One Hour One Life Forums

Thanks, Babsy!

The Force is strong with this one...

It’s not a punishment for the babies, as they are not invested in that settlement. Instead it’s a caution to the mothers and uncles, who will not get a second chance to have that player be part of their line.

That’s just awesome, thanks for sharing!
I saw something like this in one of the reviews: “this game will teach you more about the human condition than any book.” It may not touch every player as profoundly, but it’s an achievement that it does with some. Personally I enjoy reading the stories just as much as I do playing myself. Perhaps even more.

A conversation with a colleague yielded a fresh idea on how to break up the mono culture farming by introducing more types of soil. I posted it in a fresh thread here:
https://onehouronelife.com/forums/viewtopic.php?id=2018

And once we get to paper making technology, we could make doggy bags!

A bonus for eating varied foods seems like a good idea. I have an alternative to keeping track of how many you have eaten of everything. Not sure it’s better, but it’s at least interesting:

A human needs a varied diet to grow up healthy. Remove certain building blocks, and people will become shorter or more often ill, shorter life span, etc. So imagine that ten of the hunger boxes are coded to ten different types of nutrition and the way to gain a hunger box is to consume a food item of that type. A diet of only carrots will yield an adult with fewer hunger boxes than one who has had a varied diet. People will live healthier lives when they get access to more food variation.

That’s a relief. Still, it would be good to increase the difficulty in doing killing sprees. Killing is sometimes anti-griefing, but mass killing is always griefing of the worst kind.

Back to the original question about having several different crops being useful in parallel:

1. I'm with Uncle Gus (and some others) in thinking that different biomes should be leveraged differently. Possibly crops would only grow in certain temperatures, or grow at different speeds? I do understand the difficulty, but I think you should at least consider it thoroughly (maybe you have already).

2. Different tooling could be one way. Maybe some crops require deeper digging than others, and require plows instead of hand-held hoes? There's value in giving more weight to the tech tree.

3. Number of food points per unit, vs cost of production. Storage is a scarce resource, so more effective food/unit ratio will sometimes be more valuable than higher total food points per resource/labor unit. And sometimes it won't be, which requires decision-making.

4. You have already covered different use of resource. Shortage of water -> grow A; shortage of soil -> grow B. If more biomes supplied different raw resources required for farming in varying amounts, this could actually end up solving 1. But then there should be rules about which biomes can appear next to each other (no swamps near desert, etc). Are there more possible raw resources for farming than water and soil? Maybe Barren Soil + Fertilizer = Fertile Soil, and desert and rocky only have barren soil?

As a ground rule for balancing, I suggest a predictable mathematical relationship between input (resources and manual labor) and output. Note that waiting time is essentially free as long as you have something else productive to do, and boring when you don't. You should be careful about considering time as a linear input resource by itself. If there is unlimited space to put down more bushes, and no immediate food crises, the time to yield matters little, while the effort and resources to plant matters a lot. If A grows 2x faster than B, and they are otherwise equal, then A is better than B, but definitely not 2x better. (I don't advocate instant crops though, as I think the game experience is heightened by for example seeing the carrots grow over time).

I like the update with wells built on resource spots. I do think it would be even better if the resource item was separated from the ponds though. It makes sense to dig for water in the other biomes and not really in the swamp lands. A medium rare occurrence (more rare in rocky and desert) would make sense.
I also think shallow wells ought to be faster at generating water than ponds.

Good update. Curious about what the next will bring!

(interesting that while I was composing this post, Pein made a post which also touches on several of the same concepts. Twice the reason to read them then )

This can be solved the same way as you have already done with iron mines. There should be a finite number of spots where you can build a functioning well or pump well. If you need faster production than your finite number of wells can provide, you need to upgrade one or more of them to a pump well. Repeat as needed.

I happen to believe that this is the right path to take, though replace infinite with abundant.
You like when there are decisions to make, but in a steady state the correct decisions are always the same ones. Power gamers will figure these out and then get mad at newbies doing sub-optimal things, meanwhile they get bored from always repeating the same tasks. The solution is to have the game change environmental conditions on the players at certain intervalls and forcing them to adapt their decisions or die. More on this below.

No thanks to infinite carrots. Farmed carrots are man made and should never be infinite, but show up as results of our actions. Conditions and resources for growing them could change though, so it makes sense for many players to participate in the farming during certain intervals, but during other intervals it might be fine if only a single person tends the fields, while everyone else is out hunting our gathering iron, etc. Storage should indeed be a crucial cornerstone in long-term survival for a community. But it shouldn't be "stockpile everything", rather "stockpile the things that will become harder to extract or produce in the foreseeable future".

ADAPT AND COLLABORATE OR DIE

This is the main piece of my contribution, and it may require a brief background before I get to the point: I am part of a small independent game developer outfit. We had plans to make a survival game with collaborative play as the main differentiator against other games out there. We were still in the idea stage when I stumbled upon OHOL and realized that Jason had beaten us to the punch, so to speak. Our vision was to pit people against a series of challenges which could not be beaten by one single player acting alone, thereby making smart collaboration the essential ingredient in surviving strategy. In OHOL we found collaboration, but also an interesting concept of one-hour lifespan and survival through descendants (and also cute graphics and aspirations to 10,000 craftable items). We decided to not make our own game from scratch to compete, but try to see where OHOL was leading instead.

One thing that we don't see in OHOL is the series of external challenges that we envisioned: seasonal drought, floods, storms, disease, forest fires, pests and extinction-level events like the Earth being stuck by a comet, or what have you... I am donating this game design idea free of charge, because OHOL is such a great game
There has been a lot of effort spent on making it hard and challenging to survive in OHOL. But maybe the "regular" season in OHOL does not have to be so hard, but could allow more breathing room for building, teaching/learning and planning? Then there would be "disaster seasons", when ponds dry up, when crops fail, when floods whisk your houses and stuff away (unless you have sandbagged the town perimeter), etc? For a town to survive such a period would depend on technology and collaborative preparations. There can also be "abundance seasons" where you stockpile certain resources that are currently easy to come by.

The long-term success in OHOL is a long family line. Those are difficult to achieve in normal play, but easy (tedious?) for power gamers who coordinate through voice chat. Maybe an ebb and flow of difficulty would be more engaging for most players and less tedious for power gamers? Success in a family line would be measured not only in number of generations (which is repetitive and unbound in static conditions), but also in how many (and which) disaster seasons the line/society has successfully survived.

You could add more seasonal difficulties at the same pace that you add new technology. In fact, the next branch of the tech tree under development could be geared towards a certain shortage/abundance/disaster which is also under development.

This is a valid idea, but it needn't be limited to one time. To spell it out:
1. By design, grave data is stored in each client and not on server.
2. If a player picks up a grave, the player's client could remember the data of that grave while carrying it around (minus location, which is no longer accurate).
3. When the player drops the grave, his/her client could send a message to the server (original data plus new location), whereupon all clients would get new grave data from the server.

This would fit with the client/server design, I believe. It's still non-zero work though, so whether it's worth it (compared to everything else that is also important) will be up to Jason to decide.