One Hour One Life Forums

I wish players could decide whether or not to have babies.

Spoonwood, I guess you're thinking of a town from before server 12 got reset.

Oh, and the hat
https://onetech.info/3202-Hat-Sun-Hot-Weather

Try to say "hug" ?

My impression is that Jason is trying to get the "core" of the game to work, and that once Jason feels it works, other implementations will come. But that's just my interpretation.

Tarr is fug or so they say.

It sounds reasonable, but I'm not sure I agree 100%

This is not just a cooperative builder game, it is also an attempt to simulate a society. There are no societies where all people are effective, and they shouldn't have to be (depending on your political view, but still...)

For example, we have artists for a reason in real life. In OHOL, beautiful gardens are not vital for survival, but building them and exploring other people's gardens is fun. If it's fun, I'd say it's a good and interesting mechanic.

Or, take new players. When they learn to tend berries and make compost, they feel useful. But there is no need to remove experienced players' ability to do these tasks in order for the new players to feel useful. They are happy to do the tasks, experienced players are happy when they don't have to. No limiting mechanics required.

So, I don't think the previous system had a design flaw in this regard. If anything, I thought it a greater flaw with the old system that more inexperienced players were locked to simple tasks, because the societies didn't have enough abundance (food, iron, kindling...) to create good learning stations for more advanced stuff. The game should offer situations where time can be spent teaching other players to make engines, for example. But that never happened back when I played because there was no time, survival hinged on getting task done, not teaching and learning. So the best way was to play on a different server (or in the tutorial area for forging) in order to learn. That was a greater weakness in my opinion.

I'm not saying the new system is worse or better; I don't know, I haven't tried it. But to me it sounds like something is a little off with the theory behind it.

I think that if a task is imperative for survival, like compost, and if it is boring enough (and it is), people will upgrade it.

I say this as having spent hours upon hours in Stardew Valley. Every time I could upgrade something, I would. Not so much in order to make something fancy but to make the work itself easier. And every single upgrade felt valuable, because life became simpler.

But yeah, once the farm was running with the best tech and I felt rich beyond measure, I lost interest in playing. (But to be fair, that game is really tweaked around an ingame period of two years, even though it allows you to continue playing after that point.)

As for natural disasters being sort of "soft resets" or not unlike natural decay, yes, but with added drama. Can you save the city? If the city is saved, is it worth staying or is it beyond repair? It offers different opportunities for meaningful choices, survival, and being a hero.

The big cycle the game offers right now is: Beginning (Eve), Mid game (town life), End (A time of lack where everything is doomed to be destroyed)

I think there are other big cycles the game could offer. As well as smaller cycles within the big one. And depending on the rules of the game, those cycles might feel more rewarding for the players and motivate different choices than the present one.

There have been many ideas in these forums on how to make late game more interesting. I'm unsure if it's possible to get there just by removing elements or limiting the present day game, however.

Ideas include

- Farming update and irrigation. Right now, once a village is established, everything runs on the compost cycle. As new tech is invented, the basic chores should change drastically. Don't pick berries one by one, use a tool to pick six berries at once. Don't water bushes one by one, use tech to water several at once. Etc. This would make food production easier and free up time, potentially making people more bored, but for different reasons. Balance this with other important activities that can only be done in late towns.

- Ovens and forges that run on electricity. A late game activity could be building power lines to or around town. Infrastructure.

- Explore the world beyond the rift. What if you could leave the rift by plane, hunt for exotic animals, and bring back backpacks made of crocodile skin? Or if you could leave the rift by plane and mine for some sort of mineral that enabled building computers or robots?

- Seasons - What if after a reset you were guaranteed summer for two whole days, but everybody better be prepared for winter once it sets in? If no compost could be made and no plants tended during winter, a different play style would have to develop. If not enough grain in granaries, perhaps the village would have to depend on hunting.

- Natural disasters. If you build your house of sticks, the winds will sooner or later blow it down... The world could become more imbalanced and harder to survive in as the days pass. Consider a town dependent on electricity to keep the babies warm and the food production going - and then a storm destroys all the power lines. Suddenly people would have to resort to older age tech to survive until the infrastructure is back up.

- Marriage, new lines. There's no real reason why Eves should be remembered forever. It's more natural that they are forgotten by time, and that new families form.

Yes, but I suppose that depends on how long the arcs last.
The arc ending is inevitable. So does it matter if your builds last ten hours longer when they'll vanish in a day or two anyway? Maybe it's better for the players to optimize for fun by using as much resources as they can, let the arc end quickly and open a new Eve window?

But do the experts understand your game? Games are very different after all. The people who love chess might or might not be the same people who love crosswords. I know people who love crosswords who hate Sudoku. Because it has numbers. (Although to be fair, it might be the logic part that puts them off, not the numbers themselves.)

And someone who understand what makes 1st person shooter games work might not  recognize what makes, let's say, Stardew Valley fun.

So it should be of value to you to know what kinds of players are attracted to OHOL, and why. At the very least, you should ask them why they picked up the game in the first place. And then, you should ask how you can capitalize on the specifics that draws people in first before you look to other kinds of games and genres.

OHOL does have something very unique, something intriguing, that sets it apart from other games and that just might appeal to a different kind of players, or at least inspire a different kind of play style. If you find a way to nourish that, I think you'll be fine.

But isn't that what Jason is creating already? A rift with dwindling resources, where it seems the goal is to make the arc unlivable towards the end. To see what interesting choices the players make in dire situations.

The difference is that in the rift, there is no hope. There is no win condition. There is only the end, and players disagree at what point the rift no longer has any fun to offer, and when everybody should start killing each other in order to end the pain sooner rather than later.

Seasons is the rift (but in an open world) with no hope for a while, but with a win condition: Survive the harsh winter, and summer will return. Unlike the rift, there is purpose in trying to survive.