a multiplayer game of parenting and civilization building
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Oh. I assume those metals do not differ from each other qualitatively? That's a much easier problem since they can be simply plugged into an existing hardcoded system that generates names based on a template like "%METAL_NAME% %ITEM_TYPE_NAME%", e.g. "unobtanium shield"
And, because people need to hug each other, they need to build relations and communicate.
Why?
Wait, what? What do you mean?
Flintstone, Uncle Gus, neither am I! I'm 80% sure it would be overkill for the main game. But it might be viable as a mod.
It's possible to generate sprites based on hand drawn parts, so some of the charm of the game can be preserved.
It's also possible to mix generated items and recipes with normal ones. Fantastic randomized plants and animals, fantastic ores, but normal tools.
It might be possible to generate item names based on ingredients or biomes, so that they're not total gibberish. Probably really hard.
Kinrany, I don't think I've ever suggested that the game should have mechanics that specifically encourage you to care about babies.
Oh, sorry, I didn't mean to say that you suggested that. I'm the one who thinks that such mechanics are desirable.
That said, "group selection," which I personally believe in, is apparently something of a controversial idea in the realm of biology. Are there selection pressures on non-genetic aspects of culture?
Skimming the Wikipedia article, it's considered unimportant compared to other types of selection, not nonexistent or nonsensical. The world of the (meta-)game is different, so there's no reason to discard group selection. Though there are other types of selection too.
It seems that no one who is playing as a non-griefer wants their village to die out.
There are other explanations:
1. Everyone who didn't care about saving villages already left the game
2. Some people care only because they can come back eventually
The lazy way is to simply make everything random.
~10^5 items, each being just a number plus a sprite generated based on that number and the map seed. Every combination of two items has a 0.01 chance to be a valid crafting recipe, with outputs being random too. ~5 biome categories, each category having ~5 biomes. Each tile belongs to one biome in each category, ~5 biomes per tile total. Each biome has a random list of ~10 naturally occuring items that spawn only once.
Items would also need other random properties, like food value, but that's it.
The scope of the problem seems to be roughly that of Minecraft's terrain generation: I think they keep tweaking it even now.
For example, items could also be separated into categories: natural resources, tools, food, metals, plants, animals, etc.
Items could also have an additional energy value, 0-10, to make sure there is no perpetual motion. Crafting would either produce or consume energy based on inputs and outputs.
Maybe I should just make a prototype. Three days until ProcJam is over...
Everything you do is meaningless without them.
Everything you do is meaningless. All goals are arbitrary, helping another player enter the game is not objectively better than exploring the woods, socializing, making art, griefing, or just running around naked.
When a village is short on babies, they aren't pretending to want a baby for pure entertainment or role playing.
Sometimes they do, sometimes they don't. It's just that the villages that survived, had enough people who cared about babies. But that does not automatically make people want to help the village, not directly anyway.
They know that the future is doomed without one.
But why do they care?
If two men are left, and no babies possible, they suicide. The game isn't a "what can you accomplish in one hour" simulator. If it was, those two men would work their asses off to build whatever they could before they died.
It seems obvious that this is not a rule, and that some players actually do keep working just because they want to build something.
But if you want to get that meta, Kinrany, what is the point of working on your own project more and more anyway? Why are people motivated to do that? What's the point?
I don't know. Why do people play minecraft? Why do people keep living instead of committing suicide to avoid unpleasant things like hunger? Evolutionary pressure? Curiosity? I don't know!
But I don't think that raising babies is a good answer. It just shifts the burden of doing something meaningful, so it's babies all the way down.
Look, I'm merely saying that raising babies is the ultimate goal only if the game says so. (Even then, players disregard external goals all the time.) Otherwise the only reason is the evolution of villages, and I don't see why individuals would necessarily care about helping a law of nature that doesn't need anyone's help and doesn't care.
Most of your other games didn't really have goals, did they? The rules of the game are always enough, the game shouldn't need the player's help.
To your other point, maybe there should just be a suicide button. No sense in making someone reload the game to do that, and no sense in making them wait to starve to death or hunt down a rattlesnake.
I don't know, it would be a shame to lose the stories where the player that commits suicide is healed and persuaded to keep living :D
Baby suicides are a special case, a suicide button would save a ton of time for them.
That sounds like total bullshit. You got any links dude?
I wish D:
I didn't mean that the baby takes control of the mother's body. But it has some access to the stuff around itself, so it can try to steal more nutrients than the mother wants to give. Or something. I don't remember.
Point being, it's a part of the mother's body controlled by alien genes, which only cares about itself, while the mother's genes also care about all the other future babies. It's a war where killing the other side is undesirable.
The game doesn't actually provide any incentive to care about babies. It's pure entertainment.
You want people to cooperate, appoint leaders and guards, etc. for pragmatic reasons, not because it's fun. Shouldn't you do the same with babies?
One solution: lineage ban, except spawning as one's own descendant is allowed.
To make rerolling easier, let babies observe their mothers for a minute and make it possible for them to suicide before being born. The skeletons should spawn anyway, to let mothers know about stillbirths.
By the way, I can't find a link, but there's a great article somewhere on the internet about pregnancy being fucking metal: the embryo and the mother partially share control of the same body, but compete for resources, and it's the closest thing the real world has to body horror.
Well, I'm sure it wouldn't take THAT much time, but yeah, it would be a whole new game. I couldn't even find any games that tried to do it and failed.
I've avoided doing this mostly because of a duplication of work issue. If I have 6 biomes, this essentially means 6 primitive tech trees that can be explored in relative isolation.
procedural generation :0
But now that I'm thinking about it more, I'm seeing another huge problem:
One biome WILL be the best one. The optimal one. The preferred one.
People currently wander around until they find the best intersection of biomes and resources (desert near the swamp or whatever) and start their village there.
You're saying that making biomes bigger would prevent this, and therefore each biome would need to be survivable on its own.
But what would force someone to settle/stay in their spawn biome? I could make them so big that you'd never make it out in one lifetime.... so you couldn't "nomad" your way out.
But wouldn't Eve just keep suiciding until she spawns in the preferred biome?
Why would anyone start in the arctic if they didn't have to? Just for the challenge?
Accurate.
Biomes could have unique things. Like Eve statues made of different materials.
If you want your descendants to eventually build an obsidian statue with your name on it, you'll have to settle in the volcano biome even though it's harder.
The choice of biome is essentially a single player game. Children can't affect the choice, and the absolute tech level is more important for them anyway. It's like RPGs that get away with terrible balance because players just ignore the degenerate strategies.
layers of biomes would be better though
I'm not sure this is the path OHOL should take, but yeah, a completely random tech tree would be awesome. The algorithm would have to be pretty smart to not break the game though. For example, it should enforce entropy to avoid perpetual motion machines.
What do you mean? A procedurally-generated tech tree?
I do think about procedurally generated tech trees a lot, but in this case it miiiiiight be possible to avoid them.
One way to accomplish this is for every village to have a unique environment. Soil, humidity, plant and animal species, materials.
Plant A needs soil type B or C and humidity level D to grow, domestic animal E only eats plants F and G, harvesting tool H needs wood I and metal J, etc.
Each tile belongs to several overlapping (not adjacent) biomes of different types: one soil biome, one humidity biome, one temperature biome, several plant biomes, several ore biomes. Each biome provides unique natural resources.
Ideally about 10% of biome combinations will be inhabitable, that is, suitable for a village that wants to reach the highest tech level. Most villages will only ever have access to a thin slice of all the tech that exists in the game, because they lack natural resources available in all the other biomes. There will be many alternative paths: the directed acyclic graph that represents the tech tree will have lots of OR operators.
Yes, this means that even the author has to be bad at their own game.
It should be necessary for the player to learn to use the combination of resources available in the climate they spawned in. This combination, and the list of tools that can be crafted with these resources will always be different.
This explanation is probably terrible, but I'm not sure which parts are confusing and which are obvious :/
Also, it should *never* be assumed that players will go and seek outside sources to learn how to play.
I agree. (Though it doesn't always make sense to embed the official wiki in the game.)
My point is that assuming the opposite is also a mistake. Some people don't use the wiki at all, some people read the whole thing before even starting. Oh, and watching a stream also counts as time spent learning to play the game.
Instead of banning use weighted average to select the next lineage to spawn in, with weight (1+N)^-2, where N is the number of times this player was born in this lineage in the last three hours.
This will make it possible to always spawn in a village.
It will also be possible to spawn in any village by dying repeatedly, so you might want to use this only for players with less than 10 hours in the game. I'm pretty sure a more elegant solution is impossible.
Time spent in the game is not an accurate metric, people also read the wiki/onetech.
The worst part is that children are not expected to be ignorant: general knowledge of the game's rules is much more important than the knowledge specific to the current village.
Ideally it should take a single life tops to understand the basics. Memorizing all the recipes should be unnecessary and impractical.
One way to accomplish this is for every village to have a unique environment. Soil, humidity, plant and animal species, materials.
Yes, this means that even the author has to be bad at their own game.
In this game, food is the only thing you need, so everything comes back to that in some fashion.
Not entirely true, you can also get killed.
But survival is not the only goal, there's entertainment too. Can we please have musical instruments?
In this game, food is the only thing you need, so everything comes back to that in some fashion.
The dependency chains can be longer though. And some tech just makes everything else more efficient, like materials and infrastructure: glass and plastic, roads and computer networks.
There might be a problem with technical advancement being inherently exponential.
If the growth coefficient is too high, the first 80% of the game will be mud farming while the last 20% will be rapid growth from bamboo tech to space travel.
There's also the investment -> efficiency -> investment loop: if the growth coefficient is too low, the first 80% of the game will be farming resources saving for the next once-a-generation tech upgrade that makes the economy x1.01 more efficient. To avoid that, progress should be more granular, with more inventions that are cheaper, but
Oh, and the only tech that counts as progress is the tech that makes it's own production easier.
(Bootstrap tech, fundamental tech, leaf tech? Is it time to write down a taxonomy yet? Does one exist already?)
Items could decay faster when on the ground. Vote here.
Bigger sprites would be good too. Vote here.
It would be nice if you could actually aim at someone hiding behind tree, etc. (the same way you can pick up a hidden item). Killers frequently hide to wait out the cooldown and then stab again.
One uncomfortably indirect way to fix this is to make it possible to rotate the client's view. Then only hiding behind four trees will help.
Jason, I suggest you add an in-game reason to kill/attack/rob other people or villages.
It will make attacks less random, so everyone will have to be prepared to defend themselves.
Why do we want to deal with a griefer non-lethally?
Some suspects are innocent.
Also, people can have legit conflicts that aren't worth the risk of being killed.
Because anything available to the hermit is available to the griefer.
Not true. The hermit has time to prepare and access to the battlefield.
For example, he could train a pack of wolves, so that they look like dogs and kill only those not related to him.
Every weapon crafting is sabotaged by griefer.
That's not the problem. If the griefer has a weapon and you don't, you've already failed. It should be possible to store weapons safely without starving the village.
i don't intend to kill in OHOL & i don't need any revenge
The purpose of revenge is to discourage other people from committing the same crime later.
The other purpose of killing is to prevent the same person from committing more crimes now.
Killing is a tool for self-regulation. Self-regulation is necessary on public servers with little moderation.
Another option is to make movement faster and navigation easier. Clutter wouldn't be so bad if one could build the farm 100 tiles away from the village.
Yay, we've got life extension tekknology! Will we get 61-year olds by repeated stabbing?
First thought, heh. Won't work because death of old age doesn't depend on starvation?
Cult of the God-Emperor who lives forever by being stabbed repeatedly would be awesome.
I don't think anything should carry over into another life.
Why?
IRL civilization relies on behaviors that carry over, which exist thanks to evolution and upbringing. Most of the time humans are not smart enough to be rational thinkers and reason from first principles, we just don't think fast enough. And our preconfigured intuition encourages us to help other people.
So it's not like karma has to be a gamey crutch that exists solely for meta reasons.
Though the consequences shouldn't be permanent, it should be always possible to start over given enough time.
yvanhooe, I suggest you find the example of glassware that would be the most useful in the game right now. Once glass is in the game, adding more types of glassware will be easier.
That's how all general purpose technology is invented: first there's one application that is worth spending resources inventing the new technology, then other applications become possible because the technology is already there and just needs to be adapted, which is cheaper.
(I really want to make a multiplayer game about roads and factories :s)