One Hour One Life Forums

I like the idea of making minced or powdered garlic.

I'm a bit disappointed by the very short clips. They should do a 20 minute game play video so we can really understand what is going on.

Innocents will be punished as well from time to time. By making it simple enough for any player to free a captured player, it would undermine it as a means of griefing. Innocents always outnumber the griefers.

Tech progression seems to happen too easily and quickly. It really only takes a few generations to get to higher tech, and from that point on all that is left for players to do is maintenance. The vast majority of lives are spent in towns that have done everything there is to do.

Primitive tech is never replaced by advanced tech. Instead we see both being used side by side. It's extremely ugly to see things like adobe kilns alongside the engines. There's little sense of "era" because we have to keep around old stuff. Villages have to keep around things like round and sharp stones even after they have developed things like knives and hammers.

Societies are very homogenous. There is very little specialization or variety. So often there only seems to be one way of accomplishing things, so every town does it that way.

Everything happens instantly, things like grinding up grain, making rope, weaving thread all happen instantly. These seem like things that should have some cost beyond just gathering the ingredients. I'm talking about something like a time or hunger cost so that labor is more than just clicking on something.

Players can't do extremely ambitious things, due to resource limitations rather than labor limitations.

There is neither mass storage nor mass transit. It's not feasible to have outposts for specialized resource collection.

Yeah it was arrogant thing he said, and the passive aggressive humour in response is funny, but let's not get too immature.

Sex in OHOL is very poorly modeled by the game mechanics. Women reproduce assexually and males don't reproduce at all. In reality it is more likely that the males are killed and the females are assimilated, but in OHOL it makes more sense just to kill the other family since there is no assimilation. OHOL still has reasons not to send women into war, but those reasons aren't very compelling. Men don't even have a strength advantage over women.

Hello!

I think you should be born a girl, which will happen half of the time, and when you have enough pips you should take grab a basket with food and run away from your village.
By the time you're old enough to be an Eve, you should be far away enough from you village that it would be similar situation to having actually been an Eve.

Does this solve your problem?

First and foremost would be late game challenge. This should to be done in a way that doesn't make the early game more difficult. There should be challenges unique to living with a higher population of people, such as waste and disease.

Second would be storage. More things should stack. More things should decay. We need more permanent forms of baskets. There should be specialized storage which stores only certain things but a higher number of them.

I think both of you fail to see the big picture. When people construct buildings, it is largely done for novelty or for fun. Even before the temperature update, people constructed buildings and even would wear clothing. The issue is that it didn't happen as often as Jason would expect, and so the incentives for it were modified.

The primary downside to buildings it that they restrict people's freedom of movement. For a building to actually be useful rather than just novelty, there has to be a serious incentive for it.  This wouldn't bother people as much if buildings were larger, but they tend to be rather small because of material costs. A 4x5 building is small if we're being honest, and it takes 20 floors, 18 walls or doors, and 4 corners. If there were a labor intensive way to mass produce these materials, similar to how soil is mass produced, it would make construction much more compelling.

Who wants to be confined to some tiny room for a hunger bonus? People are going to prefer to waste food over that.

What is the core of what we want here? Imagine only the objects had their appearance procedurally generated but transitions remained the same. Would that be very good? In such a case you would need to learn what each object is. Mothers would probably game this by having one of every item in the center and just go through saying what they are. There would always be some meta to game the system.

More importantly, if everything is alien then I predict the game would lose its impact, because part of its meaning comes from the fact that we know what we're doing. By that I mean, we know what farming is, but if farming become sufficiently alien... then would there really be satisfaction from it? We wouldn't see it as farming so much as the thing that produces the thing that we consume to raise our pips. It makes it more obvious to us how meaningless the game truly is when it's not anchored to something we're familiar with outside of the game.

I think that artificial limits would be just fine. Why does it matter that you know it on a meta level if you've done nothing to earn the ability to do it in the game. A lot of us know the high level method of doing something, but we can't do it in reality because we've not actually practiced it. Even if I know where every key is on the keyboard, it doesn't mean I can type 100 WPM. Given the simple control interface of OHOL, complexity of execution and skill has to be implemented artificially by mechanics. The real question is, how do we go from being unable to perform a transition to being able to do so? Whatever that system is, it will be the learning mechanic in the game.

Actually, before the "how to become able" question, we should ask what it means to be unable to perform a transition. This could be done multiple ways, but I'll provide two that come to mind. The first is for the game to act as if the transition doesn't exist when the player attempts it, which is implemented by giving keeping track of what transitions a player can perform. The second is for there the be a failure transition, where they get an undesirable or less desirable result. This would take more effort to introduce failure transitions, and it would still need to keep track of the players proficiency.

The next question becomes how does one obtain a transition? A lot of transitions are just going to come free, so we really only need the key transitions or skills to be locked. There needs to be a process of discovery that is sufficiently hard so as to encourage people learn through teaching. This self discovery could be as simple as only a small percentage are born with the ability innately and they must teach it others. It could also be that one much do other transitions enough times to unlock the desired transition. If you implement a failure transition, then it could be done by having the player attempting the transition, wasting resources in the process via the failure transition, until they unlock the success transition (or maybe there is always a failure probability that goes decreases with each failure).

Finally, how would teaching work? I think the simple answer is just that you must be near a capable player and watch them do it a certain number of times. Then you have a window in which you yourself must do it. If you fail to repeat the action then you fail to learn it permanently. I suppose there could be a skill degradation system such that if you don't use it you lose it in the long term as well, but I think this almost certainly need to exist for the initial learning process.

I'm really hoping I get some sort of reply to this mess I've typed out, because lately it seems like whenever I put effort into posts like this they get ignored.

There is little motivation for having redundancy in the game, because people will simply go for the easiest thing. I suppose a good way to motivate higher tech is to have lower tech spoil like baskets do, and have higher tech be permanent. Basically clay bowls and plates could crumble after a few hours, while some porcelain alternative lasts forever. Another thing which I suggested is adding hunger costs or time costs to using primitive tools, to incentivize the use of specialized higher tier tools.