One Hour One Life Forums

The "places" currently don't offer any benefit directly.

However, the score itself offers a few benefits.  You get more tool slots, and your stomach doesn't get as small in old age.

The text on the website was a quote from an email that I wrote to a designer friend of mine years ago, explaining the philosophical premise of the game to him.  In that quote, I did talk about grandfathers, not because I planned to add them to the game, but because men usually chop wood, and I was talking about inheriting an axe, so it made thematic sense in the context of the explanation.

It was such a good summary that I ended up using it on the homepage for the game, and I never changed it to reflect what actually goes on in the game.

Until now.

I expected people to understand it as an abstract vignette portraying the underlying philosophy of the game.  Similar to the trailer, which shows future possibilities and says "Who knows where we'll end up?"

Jeck....

Coconut, not sure how to solve that problem... I mean, unless animals could walk through them?

But yeah, free animal pens was an unintentional side-effect.

People also made animal pens out of other stuff before, like oven bases, or single stone blocks.

Fug, you're right.

What you're expressing is the fundamental principles of homesteading.  You can only do it on truly unclaimed land.

Obviously, the land that I was building my fence on was not really unclaimed.  The people nearby objected to what I was doing.

It was still a damn good story!

How did it take away playing in beginning towns?

Problem with that is that like half the people would bail, and then you have a bunch of zombie people standing around with no one controlling them.

Why you no like black walls?

That has been suggested many times, and I've definitely considered it.

You know, your mother specialized in baking, so you inherit her baking skill.

And yes, some version where you're "good" at a random subset of tools has been suggested.

One problem is that "good vs bad" is hard to implement in this game.  What's a good pile of kindling vs a bad one?  The engine doesn't implement stats like that.  All piles of kindling are equal.  All clay bowls are equal.  A good bowl doesn't hold more water, and a bad one doesn't leak.

So then we end up with "can do" vs "can't do," instead.

There's also a messaging problem with any kind of procedural subset.  How do you know what you can do?  Where do you see the list?  Trial and error?  Even in the simple case of inheriting a baking skill from mom, how do you find out that you have this skill?

If you pick your own tools to learn, we don't have that problem.  And if there are static, well-defined subsets (like for the family specialty biomes), then there's no messaging problem, because everybody knows (and if you don't know, you quickly notice that you get sick in that biome, and there isn't actually anything you can't do, aside from walk in that biome... you can freely work with rubber products outside of that biome, for example.... there's no mysterious WHY IT NO WORKING thing happening).

By the way, from my perspective, the tool slots are the bit of the design that I'm lukewarm about and not totally satisfied with.  The family specialty biomes are pretty much perfect and exactly what the game needs.

I worry that many of the objections to family specialization are politically motivated, more than mechanically motivated.

Just like many of the objections to property fences are politically motivated (for those who want to live out their collectivist fantasies in a game).

Sorry, fixed that.

Book, unfortunately, I'm not looking for political objections to any game design elements.

If the game turns you off for political reasons, well....  I guess that's where we'll have to part ways.

If we want different groups of people to have different abilities, than the most straight-forward way to implement that in game is to have those people have different appearances, so that the abilities can be recognized visually, given that you will be actively seeking out a player with this or that ability.

Furthermore, in real life, the people who live in an area DO have more knowledge about that area, and are appealed to as experts.  Travelers do hire local guides for a reason.  Furthermore, the people who live in different areas of the world do look different.  This, to me, is no big deal, and not offensive.  It's a beautiful and amazing part of the world, also known as diversity.

This isn't represented perfectly in the game, but it's represented in a way that people can understand, based on their experience from real life.

Now, separate from the political objections...

Is there an objection to the mechanic of different players in the game having different innate abilities?

Obviously, it tends to short-circuit your pre-formed plan for what you want to do in this particular life.  "Dammit, there's no way I can make X in this life, because I wasn't born as the right type of person."

Obviously, that's part of the point, because this is not meant to be a game where you have full control over your upcoming life.  This is a game, in part, about relinquishing control, based on your unique surroundings and situation.

You also might want to make a car in your life, but then get born into a town where they don't even have Newcomen tech yet.

Total helplessness is not fun, for sure.

However, I don't think you're actually ever totally helpless, even with the biome restrictions in place.

I mean, helpless in which regard?  To the point where you have no choice but to starve for lack of water?

Even if you send out a search party and don't find the necessary specialist for the next step in water production, that doesn't mean you're helpless.  You're in a tense situation, and the clock is ticking for sure, but there's nothing inherently wrong with that.

What about moving to a new primitive water source and making an outpost there as a stop-gap, or even moving the village entirely, and leaving a way stone behind so that wanderers have a better chance of finding you in the future?

My goal, in general, is to give you trans-generational problems that don't necessarily have "textbook solutions" available.  Problems that require you to think on your feet, and make do with the situation that you're handed.

If you look at one of these problems as an individual, it might be unsolvable for you, right now, in this moment.  It might actually be impossible for YOU to make rubber in your lifetime.  But "making rubber" isn't your personal problem anyway.  It's a trans-generational problem.  A problem that your village faces collectively.

And a problem that IS getting solved, collectively, again and again, by village after village, eventually.  Here we have the Tini family that has been going strong for two whole weeks and 750+ generations.  What's impossible, exactly?

This is a very different feeling from the individual mastery that is offered by most games, where you look at goal X and can try and retry until you get there.

But this isn't a game about individual mastery, nor individual goals with guaranteed solutions.

There have ALWAYS been things that could get in the way of whatever individual goal you set in your life.  That's the fundamental nature of a game about cooperation.