One Hour One Life Forums

Although this is easier said than done, to me the obvious solution to griefing is better combat and raiding dynamics. If there's a better sense of trespassing than simply slipping in when some kid opens the door, more reliable ways to end intruders, and to balance, a way to force one's way in through a property fence with greater effort than it took to build it (basically everything about attacking being greater effort than defending) then it means griefers can be defended against just like any other opponent.

It should be easier to sub-divide a town also with things like the ability to use a locked gate without the ability to give anyone else access to it. That way individual subclusters in a family can have their own food stores so they only have to worry about their own children turning into griefers, and to watch for anyone trying to break in via balanced raid dynamics.

My point is that it seems like combat and raiding have been pushed to the sidelines because it's not really a game about combat, but these are essential tools in civilization to keep people in line. The trick will be how to make that complexity approachable within the one hour window...

So what you're saying is... the -real- challenge is ending the arc and persisting the family past the eve window since it's something never been done before.

I hope there's someone out there who experiences this all the time and thinks it's a game about farming potatoes, which I guess it actually partially is.

Old Gregg's Downstairs Mixup one hundo p needs to be the top town in the next arc.

You're probably tired of reading my pedantic messages and I'm sure this will sound kiss-ass and I'm sure you've heard all this before, but you are seriously my game design hero and I absolutely love your approach to it all, how you think it through, how you open source everything even your internal process as you share it all as you're doing it (how???), how you really care about getting the above described things right.

It's so, so hard to find a successful game designer who actually gives a shit about the art of the games they're making (beyond the visual art, of course) and isn't just following the dollars. If my brain was less chaotic and I was able to get my shit together I'd be doing my best to follow a similar path, but it's really encouraging to see people absolutely crushing it in ways far beyond that which I could hope to.

So yeah, hopefully my pedantry comes off as giving a shit about your creation rather than being an asshole. It's a fine line :\ Go Jason!!! *cheerleading commences*

One thing that would be really compelling to me and make me a lot more motivated to care about my children would be is if there were features around tracking their progress after death, it's really difficult to find any info about it through the site... Maybe mostly due to performance issues of the tree display, but like, just to imagine an extreme, if there was a mario-kart-split-screen type of thing after i died and it kept getting more and more split as more and more of my descendants multiply I would be absolutely captivated and probably watch it for like 6 hours haha. Even seeing a "living tree" on the death screen where i could see which of my babies are alive, which died, why they died, and as they die and have babies of their own it keeps it updated would be really great.

Not trying to dictate features here or anything like that, just trying to give input on some types of experiences would make me personally more invested in my children. Hm if the data is all public access I wonder if that kind of tool could be built externally *thoughtful chin scratching*

I mean... What's a 3 year old going to do that's born into a starving village or nomads stuck in a wasteland? Waiting until a couple years after they can use basic tools to start blaming them for their parents death seem analogous to real life, right? Like i think no one would blame a 5 year old for their parents dying. Main age it needs to def be earlier than is when they can use a knife I guess

I mean, except they can just /die right? I must be missing something

This seems interesting... I wonder how that would work, technically it could mean that if you're a baby's first mother and you do a shit job and then the next 10 mothers do a great job with that baby then your rank could subsequently drop even long after the relevant life. I'm guessing that would break the transparency issue though

Yeah but that's the whole point isn't it? To differentiate a player who is better than everyone else from everyone else. If we overfocus on "a player who can get 80% of babies to age 60" then all those calculations go right into the trash the minute it's decided that living to 40 is the new living to 60, or if a change to the game made it where reaching age 60 suddenly became super difficult. So if we abstract it a bit and say "there's some kind of behavior that roughly falls under the umbrella of 90th percentile excellence, what should being a 90th percentile player look like in terms of how the rating responds? How about when they up their game and get to 95th percentile?" I'm sure most of us have gotten really good at some online game at some point and experienced the way its rating system worked as you got closer and closer to the peak, and whether that was terrible and frustrating like sisyphus or appropriately scaled and rewarding.

Focusing on that experience first and then looking at the numbers after we have an idea of what things -should- be, even if they're handwavy and difficult to nail down like "90th percentile" means we can say things like "well 90th percentile players should take 20 births to reach their appropriate rank, and this algorithm makes it so that a mother that keeps her kids alive 80% of the time ends up taking 20 births to have their rank settle down. Is 80% survival of children a 90th percentile behavior?" then it can be scaled from there accordingly. 90th percentile could even be translated precisely into a baby survival rate from the current data if you so desired.

Edit: and then if later after changes to the game 90th percentile behavior was actually a different baby survival rate then you just need to scale it to match it up again with the percentiles, or perhaps you could build a mechanism into the game that does this automatically, or perhaps the algorithm would be agnostic to this somehow. How the algorithm works is less important than how well it achieves the goals, though I agree that making it transparent will also be important... But there's more than one way to make something transparent, of course. Having extensive details about your rank, how it changed, and why on the death screen would go a long way I imagine.

Agree, sounds good. Bumping up the K value and then taking a look at the first few dozen could be useful too (edit: ie, before they've settled since that's the biggest downside of a high K value, unless you want to gradually raise the K value the more they play which is I think how chess usually does it)

Yeah but you're only looking at the average, that's not what I was talking about... I mentioned concern about whether someone who was consistently better than someone else would consistently be rated higher than they are, or whether their rating would wildly fluctuate. Like look at the numbers in the last 100 or so babies in that 50k trial, my guess is that it dips quite low in some points.

Edit: oops, missed the lowest,highest. Yeah I mean rating of 31 for someone who on average has 54 is not great right? 54 is quite high out of 60.

Edit edit: Depends on where it happened, but yeah i feel like the first 100 births and last 100 births of a long simulation are going to be the interesting bits. Maybe it would be worth defining how long it should take to get to 55, how many babies in a row need to die in order to drop someone below 50 after being a long time 55er, whether losing 10 babies in one life is as bad as losing 1 baby each life across 10 lives, etc