One Hour One Life Forums

I'd like to see emergent gameplay that keeps the game fresh. Right now everything is static and repetitive. Each thing is living in its own little world unaffected by its surroundings instead of connected together into a whole. The game doesn't recognize every living being in nature is intelligent. In the game animals and plants are just random backdrops provided for the player's use, but every little creature, plant, and worm crawling about in nature is really living its own life. That's why nature is so beautiful, isn't it? Everything, even a tiny sprouting blade of grass, is striving to be the best it can be, nothing less and nothing more. If the game world begins interacting with itself, even in a small way, it'll make things a lot more unique and keep the storytelling aspect of play fresh.

The game could let go of so many pre-scripted interactions and have a more interactive underlying chemistry that leads to a natural equilibrium with complex imbalances. A simple thing like soil acidity, water content, and nutrient levels could affect what plants could grow there, and this could be determined and changed by the animals, plants, and weather that lives there.

I'd like to see flowers, birds, and bees in the game. One year there was a drought here and I was sitting one day watching a bumblebee desperately looking everywhere for a flower but most of them had dried up and died so I began watering all the flowers. Gradually they surged back to life and all the bees came by to dance around on them. Having bees around is really important for pollinating plants and growing orchards. The game could require them to grow milkweed, berry bushes, and fruit trees. Birds are also important to have around. If their shelter, food, or water sources disappear, then they won't come around to help reseed and pollinate plants or keep the soil fertile.

Crop rotation was another key advancement in humanity's evolution. Having animals graze pastures could also be required to keep soil fertile with the right nutrients for growing crops, but if there's too many then they eat all the pasture and die off without being given food. You'd have to keep the females and males apart to keep them from overproducing. Animals could also search for food, perhaps even get into pantries if they're desperate enough by tracing hidden smell particles that diffuse and blow on the wind. Maybe on calm days nearby animals can't smell it because the scent is too weak, but on a particular day the wind blows the scent toward a bear cave and a bear follows it by tracing its strength delta. Having these simple multiplicative interactions would create all kinds of crazy stories without any need to script them. The world would play with the players' creations.

Trees could grow, die, and spawn new saplings. Abandoned towns could gradually decay into ruins that become overgrown by nature. Simple walls could require repair after 300 years or so and become rubble if they aren't repaired soon enough. Large clear cut areas without any vegetation could turn into deserts where nothing can grow, since the vegetation keeps the wind from blowing away the top soil. Prairies would need to be covered with thick grass. If the soil loses its fertility from killing too many rabbits, then the grass dies off and is susceptible to becoming desert.

Rivers have also been an important aspect to civilization's evolution. They tend to dry up and sink into the land if the trees around them are cut down. Many of India's rivers have dried up because there are no trees left to retain the water in the riverbanks and top soil to keep the river flowing on top. Of course if the game has rivers then it would need oceans too and have separate continents and islands that require boats to visit.

Implementing these things are difficult though because the game world is completely flat. There are no valleys for rivers to flow or mountains you have to walk around. You can build and grow on anything with no consequence. It would be possible though to implement a simple 3D terrain with a height map and retain the 2D sprites.

A weather system would also add another chaotic aspect to the world. Rain could help vegetation and crops grow, as well as spread nutrients in the soil. All the rain would have to do is increase the earth's water content variable, which in turn increases its nutrient diffusion to nearby tiles. Any water getting dumped on that tile could affect it and nearby tiles. Plants also help share nutrients with each other through their roots. And animal behaviour could also change by the weather and affect how the landscape evolves. The possibilities could become endless with just a few simple mechanics.

Scripting each interaction of the game is going to be far too much work and only create a few new possibilities each time that are easily exhausted. If everything could interact and react with each other on a more existential level, like having a flammability attribute, an ignited object could easily spread fire to other nearby flammable objects. Animals could have a digestion attribute that reacts with what they eat and transforms its state. Eating certain plants could change their digestive state to having seeds that cannot be transformed into sustenance and end up seeded elsewhere. Adding these unscripted elements to the game that react and transform each other will create a much more multiplicative gameplay with endless possibilities.

And it doesn't have to model reality. Already player lives are only an hour long and can only walk about 200 meters in a year, but if the game world was intelligent somehow and always changing, it would be continually captivating. Complex issues would arise by themselves and require new solutions. There could be flash floods that tear away the vegetation and the soil could blow away elsewhere turning it into desert. People would have to work together in creative ways within their capabilities to save their villages or migrate. Unseen dangers would also creep up on villages because of their lack of attention to their surroundings, such as storing food openly and attracting bears and raccoons that steal it.

Anyway, I rambled on a lot because I'd like to make my own game with an evolving world. The parenting and survival aspect of OHOL is a lot of fun but becomes a bit dry and boring with the rest of the world dead and never changing. The thing that really drew me into this game is the reality you can't become attached to what you create. You will die in one hour and lose everything. All you can do is make the best of this short experience, perhaps leaving the world behind a little better or little worse. On top of that you get to experience in real-time the collective good and bad decisions of other people. You can do something selfishly then realize the collective impact it has when other people do the same, like people not putting their tools and junk back when they're done with it and the village becoming a huge trash heap.

I think attempting to add art and culture to the game in its current state isn't going to spice things up much because there's already a specific way to sustain everything that never changes or requires any creativity. No one is going to start worshipping the wolves and start throwing them food because someone noticed a correlation with the farm doing better after a wolf ate something. The game world is stiff, static, and unchanging without any room for creative interpretation. Remedying it doesn't have to go extreme as these ideas either. Just add death to things and life will happen naturally.