Update: Jason's Rocket Ride
November 11, 2025
All logged bugs and issues have been fixed.
I first started working on this game more than 10 years ago. My first commit, on May 28, 2015, bears the message, "Got basic client skeleton in place. It compiles, runs, pauses, and quits without crashing." No crashing! Sounds like I was off to a good start.
146,000 lines of code and over 3.5 million in-game player hours later, here we are. With something like 25 servers coordinating behind the scenes to keep things running, One Hour One Life is a massive, sprawling city of a solo engineering project. With so many moving parts, it's a miracle that this house of cards works at all, but somehow, it does. According to my records, the main game server hasn't crashed since July 2024, and it's been running steadily since the last update in January of 2025. That's 10 months of continuous uptime, during which players made something like 200 million changes to the persistent map.
Along the way, I processed and fixed over 2000 reported bugs and issues. There were something like 100 issues in this most recent batch, which was itself quite a mountain to climb.
But I'm turning 48 on Friday, and I'm not going to spend the next 10 years of my life working on One Hour One Life. It's time to make a new game, before my time of making games runs out. I fancy making something a bit smaller and simpler for the next one.
Of course, I will continue to keep the servers running and fix showstopping bugs as they're discovered, for as long as I'm alive and able. For the most part, the servers run themselves, but every once in a while, there's a fire that needs putting out.
One last little token before I go: over 300 people have ridden the rocket to Another Planet, which was always meant to be a "You Won the Game" moment. Now they will each be immortalized, hopefully forever, as long as the servers keep running. Maybe if you can get 146,000 lines of C code to compile in 2125, there's a chance at forever.
And lastly, over the next few days, I'll be getting born in the game as a baby and trying to build and ride the rocket myself, as one final salute. No cheating with VOG or other funny business---I'm going to build the rocket for real.
I may even spawn as your baby at some point, and it will be up to you to take care of me.
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