a multiplayer game of parenting and civilization building
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I repeat, having no leader does NOT make you exiled.
You are only seen as exiled if someone exiles you, and only seen as exiled by multiple people if the person who exiles you has followers.
I'm thinking about "exile" and "nomad" as two different states.
Ugg... but the visual marking stuff is really driving me nuts. I just can't imagine this game where every person has a rank displayed, even if it is in a cohesive, cartoon way (like chevrons). You'd need to see the ranks of everyone above you and everyone below you too. Screenshots of a village would look like screen shots of an army lineup.
So I think I might leave the visual marking thing up to the players as an emergent thing. Crows, feathers in hats, certain colors of clothing, etc.
The only thing you really need to see is Exile visually, and then the rest you will assess via mouse-over
COUNT JOSEPH GARDNER
DUKE TYSON LANDS
Another question: how does an exiled person learn that they are exiled?
I guess all of this stuff could have DING messages too.
Like:
DING: TYSON LANDS IS NOW YOUR DUKE
DING: DUKE TYSON LANDS IS DEAD
DING: DUKE TYSON LANDS EXILED YOU
Problem is if your Baron joins a Count, then you might get a Duke and King in the same instant.... maybe there needs a way for those messages to be spaced out.
Another question: If your Duke dies, what is your relationship to the King? You are suddenly Dukeless.
If you follow a King directly, instead of through a Baron-Count-Duke chain, what are you? Is he your King or your Baron?
"I follow no Nobles. My allegiance is directly to the King himself."
Shortcut to Duke? Get one follower, then follow the King directly.
What if you follow him solo as a Baron, and then later a Duke follows him, making him King?
When a Baron's last follower dies, is he no longer a Baron?
If people at the bottom of the tree die, can an King go from being a King to a Duke?
Anyway, just having kids shouldn't get you a follower. That would make every grandmother a Countess automatically.
You should directly inherit your mother's leader. Her Baron becomes your Baron, etc. And once you're old enough to speak, you can peel off and pick your own leader or become a loner.
I know people would go nuts with this, and try to become king by getting Dukes to follow them, and there would be lots of drama around it. I'm just struggling to understand how any of it would be real.... well, maybe no more real than such things are in real life. The army only listens to the king because they listen to the king....
Oh, okay, obviously above King should be Emperor...
What I meant was that the Duke can only exile people from the Duchy, not from the whole kingdom. The count can exile from the county, but not from the whole Duchy. If anyone above you exiles someone, you see them as exiled.
Your noble doesn't like this guy, but the king isn't convinced. So you and everyone in your sub tree, who share your noble, see the guy as exiled. But people in other parts of the greater tree, under other nobles, don't agree. If enough nobles exiled this guy, they might talk to the king about a kingdom-wide exile.
Green mark.... this is a point where I struggle. I'm trying to keep the UI in the game from looking too UI-ish, with things hovering over people's heads and stuff. It's supposed to look like a cohesive cartoon.
Mousing over someone to see their Friend or Exile or nobility status is easy enough.
But that doesn't give you an at-a-glance assessment of someone.
Maybe just the exile status needs to stand out visually, because that will be more rare? Could be as simple as a black X on their body or clothing.
Also, I think there's a difference between being exiled and not following someone. A visitor from a different land isn't exiled, yet.
So if you say, "I FOLLOW MYSELF," then you have no leader, but you're not exiled. You could still get exiled by one more more people, though.
I'm also thinking about rankings, like these:
King, Queen
Duke, Duchess
Marquess, Marchioness
Earl, Countess
Viscount, Viscountess
Baron, BaronessThere are 7 there... Maybe too many. Might shorten it to:
King, Queen
Duke, Duchess
Count, Countess
Baron, BaronessSo if you have some direct followers, you are a Baron, but that's it. A flat kingdom has one Baron.
If the Baron follows someone, that person becomes a Count. If the Count follows someone, they become a Duke. Dukes follow someone who becomes a King.
Maybe it could go up from there, if need be, with Supreme Kings, Ultra Kings, etc.
But even with these 4 levels, we can have a kingdom of 31 people, even if each person only has 2 direct followers.
Maybe people need visible rankings on their shoulder, like Chevrons or something (only visible to their followers).
Blue Eye puzzle reminds me of the Muddy Children puzzle (which inspired my game Diamond Trust of London).
I'm not sure about this:
all exiles are enemies and must be killed on sight.
Yeah, if that was the custom, then it would enforce the rest. Not being part of the clan would be dangerous, so people would want to be part of the clan.
But how does that custom get started? What unmoved mover kicks it off?
Seems like a tree would be fine. You can only follow one person. That person can follow someone too, resulting in a tree.
Bob says: "I follow Alice"
(Bob sees Alice as LEADER, and Alice sees Bob as FOLLOWER.)
Alice says: "I exile Bob"
Alice and everyone under her sees Bob as EXILED
Bob cannot follow Alice or anyone under her
Bob can still follow people in same tree as Alice who aren't under her (people in other branches), unless the root person in that tree (King) exiles Bob too. Then the whole tree sees him as EXILED.
Steve says, "I exile Bob"
Steve is not above anyone currently (he's a leaf in some tree).
Now Bob is blocked from following Steve, ever, but Steve is the only one who sees Bob as exiled.
Bob says, "I follow Jane"
Bob says, "I follow Mary"
Bob switches from following Jane to Mary (and all people under him go with him).
In terms of bootstrapping, or people forgetting to use this feature, these relationships could be inherited. If your mother follows Bob, you follow him too by default. You can switch your leader later, by following someone else.
And death is fine, with no need to hand stuff down.
When the king dies, there are two dukes, and the kingdom is divided. Maybe one duke will follow the other, and join the kingdoms, but maybe not. Or they could pick a third person to be the new king and both follow that person.
Non-trivial amount of work to implement... but I'm still hung up on one thing:
Would it actually be used by players and influence their behavior in an interesting way?
Maybe so... maybe it's the kind of information that people need, just like they all use names, even though they are optional....
This fix (and the reset) is live now.
Game should be Nintendo Hard for an Eve camp starting up a new town. Failure rate there should be way more than 50%. Wild food should run out just before the first farm produces crops. A few people should die of starvation along the way, even as expert players. This part of the game is close to the correct hardness... maybe slightly too easy, but close.
Of course, the fruits of civilization should make basic survival easier. Otherwise, it wouldn't make any logical sense. We have a farm and a well and clothes and buildings now, but food is still running out and half of us are starving?
Living to 60 as the daughter of an Eve should be pretty darn hard.
But living to 60 in an advanced civilization should be almost a given.
At that point, the game should be Nintendo Hard for the collective, not in a single life, but across dozens of generations. The failure rate of the collective entity should be high.
From this vantage point, we can imagine that a town surviving for 24 hours should be pretty darn hard, the equivalent of the daughter of an Eve surviving for 60 minutes.
Getty all distant-eyed, you can imagine a meta level of challenge above that.... If towns advance to the point where they can survive multiple days easily (because they have infrastructure in place for trade and cooperation with other families), then what's the next level of challenge? Something for the entire world....
So then you challenge at these levels:
--Can an Eve camp survive 60 minutes?
--Can a town survive 24 hours?
--Can the world survive 7 days?
(That last one was the core idea behind the Arc system, and I've backed away from it for the time being, but I'm still thinking about it.... maybe not with a full world-wipe, but something that advanced villages need to do together in the long run to avoid collapsing).
Anyway, each of these levels should be Nintendo Hard.
Yes, and cursing is implemented, along with killing.
(And it wasn't back then in 2HOL, or even in OHOL, as I recall).
However, you've still got to deal with this person for the rest of your hour if you can curse them but can't kill them.
An hour of torment is a long time. How much damage, theft, and destruction can one person dole out in a hour, if there's no way to stop them?
So cursing and killing are necessary parts of the same system.
Killing is: "go away now."
Cursing is: "and don't come back."
In real life, assuming that there is no reincarnation, then everyone is "cursed" to never come back. Of course, if we didn't have the ability to kill each other in real life, the fact that people are "gone forever" after they die of natural causes would simply not be sufficient to deal with the trouble makers in the world.
Fortunately, we also have the ability to band together and use physical (and deadly) force to stop trouble makers in real life. It's a necessary ingredient of any functioning society, and there has never been a society that discarded this tool from its toolbox entirely. Even in the most peaceful societies around, even where there is no death penalty, you will eventually be killed if you get too far out of line. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_k … by_country No country has absolutely 0 people killed by security forces in the last 10 years (perhaps Switzerland, but there's only data for one year).
We have the ability to say, "Stop NOW," and mean it, in real life.
We need that ability in the game too, or else we are never going to have functioning societies.
If finding people by searching in a 5-row grid is too hard, why not just make the grid smaller? Why not a line, with only one row?
If you knew you could walk E or W, and all the villages were along that line, would that help? It would push people farther apart, but at least you'd know where to look.
I suppose there could be a N and S rift line just to reign people in a bit, to narrow the search down.
Kinrany, if it was just labels with no actual effect, wouldn't it just be roleplay, even less meaningful than a label like "Sister" or "Uncle"? Even those labels have real meaning in the game, in terms of shared memory and experience and historical interactions (Sister means we had the same mother, Uncle means his mother was my grandmother, etc.).
These hierarchy labels would convey some information.... if you serve Alice and I serve Alice, we must both know Alice, but that's about it.
When you proposed this idea in the other thread, I assumed that there would be some gameplay consequence to these relationships.
It seems like you're suggesting some sort of actual power based on killing or limitations on killing? Like we can't kill those in our hierarchy? We have to leave or get exiled first?
So people would want to band together to prevent killing and preserve the peace, while breaking up the band as needed to deal with trouble-makers?
I guess this is a bit like an alliance in an RTS, where friendly fire is blocked as long as the alliance is in effect.
Let's say you served someone who then became a tyrant, and you wanted to kill them. What then? Can you leave their service on your own? Do you need to be exiled first?
Killing as hungry work is interesting. Would make unilateral killing impossible....
Though I do worry about self-defense in solo situations. The hermit or explorer shouldn't be defenseless, or forced into a suicide pact with someone who is bothering them (I kill you, then I starve due to hungry work and stuck weapon).
True trust and respect are built on the possibility of betrayal, or else trust and respect are meaningless.
As I said a while back, "I love you, because you could kill me, but you chose not to."
Destiny, if someone is griefing you through non-killing, and you can't kill them, then you are stuck with them for a whole hour, right? Yeah, you can curse them and never play with them again, but that's still an hour ruined.
I've only experimented with this once, on 2HOL back in the day (which made the bold design choice of having no killing), and I was unstoppable. I completely ruined the game for the 5 or so people in my village. I planted the wrong stuff, picked up the tool they were about to use, unloaded the kiln when they were about to light it, emptied the basket when they had just filled it, filled the empty basket they were about to put stuff into. I could just stand there, right under their noses, and do every little annoying thing imaginable.
They said, "Stop it!", but I didn't stop. Hey, I could do this for 2 hours.
Eventually, they all quit the game or migrated away, and I was left alone. Then a bell rang at a nearby village, and I followed it over there, and started doing exactly the same thing there. Some of my former village-mates were living over there, and they were not thrilled to see me.
But they were powerless to do anything about me. 2 hours of hell is plenty. I got bored after about an hour of this, fortunately for them.
I felt bad about all this, but I had to experiment to see what was possible in a game without killing. It was a griefer's paradise.
Yes, through killing, a griefer can ruin someon's game for 40 seconds. But without killing, they can ruin someone's game for an entire hour, and there's no way to stop them.
There are other solutions to this problem besides killing.
--All the annoying stuff I was doing would be blocked via hard-coded property rights. I can't touch the basket, or the crops, or the kiln. But imagine how fiddly such a game would be, with players granting and revoking permission for every little thing. Go play Eco. Even in such a locked-down game, other forms of griefing are possible, like following someone around to annoy them (which I was able to do in Eco). Emergent property rights are available in OHOL, and most people don't use them (already too fiddly to manage permissions for a single gate, let alone each tool).
--Insta-cursing.... why wait 60 minutes for them to die so you don't have to play with them again? But insta-cursing is just killing without the blood.
Which brings us back to killing, and why it's necessary.
Here's the deal:
Average lifespan is computed by last 10 lives for You on record.
If there aren't 10 live available, we "pad" the history with extra 30-y-o lives. This is meant to make a more sensible average for brand new players who don't have that much history.
However, we also discard historical lives affecting your score beyond 25. This includes You lives and all offspring for you.
What has been happening is this:
--We only keep 25 historical lives on record.
--We need 10 You lives from that record to compute your average lifespan
--Most people don't have 10 You lives in their 25-life window (the average is more like 5)
--Most people are eternally getting their average padded with several "30-year" dummy lives
--Even when they live to 60 constantly, their average hovers much lower because of this padding.
--Because score deltas for everyone (your ancestors and you) are computed based on your average, most people are getting bigger boosts from each offspring and You life than they should be. Expert players, who constantly live to 60, are handing out fitness score boosts constantly. (Their true average is 60, but the 30-year padding being used to get a 10-life average is pushing their computed average down to 45 or so).
--Major score inflation results.
FIX:
Keep both You and non-You lives around in separate batches. Make sure we keep 10 You lives (and 25 non-You lives), so that after a player has lived at least 10 lives, we stop using 30-year padding entirely.
Reset all scores back to 30 to give us a fresh start after this fix.
I'm sorry about this, but it was a hard inaccuracy to notice. Thanks to miskas for pointing out that something was off, and Twisted for confirming that he was seeing the same thing (they both were living to 60 consistently, but still seeing their own scores go up from each subsequent 60 life they lived, when it should have leveled off).
Legs, they are two separate fams, not living together.
One was brown, the other was ginger.
I'm not sure what you mean by "unplayable," given that playing the game means living an hour-long life in whatever context you find yourself in. Could you not find food for yourself or your babies? Could you not find a spot in which to dig a primitive well? Could you not start a new town?
The lack of a pump is a trans-generation problem, not a problem facing any one person alone. Someone, at some point in the timeline of a village, needs to solve this problem. But every player in every life does not need to solve this problem directly. It is also possible to make a contribution toward solving this problem, that will help future generations, without directly solving it.
For example:
--make a map or a waystone based around the best information you currently have about where another town might be.
--build waystones around your town, to help people find you.
--migrate the family to another spot, and start a new primitive town, to buy time, and leave a waystone in the old location.
--make water outposts to buy time.
--start building a bell tower.
At least one of the families is currently "cheating" by planting rubber trees outside of the jungle. That glitch will be fixed this week.
I also see that extra spreading bug, and will fix it.
Also, quick VOG survey shows things looking vibrant enough.
There are currently two fams with Newc pumps.
It's supposed to be hard. Really hard. Almost impossible to keep a town going forever.
If that's the case, then where does this challenge come from?
I've tried having resources run out, but too many other things need to be sacrificed to make this happen (infinite map, parallel villages on different timelines).
So now I'm trying collective cooperation as a source of challenge. Can you find others? Can you work with them to get what you need in order to survive long term?
Is it very very hard, yes.
Is it impossible? No. In the past week, the record for a lineage is 94 generations, and several fams lasted 60+ generations (15+ hours).
Did the prediction of "we'll all just live together in a melting-pot village" come to pass? No, it seems like it didn't.
Let's look at some real data.
Yesterday, there were 79 Eves placed.
There were 4 Newcomen Pumps built today. There were 9 built yesterday.
Looking at OneMap, the eve placement looks normal (a grid pattern that moves gradually to the west). Families are close together. Walking 10,000 tiles is not needed.
It is possible, but it's a LOT of work on my end, and would result in a bunch of duplicate and error-prone content. It's the way the auto-orientation is implemented... it's tagged per object (so a wall is marked to auto-orient, not the stakes).
It might seem obvious to make the stakes auto-orient instead of the walls, but that would prevent existing walls from reacting to new constructions.
So if you build a horizontal wall, all the stakes you place would be horizontal.
Then you build a vertical wall. All the stakes you build would be vertical. But when you place the stakes to join the two walls, the stakes would auto-orient, but the existing part of the horizontal wall would be stuck, and wouldn't become a corner wall.
Unless there were two copies of every wall (one that auto-orients and another that doesn't). There are already 12 wall objects (3 orientations of 4 types), and more coming in the future. There are also loads of transitions that hook all these together.
Most building games have auto-orientation. The fact that it wasn't present in this game for a long time was an implementation flaw.
Oh, and new walls SHOULD auto-orient themselves relative to ancient walls. I'll make sure that's not a bug.
Just checked, and that's working correctly.
So if you find some ancient walls, and build new walls to "add on" to the ancient walls, or repair a gap, your new walls will auto-orient correctly relative to the ancient walls.
Not sure what's going on in the OP's screen shot. The entire structure looks ancient, so I'm not sure how that gaff was possible. It should have auto-oriented at the time of construction.... oh, unless... the horizontal part went ancient, and then the vertical part was built later. That will leave a gap.
Ancient walls do not auto-orient. That is on purpose, because they are ancient. You have to kinda build around them, where they are.
This does make for some ugly hybrid buildings, but that's okay, because that's what hybrid buildings look like in real life. There's an old wall here, and we built around it.
As for the reason auto-orient was put in place, it's because many players couldn't be bothered to orient their walls properly. In terms of gameplay, non-oriented walls are just as functional as oriented walls, and poorly oriented walls were all over the place in the game.
It was hurting my eyes.
But also, in general, if something CAN be automated by the computer, it should be. Why ask you to sit there and click 4 times when it's obvious that this should be a corner wall?
Lots of other games have auto-orienting walls, roads, etc.
I knew that auto-orientation would curtail some intentional creative uses of walls, which is sad. But most of the time, was I was seeing was walls that didn't connect visually by accident.
You do have full control over walls that are free-standing and not touching other walls.
Okay, there's room at the top of the screen for a second home arrow. I added one up there that points to the bell tower. So you don't need to dig up your home arrow to see the bell tower arrow. You see both at the same time.
In further testing of inherited home markers (what you get automatically as a baby).... they are in the wrong spot! That's why the marker is never there... Fixing that right away, of course.
I'm pretty sure this is working correctly....
...BUT....
...it's way too confusing!
I need to work on this some more... screen real estate is a bit of an issue, which has always been the sticking point on fixing this. I'll take another look.
Got another email about griefing today.
The guy was trying to save his town from a lone griefer, but he couldn't convince the noob players in town to team up with him and help.
1-v-1, stopping a griefer is still pretty hard. You run slower when you chase them alone.
Sure, they run slower too when chasing you, making you as an expert player relatively safe. But they can still pick off noob players who don't know to run when they hear murder mouth coming.
So in the email, this lone griefer hung out outside of town and picked off unsuspecting noobs relentlessly, along with stealing stuff, etc.
As I've said, killing is a necessary ingredient in this game... otherwise, how would you dispatch such a griefer, even with majority consent?
But one person unilaterally picking off unsuspecting people is not the reason killing is in the game. It's an abuse of a necessary power.
Assuming that such griefers are in the extreme minority, it would seem like a hard limit on killing, per player, might help. Maybe even one kill per life. Maybe after doing it, your character just can't bear to do it again, which makes some sense thematically.
And if a town faces a few griefers, they need a few good men to dispatch them, a different posse leader for each case. The guy who handled the last one is on break.
The other idea is to make unilateral killing completely impossible. Maybe you need a posse of 2+ to do it.
This would undercut gate-guarding, though.
In fact, even a killing limit would undercut a gate-guarding career somewhat.
In general, I want to leave some kind of unilateral killing in the game to permit lone players to stake claims and make threats. You know, "Get away from here, I've got a bead on you with my bow, don't come near."
If there was a limit of one kill per life, the lone player would only be able to fend off a single invader...
The game takes place in the realm of thought experiments.
It is "in the future," because the thought experiment is about the future.
But this world is obviously not earth.... it is 50,000x bigger than earth, and it has no oceans. So there was no apocalypse here. There are no ruins.
The world is the imaginary space inside which this thought experiment plays out:
"If we had to start over from scratch, but kept all of our knowledge, how long would it take us to get back to iPhones?" where iPhones are a placeholder for whatever sufficiently advanced tech we can imagine.
But that thought experiment involves survival too, which is one of the things that would slow us down. We have to eat, and keep warm, and fend off natural threats, and have babies to keep the civilization going. Obviously, we wouldn't get back to iPhones in one generation. It would take hundreds of years. Might it take thousands of years? Might it take longer the second time around than the first? Maybe the knowledge doesn't help. Maybe it was all about bootstrapping infrastructure. Might we never get there the second time around? Maybe we'd lose the thread. Maybe all the "right place at the right time" moments wouldn't play out the same way. Maybe retreading the same ground is impossible.
All that said, so far, this game has been a pretty lousy embodiment of that thought experiment. The answer is that people get back to diesel engines in a generation or two!
In recent times, I've been throwing in a few monkey wrenches that make failure more likely. But I've always been somewhat disappointed that the progress up through 3000+ craftable items didn't take longer....
In the end, the thought experiment seems to have been an inspiration point for a game that ended up not really being about that thought experiment.
The other thing the game is about is the deep mystery of civilization. How did we get here? What guided us here? How do we cooperate across generations? How do we make sense of the world we inherit? Who were these people who built all this stuff, and why did they build it, and what were their intentions?
That mystery is part of the "tech progression" thought experiment. The "it might take longer, or even never happen at all" hypothesis embodies that mystery. We don't know how the hell we actually got here. We tell stories about it, but we don't really know.
Anyway, the game ended up being a pretty solid embodiment of that mystery, so that's good. In the end, the mystery is far more interesting than the tech progression thought experiment. The thought experiment is just a question that spurs various answers.
The mystery is the unfathomable foundation of our being as people.
I have thought about this... One idea was that free demo players can only play as animals, and you get born as a sheep or pig or dog. That would require a lot of work on my end, though...
The main problem is load. Free games attract loads of simultaneous players, and something like 98% of them don't buy the game.
I need to focus my engineering efforts on supporting the customers who actually paid.