One Hour One Life Forums

I understand that the premise and structure of the game makes playing with friends hard to achieve in a form that doesn't hurt the game in other ways. But I worry that the lack of this feature may hurt the game's success so much that it's worth trying really hard to make it happen in some way. The fact that you lose all progress on a village after every life ends is already tough enough to turn away many customers... you need something to sweeten the deal just a little.

As with Roguelikes, sometimes you get bad runs and sometimes you get great runs - and that's part of the enjoyment. Perhaps you could factor this into friend relationships? Sometimes you spawn in the same village as your friend and can continue their legacy, sometimes you spawn on opposite ends of the continent. But it's random, not reliable, so you're happy when it does happen. There's just an 'affinity' between friends that biases the probabilities to make it more likely for them to be born to each other (but without making other problematic tradeoffs). This would limit the silent telepathic clique problem: you'd realistically only ever get two friends together at any one time.

Another option would be in-game spectation: when you're dead you can spend a few minutes spectating your friend's game, so you at least feel a bit connected. This could be combined with the friend-to-friend birth affinity in that you get kicked out of spectation and into the game if RNG decides it's your time to be born as your friend's child.