One Hour One Life Forums

Hi i'm a new one hour one life owner with 10 hours of gameplay and I really love this idea of being born to another player and living such a short life. Great idea there.
However as much as this is a cool idea I feel that the game it's been implemented into is not such a good experience WHILE there is huge potential to improve this game into a more enjoyable experience.
Here are a few suggestions that would fix much of the frustrations i'm having with this game. I am also a one-man-army gamedev just like Jason, developing a browser mmo and I feel like taking care of the frustating parts of your game is something really important that makes your players stay and actually play the game. Bare with me because this will be a long post I think...

1. Birth control

Suggestion: fertile women should have an on/off switch option when they are ready to give birth to babies.

(maybe a little unnatural but easy to implement imo)(a better fix but harder to implement and with much larger game-wide consequences imo would be to have mating (this could be a simple kiss or hearts animation when a fertile man and woman stand on the same spot and press letter L or click some love button in the interface -> and eves would need to spawn as a couple with their man (would make starter villages much more survivable as woman would care of the children and man would provide for her(if we're going for historical accuracy then  this is the way to go also lol) and it would also make men more important and actually required in this game's society)

Reasons: I think it's utterly ridiculous and frustrating that 50% of the time you are born to an eve or a foraging mother in the middle of nowhere and they just leave you there to die... and then another 20% of time you're born in a village where they dislike boys and/or have too many babies and they take you away to die. If we're trying to play the "I was this kid born in this situation, but I eventually grew up." - according to game description then every kid should be wanted instead of 70% of kids being discarded.
Not only does this just waste our time as we cycle through games where we're being discarded and make babies and mothers feel bad (the moral part of it(which this game kinda wants to simulate I guess?). At least when you're first playing the game lol - goddamnit Jason why are you teaching people to murder innocent babies?!? ).

I'm not sure if Jason really said this but according to one player on discord one of Jason's reasons to not agree on some birth control fix like that is "blocking births during breastfeeding was true-to-life, but the "oh shit" factor that it gives a mom was too priceless to just remove". Yeah I don't think 70% of newborns were discarded in any time or culture of human history lol (maybe I could have been unlucky to be given birth to so many running-away-eves and child-killing villages but it's probably still 50% of the time you don't survive as a baby due to this). And the oh shit factor, well there would still be that, just in a little bit more controlled way.

Consequences and potential troubles:
-The good: Villages could control over-population and freshly spawned eves could play to the point where they create some tools and perhaps even farms before they decide to start popping children out. This would make for much bigger fresh-village survivability so there would probably be less eves being spawned because you'd be much more likely to spawn to someone in a village (because there would be more of them).
-potential troubles: if a lot of women on the server are blocking their birth, there would be more eve spawns? This would actually cancel out with the point I just wrote above that there would be more surviving villages and therefore more spawns as a kid. But potentially you could give players an option to select if they prefer to spawn as eve or as a kid and if they wanted to spawn as a kid and there would be no mothers needing kids, wait up to 5 seconds if any mothers will want to have babies and then spawn them in, if not spawn them as eves (This really wouldn't be a problem, there's millions of people playing competitive games these days where they have to wait for matchmaking to find suitable opponents and they don't mind it because they know that they will be having a better game if they have to wait a little)

2.problem: items all over the floor / inventory craze!

Reasons and possible solutions:
This is another riduclous and frustrating thing of this game and this problem needs to be solved somehow. Villages having items all over the place lol. Yes there is posibility to make baskets and carts and I saw there are even chests and you can also lock them (though of course that's really complicated to make (as is anything else apart from baskets) so looks like it's not viable to make or there would be more of it in villages) though i've never seen one so far. Villages are way too vulnerable of someone stealing their precious items, while it's probably not viable to have someone appointed a guard walking about doing nothing to add to that needed food. I don't really offer a clear cut solution that would work for this game's style but there would be nothing wrong of having something like a minecraft chest inventory system (with less space). Or even simply allow there to be a lot of items on just one floor tile (and as you'd click on it to grab something from that pile a list of things that's on that tile would open up and you'd select what you want to take or simply a grid of things). Or at least divide each tile into 9 grids so there could be 9 different things on one tile (that would still clearly make every individual thing on the floor visible given the size of a tile I think).
The general feel when handling items around is clumsy and frustrating to me and even more so when you're dealing with baskets and backpacks.
Let me share a gameplay story here... yesterday I was given the privilege to be given a knife and backpack and full clothes from one of the village elders as the next inline to "lead" the village. All went well and when I was about 50 years old I decided I'll give my knife and clothes to the next diligant worker that will keep this village in good shape when I'm gone. What followed is me trying to put the knife on the floor for them to pick it up and because there were items everywhere I ended up stabbing the women by accident instead -_-. In my utter disbelief of what i've just done (to make matters worse this was I think one of the only two remaining fertile women in the village as well) I was standing there texting and forgot to eat. My backpack was still full and there was still no place on the floor where I could drop my knife or anything from my backpack so I ended up running to berrybushes to grab a berry to eat but there were nowhere to drop the knife there as well so not only did I stabbed her to death I also starved myself lmao. Of course i'm a new player and still noob but really the underlying problem of this frustrating experience is the ridiculous inventory system of this game.
I'd definitely keep the amount of items you can stash in backpack and one item in your hand mechanic, that's good and somewhat realistic (maybe we could have one item per hand (would also allow for something like shield + sword )) but other storage things should definitely be expanded especialy including expanding the one item per tile.

Reply to seemingly stubborn Jason(that's what I heard and read ):
Here's a quote from one of Jason's forum posts:
"People just can't understand why I won't just give up and make the game that they want to play.
I hope---I really hope---that part of the reason that you're playing this game is that it's so DIFFERENT than other games out there.
I could add a birth location picker, and respawn mechanics, and a damage health bar, and an inventory bar, and all the other things that every other game has.
And some of these things are the kind of thing that would make you play more.  Like, if you could easily respawn and keep working on the same project, I might hook you into playing for 8 hours straight.  And that would be great!  You'd like the game more, and tell more friends about it, and I'd make more money.
But, given that there are loads of games out there that do those things already, what would be the point?"

and then i'm going to quote Bruce Lee: “Absorb what is useful, discard what is useless and add what is specifically your own”

My point for Jason here is that you have one great unique idea that works (being born to other players and living 60 minutes) and that's the one which made most of us buy this game, and another unique thing (the crazy inventory system of this game) that doesn't work and should be discarded for a proven system that works (this is where you look at how other games solved the inventory issue).

You don't have to do everything in your game unique is my point. There's one unique thing that makes this game really stand out from other games and that's enough. Yes there are lots of games out there that do the same inventory like all the other games and it's probably because it just works. Your game won't become like all others just because it has one part of it like other games. You want to make your game different but if it's too different it's not helping anyone and leaves a bunch of frustrating players with a sour taste of a game with wasted potential.

3. allow full chat charachter length when people reach young adult(age 14) and possibly make children have 2 letters per age instead of 1

Reasons:
In order to grow your village more successfully we need more order and to have more order we need to have better communication. 1 letter per age is kind of a brilliant idea at first glance but it's flawed and unrealistic. Anyone over 15 can articulate just as good as an elder can.
I think what kills most of villages is poor communication and the premise of this game to be taught by your elders doesn't work very well right now. Why? Firstly because elders don't normally take care of babies (because old mommas can't breastfeed). So the ones who have time to educate the kids are the nannies as they're not doing anything else. But young nannies can only say a few words at a time... I saw more players on forums, discord and steam opinions say that they would want to educate their kids when they're roleplaying a nanny/mom but they just don't bother because the charachter limit cuts into every sentence they make so they just give up on that.
I saw Jason pondering how to make baby age more interesting and this suggestion improves that -> babies will be busy listening to their nany teachers.

OTHER IMPRESSIONS:

I love this game and this idea but at the same time it leaves a lot to be desired and is also very frustrating at times and I think the above fixes would improve the game greatly while leaving the original idea and playability the same. Maybe the game is also almost too hard to survive but I won't be judging that just yet as i'm still very new and will continue to try to learn more of crafting. But as other players have said the constant battle for survival leaves too little room for roleplaying and being creative. There's things like dogs and cards in this game that I will probably never see and it's because no village gets to the point where some people can get dependant on others to be creative and play around I guess? After all this is how big achievements of civilizations are made -> when people's needs are satisfied and they have enough time to think of other things than survival. (but anyways this is a survival game lol)
If I had to describe this game in two words: starvation fest

Don't forget to upvote on reddit if you agree with these suggestions: https://www.reddit.com/r/OneLifeSuggest … pand_chat/