a multiplayer game of parenting and civilization building
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This bug has been fixed.
And Eve Bush can be found in there now.... that was you!
Ah, I found the bug....
If your last words contain a ' character, it essentially counts as an SQL injection, breaking the insert query for your life and failing to log you as dead, so you never appear in the family tree.
I will fix this tomorrow!
The biggest change this week is the addition of an online family tree browser, which you can view here:
http://lineage.onehouronelife.com/serve … front_page
You can search by your email address or any character name that you can remember, and if you click on faces, you can browse up and down through the generations in the tree.
There are also a few changes to the way that families work. First of all, the client now displays Big and Little status for your siblings, and also detects the rare case of twins and identical twins for you and your siblings.
Second, babies now inherit the last monument bell that their mother heard before they were born. This bell will "echo" through the genetic mother-baby connection when the baby is 0.5 years old. Thus, trans-generational pilgrimages to distant monuments is now possible (journeys that are too long to make in one lifetime).
The way locks are displayed has been improved, with loose locks and keys labeled with A, B, C, etc., so you can keep track of what you're making. After a lock is installed, however, this label becomes invisible, so an attacker won't be able to know which key to try. I took this one step further: The server now doesn't even send the true lock object ID to the client (instead sending the ID for the generic lock), so even someone sniffing the protocol can't get unfair information about a lock. Trial and error (making all ten keys and trying each one) is still possible, of course. And if an attacker gets a hold of your key, they will be able to see which key it is. This is just like real life---take a look at your own keys, and you will see a number stamped on any master keys. My computer room door has a 43842, because it is a 5-pin lock with those pin lengths.
As you may have noticed, after a server update, all keys and locks revert to a base form. That is now displayed with a "?" in place of the letter label for clarity. Everyone who knew which lock was which is dead, and the next generation to discover the village is essentially handed some easy-to-open locks that they can re-key as they see fit.
Unlocked doors can be removed, and milkweed stumps can be removed in the same manner as berry bushes. Making the letter N no longer eats you knife, and U and C no longer fill your bowl with water.
For now, I'm going to leave it as-is.... I spent almost a whole week working on it already!
Yes, I get the chicken-and-egg problem that you're pointing out here. Don't we need the players who have sunk 100s of hours into learning the game's intricacies in order to keep the thing afloat?
However, something else is possible.
Imagine the hypothetical version of the game where each person only played the game once.
Would the game be stuck in the stone age forever?
Not necessarily. After all, as soon as one person has a little success in life, maybe through random chance and trial/error, their offspring can learn from them, and be better off than them. Then their offspring can learn even more. It can theoretically work in this kind of incremental daisy chain, with no outside knowledge or trans-life knowledge.
That is the underlying theory of the game. That's it's ideal form. You play one tiny part in a much larger story. It doesn't matter if you play one hour or 100 hours, because you learn from your parents and make your little contribution before dying.
Obviously, the game is not tuned well for this ideal form. I mean, if each person really did play only once, I have a feeling the game would be forever stuck in the stone age.
But that doesn't mean that it's impossible to make that game.
Also, the ideal form still would ups and downs along the way. Progress would be fragile. But given enough time, I think it could be possible for single-hour players to make it all the way through the tech tree.
After all, in real life, we are all single-hour players..... and yes, there were ups and downs along the way.
Anyway, this is the game that I aimed to make. I didn't aim to make a game that required 100+ hour players to keep it afloat.
Even financially, it would be foolish for me to make a game for those 100+ hour players. There are currently only 300 of them, making up about 2% of the people who have played the game.
If I made a game that only appealed to them, I'd be sitting here with $6000 and my life in financial ruins.
On the other hand, those people are the most passionate about the game and the most likely to spread the word about the game.
Thanks!
Cause if death is not being logged in the family tree server except for if you are murdered. That is currently not being displayed, however. I will add the murder's name next week.
But if you are killed by a bear, that won't be shown. The lineage server is a separate piece of code that isn't loading any object descriptions, etc.
Are you sure you're using your key and not your order number?
The key should have arrived in a separate email.
This is not a bug, actually.
When the laptop goes to sleep, it stops checking the network until it wakes up.
The server eventually has you starve to death and breaks the connection to you, but the client misses all of this.
When the laptop wakes up, the client checks the network and sees the connection is lost. It measures how long you were alive, and shows you that message.
Of course, you weren't really alive that long server-side. It has no effect on server-side stats.
I suppose the client could paper-over this with an "AGE UNKNOWN" message or something, but it's a rare enough case that it probably doesn't matter.
Well, I don't think this 411 person is using a bot, but maybe I'm wrong.
And I know that the initial OHOL experience sucks for many people. I don't really know how to fix that in general.
But I was pointing out that it sometimes can be amazing, because there were a few people who lived to old age on their very first life.
I think I can push the game towards the initial experience being better by making everything matter more, which means that players will take care of their babies more and communicate more, which means you are more likely to have a better first-life experience.
I think the game got worse for new players in recent weeks, with all the baby suicide and inner-circle stuff (only playing with friends, going back to the same village over and over, etc.), and also emergent fertility control ("too many mouths, sorry," is terrible when you keep getting born to the same family over and over).
Family tree browser gives every Eve a reason to care. In fact, Eve becomes the coolest role in the game now, setting the tone for a family line to come, and checking back periodically like an ancestral ghost, her photograph fading with the passing decades.
Anyway, the point is, if everyone is thrown into the same situation (born to strangers, a different story each time, etc.), then the game is at least the same for everyone, both new and old players, and I can work on tuning it to be better for everyone. And as I make it better for everyone, it gets better for new players.
Finally, coming back on topic to coordinates:
I WANT you to find your old village. In fact, that might be your main goal in the game. I just don't want it to be automatic or done through a hack. I want it to be special and hard won.
As an example, I'm going to make more monuments with different sounds (maybe different sized bells with different tones, stuff like that). So you can teach your children a special ring pattern, and tell them to summon you in your next life. I want you to figure out how to do this stuff inside the game, not by working around the game. Stories, people!
Wait...so I wasn't meant to sink over 100 hours into this game so far? So it's not your intention to make a game you could enjoy over and over? That kind of has me concerned for where the future might go, but I'm definitely still interested.
This is complicated.
The game wasn't designed to support 100 hours of boredom-free play. 100 hours is a lot. I'm not saying it's against my vision or anything, but I didn't set out to make a game with that much depth, and especially not right now, before all the content is in.
However, I've seen that many people have played 100+ hours. I've also heard from a number of those people that they are growing sick of the game. Yeah? Really?
The current record for human (non-bot) play is 411 hours over 39 days. That is over 10 hours a day every single day....
Now, if that person complains to me that the game is getting boring, it's not really my fault, right? I mean, at 4 cents per hour, I think they got their money's worth. The game does what it says on the tin.
What I did set out to do was make a game where anyone could dip into it an experience the most amazing, humanistic, emotional experience that they've ever had in a video game.
And when I look at the other end of the stats----the people with the longest average game time----I see that has this has happened for a few special people.
There are a handful of people who have played the game exactly once for exactly one hour. Getting born, getting taken care of, and living to old age in some village. And then never playing the game again. I guess they feel like they got their money's worth in that one precious hour. I mean, really, that has to be the greatest first hour of video game play ever. Their parents probably taught them stuff and everything. One of these people even wrote a review, even though they never played again after that first life:
My favorite part about this is it forces everyone to work together to survive. People just work together and cities grow out of it.
Anyway, that is the original, real target of this design. How do we make a game that can give you an absolutely amazing experience, even if you don't play it for very long? An hour is do-able for almost everyone. Being born as a baby in someone else's care alleviates the need to slog through a tutorial before you can start playing. You kinda hit the ground running, your parent gives you a job, and then when you grow up, they may even tell you how to take care of your own baby. You get old with some grandkids running around, and then die a peaceful death at old age.
So that is a game that pretty much any human being on the planet would want to play, at least once.
Most people don't play video games beyond Candy Crush. They understand that "real" video games demand dozens of hours of their time, and they don't have or want to give that amount of time or dedication to a game.
But an hour for an amazing experience? That's doable.
So that's the real target market: everyone.
That said, the game can't reach everyone unless it picks up steam through regular game players first. And I get that regular game players measure value in terms of the number of hours spent in a game.
Also, I'm not making some kind of casual, throw-away game. I guess what I'm trying to do is make a hardcore game for everyone. Most people, even if (and especially if) they have an amazing first hour, will play more than one life. Let's say they play 5-10 hours.
But once you pass about 40 hours.... I'm pretty sure it's all kindof the same. Is a 400-hour game better than a 120-hour game?
Also, here's the overall average across the playerbase:
Average: 12.6 hours spent in 89.8720 games
Don't Starve is not permadeath anymore. First they added some kind of monuments at which you can revive once per world. The when SOME players were still bitching about how it "sux to loose everything" they added easy mode where you can revive as much as you want.
Natural progression of so many games that cater to masses - make it easier and easier over time and model the game after requests, not game initial designs.
Yeah, and I'm also aware that the multiplayer version of the game is softened in this regard quite a bit.
However, the game became a huge hit long before it was softened in this way.
I'm sure they softened it because they wanted it to be even more of a huge hit than it was.
Anyway, I'm not that kind of designer.... if anything, I tend to make my games harder and harder over time....
This is all happening server-side.
When you die in the game, the client disconnects from the server, and the server can't tell if you shut down the client between lives or not.
So yeah, I think this is all working as intended.
I don't want to prevent you from ever finding your old colony.
However, I want it to be HARD to do this.
Coordinate hacks were never "part of the design" or something that I intended to "leave up to the players." It was a simple oversight on my part.
Here's another oversight on my part: Through hacking the client, you can currently figure out which lock is which, because that info isn't hidden in the protocol. I have plans to deal with this and fix it, but I'm not leaving it up to the players to exploit. It's just a bug. Coordinate hacks were a bug.
Why is discovering your village interesting or rewarding if you can do it automatically through coordinate hacks? What kind of "story" is that? I was born, I grew up, and then I bee-lined through the wilderness for 15 minutes until....
And baby suicide is the same thing. What kind of story is that? It's just one weird, game-breaking trick to auto-find your old colony. And it makes for a terrible story.
Compare this to bell towers in a game without coordinates. It rings.... whoa, what was that? Even hearing it can be special. Then following the home arrow that it gives you will lead you where? Who knows? It's a great adventure and mystery. You may die along the way. The journey may be too long to complete in one lifetime. But if you get there, it's a magical moment. You will probably cheer out loud when you finally see that town.... And that is a great story. And you may go through other lifetimes without ever hearing a bell at all.
This is NOT a game that is supposed to be interesting for 100s or 1000s of lives.
However, it IS supposed to be a game that will give you an experience that no other game gives you. I'm sure all of you have had these experiences. I certainly have.
This game solves one of the age-old problems of video game design: how can we have meaningful, emotionally-impactful, emergent stories about human beings inside a video game?
Have you ever loved anyone in a video game before? I've seen so many people saying, "I love you" at the end of their lives before they die, and I don't think they are just role playing.
My job is to keep turning that knob up until it finally breaks off.
Now, as for whether this experience of relationships inside a game is "fun," well, I don't know. It's certainly compelling. Sometimes overwhelmingly so. But it's worth experiencing, if you care about video games as a medium. And I think it's worth $20.
But if you do it over and over and over, hundreds of times.... well, you rub that spot raw, I suppose, and feel nothing at the end of your life anymore. If you want to keep playing after that, what are you going to get out of the game? That part will get better over time, as I add more and more stuff to the game, because it will take many lifetimes to see everything. That is already the case.... I'd say there are probably 5-10 lifetimes worth of stuff to see and do in the game for the average player. That's worth the cost of admission right there. But once I hit 10K objects, it will be more like 50-100 lifetimes worth of stuff to see and do.
I said I'm not making Minecraft. But I didn't say that I didn't want to make a hit game. OHOL is already a minor hit, and the biggest financial success of my 15-year career so far. I think it could be pretty popular. But popular BECAUSE it does these things that no other game does, not because it copies Minecraft.
Making a family tree browser is an example of me continuing to push the game in this unique direction.
And for everyone referencing Don't Starve..... that game is a permadeath game where you routinely lose EVERYTHING when you die.... my game at least gives you a rare chance of seeing your village again, either through bell-tower pilgrimage or eventual rebirth there.
But permadeath is the lineage that this game grows out of, as a design tool that amps up the meaning and emotional impact of each experience. The original idea for OHOL was that everyone would get to play a single life, and that was it. You pay $5 for this insanely amazing hour that you will never forget, and then at the end of it, you say goodbye forever. Literally ONE LIFE, and only one life.... imagine that game for a minute...
And yes, "permadeath games get old." But every game gets old. Some linear game gets old as soon as you beat it. But you don't think of it that way, because you know when to stop playing.
An endless game has a problem: you don't stop until you get sick of it. That means that everyone always leaves the game with a bad taste in their mouth.
But along the way, before you get sick of them, those permadeath games can be some of the greatest game experiences imaginable....
No, this understanding is NOT correct.
You need to file the correct key to make a removal key that matches your lock. You can't just file any key.
These things don't show up correctly in the web-based tech tree browsers, because locks and keys are "variable objects". They currently have 10 instances (ten different possible key/lock pairs) that are created on the server at runtime.
When the server resets, everyone dies, so no one remembers which key goes to what door. Thus, all keys "revert" to the default key when the server resets. At that point, filing any key can be used to remove any lock, but then you can turn the key/lock back into a blank and re-file it into whatever key/lock you desire.
All that said, there could be some bugs in the way that locks work. Please let me know if you find any!
I think this has been fixed.
Thanks, will fix.
This was fixed a few days ago.
Okay, will fix.
Yes, this is a bug. Will fix
However, for the sign, a key always removes the lock, so no removal key is needed.
So it doesn't sound like this is an agreed-upon bug...
I'm thinking about ways for graves to track families.
Well.... I want naming to matter!
You can ask your mother for a name, after all. I think you can say NAME while you are still young enough to be picked up.
A bigger problem is family lines that have no last name. That's Eve's fault. But I want to give Eve that enormous power and responsibility.
I was just born into a HUGE and thriving village that had obviously been there for many generations. I saw some 6th cousins running around. But we didn't have last names!
It's hard to imagine a thriving village being founded by a clueless Eve, but I guess it happens.
Anyway, if I make any of this automatic, the power and specialness of getting a name from your mother is reduced.
Some kind of family tree browser or something similar is coming, which will allow you to peek in on your true legacy (the people who survived after you, and more importantly, because of you).
This will transcend any limit on revisiting your village.
This was fixed.
Is the problem that dung never decays away on its own, so it builds up?