One Hour One Life Forums

Destiny, you do have my number there.

I don't see the point in making a game that is mostly like something else that already exists.  Why bother?  I could just go play that game instead.

That doesn't mean that I never look for design solutions in other games.  However, I was specifically addressing your proposal for more avenues for solo play.  Sure, lots of people don't like multiplayer games at all and refuse to play them (too much pressure, too awkward, etc.)  But there are plenty of solo crafting games out there already.  Without the multiplayer, trans-generational component, how is OHOL that much different than Don't Starve?

I imagine that most of the people who want 2D solo crafting are playing Don't Starve already.

The only reason that OHOL has been a success is because it offers something different.  For the people who want something different than the solo crafting that a a game like Don't Starve offers (or the flat, private multiplayer crafting of Don't Starve Together).

So it's not just an artistic strategy, but also a business strategy.  A blue ocean strategy.

Think of all those gobs of youtube videos where the streamer is running around as a helpless baby.  The world had never seen anything like that before.

At first glance, it looked a bit like Don't Starve, but then people instantly can tell you how it's different...  "No wait, in this game, you get born as a helpless baby to another player who is your mother!"  You can't mention such a premise in an elevator without people begging to hear more about it.

And yeah, as many players have suggested, I could offer a buffet-style game, where there's a Solo variant, and a group variant, and a battle royal variant, etc.  Think Minecraft Survival vs Creative mode.

However, if I had done that, the game would have been watered down in its about-ness.  How many of those YouTubers would have played the solo version by accident and NOT found a crazy, unique, and streamable game?

That's why I'm so nervous about the tutorial.... it's not really what the game is about, and it gives the wrong first impression.  I want to dump you right into the crazy uniqueness.

Yeah, you caught me, the laziest developer on the planet!

93 updates.... the output of an absolute sloth.

fug, I can give you a very straight, clear, and concise definition of fun.

I can also very clearly articulate WHY those things that aren't fun for you aren't fun for you (especially given the way you articulated them).

I wrote a whole post about it a while back:

https://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/commen … career_of/

I'll quote the most direct portion of it here:

The reason those situations aren't fun for you is that they are impossible for you, or at least seem impossible, and there's nothing you can do to improve in the face of those situations (or if there is something you can do to improve, it's not clear to you).  In other words, you are helpless.  There's nothing to learn.  Thus, those situations are not fun.

This is obviously not by design.  They are emergent, degenerate cases enabled by the mechanics that I designed, however.

Furthermore, there are (at least hypothetical) situations that emerge from those same mechanics that ARE fun.  For example, negotiating with someone across a language barrier can be fun.

Fug, what is "fun" to you?

Where does it come from?

What causes it to exist?

How do you know you're having fun when you're having it?

Tipy, the guy still came to you to ask for sulfur.

If he could have gotten sulfur by himself, you never would have had that interaction.  Maybe it was a simple interaction.  Maybe it was boring.  But it was some interaction, and a necessary one (from his point of view).

Destiny, somehow, all across the server, people have rubber.  It's not supposed to be something accessible to a new player.  It's a challenge for the experts, to save their town long-term, by solving this problem.  There is no recipe for solving this problem, so no, it can't be taught to a new player, classroom-style.

Fug, what is the reason that managed resources are so much less efficient than unmanaged resources?

I don't think that "bouncing between lineages" has anything to do with it.  Throwing resources in a communal pile is something that you do now, in this life, and not across lives.  You're not paving the way for yourself to wander in as an outsider and take from that pile in your next life.

I'm trying to come up with a thought experiment.  Suppose you are baking pies, and half the people in the village are well-dressed, and the other half are naked.  The naked people are burning through food much faster and wasting your pies, but does it matter to you?  If they are your genetic relatives, you want to keep them alive regardless, so they don't hurt your score.  And what are the chances that we actually run out of food, sometime soon?  Probably pretty low chances.

I think there's a general feeling that the way we spend these resources doesn't matter.  Efficiency and "wise use" doesn't matter.

In an early camp, you might be pretty livid if someone wasted a burdock on a half-full baby instead of saving it for the Eve who is nursing.  That one misstep might actually doom the entire camp.

Later on, wasting resources might matter long-term in the abstract, but it really doesn't matter right now, in any tangible way.

Of course, managing resources takes time (and thus resources).  If the benefit of management is perceived to be dwarfed by the cost of management, then people won't manage their resources.

I've never been satisfied with how food pressure felt in later-stage towns.

Tipy, even if you give him sulfur, you still had to find him and do it, right?  You know he can't get the sulfur on his own.  Finding him, and handing him sulfur, and hoping that he will hand you latex in return, is a social interaction that would not otherwise exist.

I mean, if you could just go to the jungle and get your own latex, right?

Then you wouldn't even need to find his town.  Then you wouldn't even need to offer the gift of sulfur.  You'd just mind your own business, and only interact with other towns on a whim.

Now you must interact with them, in some way, or your town is doomed.  There are a bunch of solutions to this problem, including convincing some of them to move into your town.  However, there's still a problem that you can't avoid solving, and it is fundamentally a social problem, NOT a crafting problem.

If you give a gift, there's no guarantee that you'll get what you need in return.

If you try to convince someone from the town to move into your town, there's no guarantee that they will listen and follow you.

If you try to move into their town yourself, there's no guarantee that they will trust and accept you.

If you hear a bell, there's no guarantee that the town that rang the bell has what you need.

In the old game, if you needed rubber, you just wandered around until you found a patch of jungle, then wandered around more until you found some sulfur.  The solution to your problem was guaranteed, and always worked exactly the same way.

Regarding numbers falling, yes, numbers have ALWAYS been falling.  They were falling ever since the off-Steam launch, which is why I finally decided to put the game on Steam.  They were falling before and after every change I ever made to the game.

You can pick your favorite love-to-hate mechanic, and say that is why the game is losing players.  But the reality is that people generally like the game right now.  They have always generally liked the game.

Every game loses players.  Some games lose players more slowly than they gain players.

These days, we're gaining about 40-70 new players per day, and probably losing a few more than that each day

While the average player plays for 20 hours (95 lives) before quitting, the median player only plays for 3.5 hours (20 lives) before quitting.

I believe there is something fundamentally unsatisfying about this game, baked into its very structure.  This is the thing that makes the game unique, and makes people want to try the game in the first place, but it also makes them eventually want to stop playing.  You only live one hour.  It's right there in the title.

For the games that people get really hooked on, for the games that they play all night by accident, you don't usually play for only one hour.  Those games aren't broken up into convenient, stand-alone chunks.  Even in a permadeath game like Noita, "just one more play" is right around the corner, and there's no fixed time span for that next game.  In fact, most decent Noita games are LONGER than an hour.  But you don't know that going in---not for certain---so it's very hard to stop playing.

In OHOL, when you die of old age, that's a great stopping place.  Are you really going to start a new life?  Are you really in for a whole additional hour?  Probably not.  Especially since the "being a baby" part of the game is the least interesting part, and you're definitely going to have to go through that again.

Finally, there's the fundamental problem that every life happens in isolation, and it's not really building toward anything.  You can't (or shouldn't be able to) get caught up in your personal vanity project and work on it all night long.  I don't think that this is that big of a problem, since it's shared by every GAME OVER game in history, and that didn't stop them.

The known hour commitment is a hard one to fix.

The leaderboards help so that each life matters a bit more, and there is some sense that you're building toward something.  There could be more things like this.

In a game like Noita, the first part of each game is the boring part (the easy first level, where you go through the motions).  However, what you're doing there does matter, as you build a foundation for the rest of your game.  You want to play that first part optimally, each time.  OHOL is missing something here, since what you do as a baby really doesn't matter, and doesn't build a foundation for the rest of your life.

In Noita, just one more play means, "another roll of the dice, and a chance to build a perfect foundation for a really great run."  Maybe there's some way to fix this problem.

Regardless, I think that the structure of the game makes it fundamentally less compelling long-term than other games.

On the other hand, it also makes it much more meaningful, short-term, than other games.  Very few games pack the emotional wallop than OHOL does.  And I don't think there are ANY games that pack that same wallop reliably, over and over, the way OHOL does.  I mean, if you've seen a sad cut-scene once, you've seen it a thousand times.  But the end of each unique life is touching, as you say goodbye forever to this special situation and this particular configuration of people that will never exist again.

So maybe it's worth it?  To make such a game, even though it doesn't hook people and keep them playing for hundreds of hours?

I've heard the following story a number of times:

"My first life in OHOL was perfect and amazing.  My mother took care of me, and showed me how to farm, and my uncle took me hunting and fishing.  I helped to gather water, and then to build a house.  I had a few children of my own, and took care of them.  Then my mother grew old, and died, and I was devastated.  My uncle was next.  At the end of my life, I was surrounded by my children and grand children, and they all said goodbye to me and told me that I was a great mom.  I died at age 59.  Wow.  This was the single greatest experience that I've ever had with a video game.  The game can't get much better than this, so I'm going to stop there, and never play it again.  I had the full OHOL experience on my very first life."

I can't argue with that.  But then again, they weren't motivated to play again, right?

Trade is just a placeholder for "whatever complex and interesting social interactions and challenges we don't currently have."

This is supposed to be a game about collaborative civilization-building, where we work together and negotiate with each other to construct a civilization together.  Where there's a little bit of friction between us, and problems we need to solve.  And by problems, I don't mean, "grow more milkweed" or "find more ore," because those problems aren't that interesting to solve (go through the motions of planting more, or wander around until you find more ore through random chance).

If I have A, and that guy over there has B, but he's not just going to hand it to me, that's one example of a more complex interaction.  I have to negotiate with him, or convince him, or trick him, or rob him.  All of which are more interesting, to me, than simply grinding away solo to make B yourself.

If you can always grind to make B yourself, then every time you play the game, the challenge is exactly the same (how optimally can you grind away to make B).

But if you have to get B from another guy every game, then the challenge is different every game, because the guy and his motivations will be different every time.  Maybe in one game, he just gives it to you.  In another game, he makes some outlandish demand that seems unfair.  In a third game, he refuses to give you any no matter what, and in a fourth game, he refuses to talk to you at all and responds instantly with hostility.

On a micro scale, tool slots do something like this.  You can't just plow through, solo, to accomplish everything under the sun in one life.  You have to assesses the situation carefully (first of all) to determine where your efforts are best spent.  So you at least have to pay attention to what other people are doing.  If you pick up a smithing hammer and see six (+) signs above heads around you, you're probably wasting a slot if you also learn the hammer.

And after carefully picking tools to learn, you will still not (likely) know enough to do everything you need to do in your life.  So then you need to communicate with the others around you.  You will hit road blocks where "just grind more, solo" won't bring a solution.  Other players are the keys to the locks that you encounter---including your own children, who you can guide as extensions of your own hands.  And maybe some of these characters won't cooperate with you or listen to your requests and orders.  Then what?

On a macro scale, the biome restrictions do something similar.  Our village is going to need rubber soon.  I was born into a dangerous situation.  There are no specialists immediately around, so that means that I need to find some.  Maybe these maps and waystones will help, or maybe they're outdated.  If I'm successful, I really need to document the location of the helpful specialists for future generations.  This is very different from me just walking into the jungle and slashing a rubber tree life after life.  Instead, I'm finding myself in a unique and challenging social and trans-generational situation life after life.

None of this may actually qualify as "trade," but I'm not sure that it matters.  A gift economy is still an economy, and a social interaction that didn't exist before.  An interactive journey is still needed, for example.

And you may try to "route around" the restriction by having multi-specialist towns, but.... well... that's a fragile structure that's hard to maintain over the long haul.  The fundamental challenge still lurks a few generations into the future.  And even right off the bat, someone "solved' the problem in a non-trivial way.  Find a needed specialist family and convince them to move into town, across the language barrier?  That's a feat that tops mere "trade" in terms of social complexity.

But at least you had to do something creative.... at least the same old thing, repeated, no longer works every time.

Whoops, yeah the tattoo thing is broken.

Will fix that next week.

https://github.com/jasonrohrer/OneLife/issues/543

Regarding groups, since the update, there have been only 3 kills in 14 hours, and one of them was healed.  Out of the two kills that resulted in death, one was out in the wilderness (solo), and the other was a group kill with a posse of 3.

Recall that before the update, there were 6 kills EVERY hour, or 140+ per day.

Grim, I definitely hear you that some freedom and "instant drama" has been lost.  I'm still thinking about what to do about that...  However, that solo kill in a personal argument has (hopefully) been replaced with conspiracy, which is much more dramatic and memorable, in the end.

You and your in-village friends jump the guy you've been arguing with.

Have you successfully landed a solo kill against a team of 3 griefers as a means of "fighting back?"  How could you?  They'd have plenty of warning, and you'd run slower.

This change has been live for four hours, and during that time there has been only one single kill, and it was a solo kill out in the wilderness.

Before this change, today, there were around 7 kills every hour.

Well, I'm no fan of melting pot towns as a way to "route around" this problem.

Though I haven't see that myself so much.  It's not like every town has all three "necessary" skin tones represented.

Instead, I've seen problems that need to be solved through cleverness and determination, when before, there weren't really any such problems.

Having all three live in the same town is at least more interesting and presents more challenges than one know-it-all-player doing everything by themselves to keep the village going.  At least now, there has to be some coordination and cooperation.

Here's what I want:

Every life, you should see an obvious problem that needs solving in your village, and not be quite sure how to solve it.  And maybe, sometimes, even if you play perfectly, your attempt at a solution to the problem doesn't work out.

Think of it like an emergent quest system.  But a quest system with no NPCs.  Think of a social puzzle game, but where the "pieces" of the puzzle are intelligent entities with their own individual motivations.

I'm not saying the game is there yet, but that's where I'm trying to go.

Cramming three different skin tones together in one town is a bit of cheat toward solving the social puzzle.

But even that is not that easy to accomplish, right?  You might want to attract other families to live in your town, but that doesn't mean they will come.  It's a solution that is implemented across many generations, and not just something that one very competent player can do by themselves.