One Hour One Life Forums

People have claimed that no matter how well I balance the food sources, one food will always rise to the top as the most optimal food choice, given the limitations on resources that people are facing.  It was carrots, then sheep meat, then popcorn, now berries.

As I go about adding more farmable foods this week, I'm struck by the question:  but why would anyone eat this?

I'm about to add burritos to the game (after you grow beans and lime the corn to make masa harina for tortillas), but why would anyone eat them?  "Out of boredom" isn't a great answer.  I could make them better than any existing food source, and then they'd become THE food source for a while, until I introduce yet another better food source later, and we're into the classic power-inflation thing that a lot of games face when new content is added.  The old food sources become worthless.

I could make them all require different resources to grow, so you'd have to switch foods as various resources run out, but that's also a design headache of a different variety.  How many different resources can be required to grow something?  Or maybe they are cooking ingredients, like goose fat to make pie crust, and lime to make tortillas.  But balancing how those things run out is going to be a nightmare, and then after all the higher-food ingredients run out, people are still back to eating raw foods.  Might as well have been eating raw foods the whole time, right?  Well, except that they use water less efficiently.

But in real life, there's another reason that we don't just mono-feast on carrots, and that's nutrition.

A bunch of people have requested a nutrition model in this game, and I've resisted building one.  It's fiddly, it's beyond the scope of this coarse simulation, it's hard to message.  I've seen games that do it, and I never like it.  Heck, my second game had one back in 2005, and I didn't like it in my own game.

Maybe there's a cheap substitute, though....

What if eating the same food over and over reduces how filling that food is for you?  Like, you just get sick of it.  That first carrot is DEEE-LISH-US, but that 99th carrot is making you feel green around the gills.  You can hardly eat it.  Ugg.

Remember Tom Hanks in Castaway, the first time he cooked a crab.  "Oh boy!  Crab!  You gotta love crab!"  Four months later... more crab...

This could also motivate spices and other things.  You're getting sick of burritos, and then you craft hot sauce and give them a new lease on life, for a while at least.

I guess this would be implemented with a list of foods eaten, server-side, and some way the food value is decremented each time you eat the food, and then incremented again each time you eat some other food.

I'm imagining this being a slow process... maybe decrementing one calorie for every 5 or 10 times the food is eaten in sequence.

There are problems with messaging here, but I think it would be okay if it just kinda crept up on you over time, and you started to notice that these carrots aren't working so well anymore.

startafight wrote:

feel free to add on with what makes you keep returning to ohol

I just want to knock Telafiesta off the Top Playtime Reviews!

https://i.imgur.com/AzXi4EU.png

ECKSDEE!

Na, jk.

I think what i love best is the juxtaposition between being subjected to Jason's weekly game tweaking experiments, while I spent whiff after whiff of life, with total strangers acting like family while we balance our survival skills at breakneck speeds to create not just a functional present, but a functional future for those who've yet to inherit the constructs we leave behind. It's especially thrilling to be the Eve in that role, spending almost half my life just finding the stage to set the future in, but it's no less rewarding being the child of an Eve, or near descendant, and establishing a vital part of a burgeoning establishment.

Pulling out of a downward spiral 5 to 10 generations in is also a lot of fun.

Really, whats not to love about this game?

If it were any harder, I'd love the challenge that much more; were it easier, I might just say a few more words each life to my family, and maybe get to know some of you for the real people you are, but there is plenty of time for that in lives yet to come. In this hour, this life, we have to make every action matter most, for all those who've yet to come.

The desert is only an extreme if you're wearing any clothes. The snowy biome is extreme only if you aren't. I like it that way.

Screen shot?