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.
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