle was MaDc0w, and I just recently learned where the "Methman" nickname in the OHOL community came from. Mofobert designed an "OHOL Portrait" of MaDc0w using the Editor, and MaDc0w loved this hilarious image so much that he adopted it as his Discord icon. MaDc0w thought that this wacky OHOL character with the red cape looked like he was high on meth, so the name Methman was born.
Here is a direct quote from the email that I received from his friend:
Now that the family has had a couple months to grieve we are providing the following statement in one of his online communities. I pass this information on to you so you can choose to make a statement or have a remembrance as well.
It is with deep sadness that we announce the loss of MaDc0w, a friend so close to us that they are considered family. He unfortunately passed suddenly and untimely in the morning on November 30th while in his home. He lived an amazing life with a love of Technology matched by few. MaDc0w was a leader in our community and will be missed by all.
Rest in peace, Methman. You will be missed.
| Update: Big Soil
January 17, 2024
A small mid-week update this week. You can now pile baskets of soil, just like you can with baskets of charcoal. There's also been a gotcha fixed with worm farming: taking the last worm from the wormy soil pile no longer permanently ends the worm farm, since you can put the worm right back in if you've removed it by mistake.
I also spent a good chunk of time this week ironing out the details of AHAP and starting to implement it. You'll hear more about this soon.
Tomorrow, I'm heading out to Utah for the premier of the documentary Eternal You at Sundance, which is in part about Project December, my AI side-project. More details here:
https://festival.sundance.org/program/film/6569ff9efac9f46f45c03c81
I'll be back early next week to resume work on One Hour One Life.
| Update: Power Edit
January 13, 2024
A bunch of improvements to the Editor this week.
First of all, along with loading mods, which are temporary, the Editor can now import content permanently. You can either replace objects content (similar to how mods are loaded, but permanently) or add entirely new objects. To import, drop an OXZ file into the new import_add or import_replace folder. The idea here is that people who are working together on new content can easily share their work with each other.
The various pickers in the Editor now support searching by ID numbers in addition to name text.
Next/Prev paging in the pickers works more sensibly when holding CTRL and SHIFT for bigger jumps (jumping by 25 on CTRL, 125 on SHIFT, and 625 on CTRL+SHIFT).
You can also search using a new field=value, field>value, or field10 will find all food objects that are worth more than 10 food. Searching for MapP>0 will find all objects that occur naturally on the map. Almost all of the text field and checkbox names in the Editor can be used as part of this new search syntax.
There's also a new contentSettings folder, which ships as part of the content updates, to cover settings that are content-specific. Before, all settings shipped as part of the platform-specific binary client updates. This meant, for example, that when adding a new emote, both the content (for the emote's appearance) and the binary client (for the emote's settings) would have to receive an update. Now a content editor, who wants to make deep changes to the game world, can do so with a content update alone and without touching the binary client codebase.
And most importantly, you can now put dried beans in piles and buckets.
| Update: Steam Workshop Mod Contest
December 24, 2023
Steam Workshop support is live. You can find it here:
https://steamcommunity.com/app/595690/workshop/
Instructions for posting mods to Steam Workshop can be found here:
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3121137673
And I'm holding a contest for the best mods, as voted by the community, between now and New Year's Day. Post your mods to Workshop between now and then. The mods with the most subscribers at or around Noon EST (New York City Time) on New Year's Day win.
There will be ten winners. Each person can only win one prize, even if they have more than one highly-subscribed mod.
Prizes are as follows:
1st place: $500
2nd place: $400
3rd place: $300
4th place: $200
5th through 10th place: $100
Prize winners can choose from the following payment methods:
--PayPal
--Cashier's Check by Mail.
--Gold coins/chunks by Mail.
--Silver Coins by Mail.
This is obviously a contest of skill, not a lottery. If it is illegal in your area, I feel sorry for you.
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