One Hour One Life Forums

Jason I just found out about you when this game first hit Game Informer yt channel. Never played any of your games before, but I'm not a heavy gamer these days anyway. I'm quite a different user posting here because I haven't even purchased this game yet. I plan to do so very soon just to support you, but I probably have no intention to ever play it. My enjoyment comes from watching the organic story lines and the evolving meta of this game on youtube. I like to study human psychology, which as you know has a lot to do with how and why people do things. Sometimes there is no clear answer, but a lot of the time there are answers. Kind of like puzzle pieces one must fit together to make sense. Once you have identified those pieces, then sometimes it becomes possibly to predict human behavior, and even begin to understand the human condition.

I feel that this game you created is the first one to ever have the potential to truly explore the psychological depths of the human condition. if you let it happen that is. I was able to accurately predict certain meta developments of this game just by using actual early human history as a template. What did the beginning of humanity really look like? How did society organically evolve into the ones we see in front of us today? This game was beginning to answer some of those questions right in front of our very eyes at 525k times the speed it actually happened in our world. Sure it's only giving us a glimpse of all of the complexities of early civilization, but that microcosm it provided was still more than what any other online game has ever achieved. This was happening in the mere few weeks 1H1L has been available.

You say that the point of this game is for one family line to go from creation of a society to the end of the technology line. However, the way you designed the game currently makes that impossible, and it has nothing to do with revisiting abandoned villages. Contrary to popular belief, writing is almost as old as irrigation technology, and is even older than irrigation in some parts of the world. If you want generations to survive, there must be a way to pass down knowledge through writing. The ability to chisel laws into a stone block at the center of a village would go a long way in maintaining generations. But it seems like your fear that people will be bored, once they reach the end of the most recent technology tree, would deter you from making the game any easier for communities to thrive and survive than it already is. But therein seems to lie the crux of the problem. There is a miscommunication between the purpose for you making this game, and the reason why people have fun playing and watching it.

I, like many others, don't feel that this games fun is based off of just survival. Just like the fun of life itself isn't based off of pure survival. You spoke of not wanting the player to get bored so quickly. Even though I haven't seen anyone complaining of the game becoming boring, if that is your concern, then give the player the opportunity to do what real humans did throughout history when technological advancement stagnated. They reinvested that time and energy away from survival technology, and into visual and performing arts. Give the player the ability to be creative somehow. Give them the ability to create unique items along with the ability to name them; Things like murals, pottery, jewelry, temples or adorned grave sites for great rulers they once had. Already, in your game, people were developing organically in a way that mirrored the real world, why not go even further? You implemented the option to create a gold crown, and within days kings and queens were being crowned in the larger villages. Then with that crown came jealousy to covet that crown...

I saw a video where a player was born into an established family, plotted to kill the young princess and take the crown for herself with another player. She lured the princess to the bakery and killed her, then gave the weapon to her accomplice. They then went to the birthing area, alerted everyone that the queen was dead, and then held a faux ceremony where the murderer was given the crown. Luckily the player we were watching witnessed the incident and identified the perp to the others. The two accomplices were punished, and in that village from thereon out, no one named their child the name of the usurper and her accomplice. Those names were considered to be swear words among those people and their descendants. These are events that are very similar to stories told in historical books, which are now happening organically in your game. I have over a dozen other stories like that from watching videos of 1H1L. Like how the developing meta of trolls wanting to kill the current monarchy, gave birth to a secret order of protectors who's job it was to protect "crown and country". These are things that really transpired in the history of our world, and I highly doubt that people are playing your game while reading early human history books as a guideline. You didn't set up a system for royalty and knights to protect the land. You simply made gold crowns a craftable item, and the community did the rest. Doesn't that invoke a sense of amazement within you?

I tell you all of this to say that I feel by doing the apocalypse style reset, it takes away from something wonderful that was happening organically which mimics real world history. Civilizations dying out and being rediscovered happened scores of times, at hundreds of ancient cities around the world. This true aspect of real cultural history should be adapted to compliment your vision and not detract from it. If server population of players and items are the problem, then implement a better decaying system, again, modeled after the real world. The more natural an object is, the faster it decays. As the technology becomes more advanced, then like real life, iron last longer than bronze, and steel lasts longer than iron, but they all still decay. Same with the wells and buildings. Make it so that they have to be maintained after a while or they will waste away into useless ruins. Maybe consider expanding the recycling system to repurpose objects back into their base elements, or into something more useful, but at a cost of losing some of the original raw material. So if a knife needs 3 or 4 parts to make, you can only salvage 1 or 2 of them for very specific new items. This was commonly practiced by early human civilizations.

I feel that a lot of the hard questions you have in developing this game can be approached and solved from the viewpoint of using the real world as a possible solution. The problem with making a civilization game that so closely mimics actual conditions experienced by the earliest humans, is that you can't do it half way. Either you use real historical knowledge and solutions as inspiration for solving those problems, or you are going to have to keep implementing programmer magic that breaks the immersion and overall experience. That is what the monolith is. It is programmer magic which you needed to solve problems you hadn't foreseen in your original design, yet doesn't make any sense within the original concept of the game.

If you must continue with the apocalypse system, then please divide the servers. Make half of the servers persistent, if only to satisfy the players who desire a continuous persistent world, and do not care if the technology tree doesn't change for a few weeks. Then make the other half of the servers for players who like more of a challenge, and don't mind having their progress wiped out every once in a while. I still feel that those server wipes should be scheduled and completely out of the hands of the players. Make it every couple months or something agreeable to the players, so that everyone who plays on those servers knows what is coming. I have never seen so many pissed off players of an indie game, that is as beloved as 1H1L after a single update change. If you watch videos of people playing your creation then I recommend watching HoneyBunny. He was the one who was a part of the original members of a secret order of protectors being created in your world. A game like this creates its own persistent stories, and that is the fun of it. All you have to do is give them the tools to tell that story, and people will love it.

You are right that survival should be hard, just like in real life, but real life didn't have magic monoliths destroying the world by way of human intervention during the bronze age either. There is a happy medium between the tough survival game you desire to make, and the persistent civilization and community world building players desire. Until that happens, I just want to congratulate you on creating a new genre of game that will surely be copied in the months and years to come. This game was as fun to watch, as I'm sure it was for people to play pre apocalypse. It can be that again, in a self-sustaining world with a few adjustments, that I'm sure you're already working hard to make into reality.