a multiplayer game of parenting and civilization building
You are not logged in.
---> Fruiting stage could DEFINITELY use a better graphic. It's too obscure (and also, too short of a period!). People mistakenly click all the time because the flowering stage is the most "obvious" or "intuitive". But also, fruiting vs normal looks very similiar (fruiting is just a little more yellow).
- That's hard for people with color blindness, or difficulty seeing, and also new players.
I do think Milkweed should be more forgiving. ONE dumb player can ruin the entire biome for the town. I logged into an empty server and HAD NO IDEA there were so many milkweed normally around! That means the game mechanics are counter-intuitive / flawed for Milkweed because "adding more" would simply just mean "more are accidentally destroyed" instead of "increasing milkweed production."
I would rather just reduce the total number, but make them like berry bushes that never go away. That way you can still cultivate them, but they're not super-aggro-grief targets AND super-easy-accidental-click targets.
I can't count the amount of times I've accidentally clicked a milkweed that CHANGED as I was walking to it (or doing the Lag Dance).
I like anything that has a self-limiting nature.
So absolute +1 to food limits
Note: It doesn't have to __kill you__. <-----------
In Space Station 13, being "overfed" means you: Move slower, vomit up extra food, and/or simply cannot feed more. (Message says "You absolutely cannot stuff any more food down your throat.")
Also, constantly overeating actually makes you fat in SS13. Which would be a cool mechanic to add to the game. People who don't eat enough constantly will get thinner, and people who OVER EAT will get fatter. Also, it means people who are constantly over-eating SHOW UP TO OTHER PLAYERS which means people will immediately notice glutteneous players who are a threat to the village/tribe! That's probably a real-world societal / evolutionary reaction!
Yeah, I don't know who might have complained to you. But nobody (reasonable) is expecting you to drop everything in your life just to make a bugfix/feature happen a day earlier.
And if it's not clear from my writing style, my posts are suggestions, not demands. But I still intend to post whatever comes to mind.
Thanks for your hard work,
--Chris
I tried custom server, and used server10. I was the only one on the server. And still, it would lag my connection out. Much less so, but still around. On main servers, it can become insanely high.
- 8 core AMD FX-8370, 32GB RAM, GTX 1060, 4K screen. Playing 1080p Windowed. Windows 10 64-bit. nVidia and Windows drivers up-to-date. 65 MB internet connection that can play Rocket League / PUBG / et al without problems.
I've now died countless times because my character clicked on something, and then begins replaying the animation over and over and over.
Clues:
-> Talking still works. I've literally asked people to force feed me and saved my life.
-> Everyone else still moves! Animals still move. Milkweed still grows and changes shape.
Want proof? Check out this nasty log:
PLAYER_UPDATE with heldOrVal=0, heldOrx=0, heldOry=0, pX=-226, pY=452, heldTransSrcID=-1, holdingString=0
Reached dest -212.760000 seconds early
Playing a held pending message
Got length 106 message
PU
18759 350 0 0 102 255 235 0 102 255 -1 0.24 1 0 102 254 16.23 60.00 3.75 199;201;0;203;200;198 0 0 -1
#
-212 seconds early? That's a command occurring THREE AND A HALF MINUTES later than expected. In a game where food kills you within minutes, that basically bricks the game for you. That is, if you're lucky enough to not be eaten by a bear or wolf.
The only thing that makes my system ... possibly... unique? Would be I let the game auto-patch instead of re-downloading. So perhaps my game (patched) is getting out-of-sync with the server code (built from scratch)?
Now, there's no way I've got a latency of 212 seconds. So this has to be a netcode issue. I don't know your netcode, Jason, but the fact I can't move (but an animation plays), yet everyone else is still moving sounds like a message queue for my input to the server is full or blocked, while the INPUT from the server is running just fine (as well as the OUTPUT from every other client that isn't frozen TO the server). Maybe some deadlock issue? I don't know, I didn't write the code.
- In the source, ideal temperature is 0.5. (0 being cold 1.0 being full hot) There's a slight tick mark but that does not imply that it's the ideal temperature. It's also not clear why it's related to food at all from the GUI. You have to learn it. But people in real-life don't need to be "taught" not to freeze to death.
- The adult food meter has no grouping. It's extremely difficult to COUNT your food meter, and instead you have to (peripheral) eyeball it.
It needs to be grouped into say, units of four, or replaced with digits as higher numbers. Many games have done this exact thing, though I can't recall specifics at the moment.
- The text boxes with old text / greyness can actually fill up and become unreadable when you speak a lot. Which happens OFTEN when you're a mother teaching babies who are bored with nothing to do yet.
(Also, some of the sticks GFX look really similar, ala Milkweed vs Short Stick, and tiny items like bones are really hard to click. But that's not the end of the world right now.)
(Also, sidenote: Shouldn't desert biome warm you up some?)
Thanks.
>Sometimes a family can be through adoption and encoding relationships kind of invalidates that.
Or you know, support adopting.
Additionally, we'd be able see LOGS of civilizations and family trees. See who adopted whom, etc. Dwarf Fortress is renowned for it, except here, it'd be civs by real people.
>Naming is a nice idea, but imo it would have to be done in a way that prevents troll naming.
Maybe have names be chosen using some kind of dictionary-based auto-complete - if that makes any sense.
- Well, you could allow someone to rename themselves. (Perhaps make it part of a "ritual" involving paints or something.)
And troll names shouldn't be that bad since they could simply murder you or leave you to starve instead...
But one key thing there (other than lineage/history) is that it's actually hard to tell people apart in game, when in real-life, we evolved pretty darn good abilities for telling each other apart!
- So while yeah, you can't normally "mouse over" someone's name, it'd be nice if when someone told you their name, the game remembered it for the future! (So you could choose to not tell people your name too.)
Or you could right click on someone's body from far away, which pops up a wheel full of icons, and it attach an icon to them. Different colors, different symbols. That way you can "remember" how you felt about someone.
Kind of like this:
https://ecdn.teacherspayteachers.com/th … 8314-1.jpg
Of course that's actually a different request I'm gonna make a post on. Having facial emotions, hugging/handshaking, and pointing at things. Young children should definitely be able to point at things.
- When a mother first picks up a baby, give her the option to name it.
- When you mouse over a person, it shows their name over them. (or hold alt, or shift, or control, or something to show "verbrose view")
Now, when a baby/person dies it will say "Grave of [named person]."
Now when you encounter a grave, and it's someone you knew, it's not just a random piece of bones. It's "omg, my friend Sally died!" (Possibly include clues to their death, such as withered bones = starved)
Now, one more feature! (You'll soon see how this all works together.)
Signs! Be able to write signs that say, adolescents and older can read. (Use wood + charcoal to write sign, then hammer it in ground with a post, or whatever.) You can leave notes like "this garden is for seeds"
And then it's just one final jump to... MARKED GRAVES.
Think about that mother that raised you, and countless others. She sacrificed and never left the fire. And then she died. From a quick famine, or simply of old age. You find her body. You dig a plot, bury her, and put a headstone. The stone reads, "Mother of 6, the great teacher."
So now, YOUR LIFE LIVES ON, in the tomes (later!?) of history itself. Now, doing GOOD THINGS means people will REMEMBER YOU FOR THEM after you die! (=incentive to be a good person)
Also, while we're at it: Signs (bigger signs?) can be used to officially mark the NAME OF A TOWN.
Lastly, when we finally get ROADS, we can officially link towns together. And, ideally, have compass markers that show little arrows to various nearby towns. (Maybe you need a "map" or a "compass" or a "scouting headdress" to be the only one who can spot towns from far away--as opposed to everyone.)
[edit] OH, and I almost forgot! It'd be really cool if you got NOTIFICATIONS when people you knew died. It might not be "canon" with the game. But as a grand mother, getting a notification that one of your children died is super sad! Likewise, knowing your grandma died is sad! But right now, people just die and it's not that big a deal. Most of the "not a big deal" is because you simply DON'T KNOW if someone died or walked away!
To Jason R.:
Have you considered zooming out the game?
- It's physically dizzying/nauseating to run for more than a screen or two if I don't unfocus my eyes.
- It also seems like you could recognize larger patterns as "landmarks" to actually find your way around.
I'm not talking super far out. But 30-50% more screen area would be way better. We're not talking about "5 towns on the screen." but rather "I can see more than 4 plots of farm"
Thanks.
- It seems like, children, and old people die from wolves. (And to HUGE amounts of rage, you'll pass by one, and 30 seconds later, be informed you actually died. >:( But the lag is getting better.)
- Can anyone die from wolves?
- Is there any way to predict their attacks, or fend them off?
-> I wish berries regrew, but just weren't as good as carrots.
Perhaps as a simpler construct, or, adapted somehow to fit food emergencies. They could grow faster but have less food, or, slower but have a higher "maximum on the vine".
Right now, they're basically only used by stupid people (me!) who didn't know they don't regrow until growing a field of them and someone going "dear God, no!"--I literally spent an entire lifetime... wasted. I thought it would be my crowning achievement only to realize it was all in vein.
Someone call in the Factorio folks and you're gonna see some of the most insane, awe-inducing, formations of material production.
https://www.reddit.com/r/FactorioBlueprints/top/
For example:
https://giant.gfycat.com/VigilantCrazyJerboa.webm
>It really is pretty nice, once you get used to it. You don't micro-manage the character, but instead issue high-level instructions and let the character do the walking for you.
Except it's super easy to accidentally click on a bush, tree, or whatever and get lagged or, start a long queued process like taking apart a tree.
It'd be nice if the mouse movement, once started a "run", wouldn't pickup clicks from objects, until you let go of the mouse click and click again. That is "click and hold" won't accidentally pickup an object while you're running.
Gameplay has actually gone MUCH BETTER lately thanks to Jason popcapping servers at 60!
I'm super hopeful for this game. I'm thinking about forking it and testing out a proof-of-concept for some of my suggestions...
(If no answer I'll just ask in another post but:) Jason, if you see this, while forking is allowed... how do you handle serial keys? Like, if I made a mod server, would I forward serial key requests to the central server? Or run keyless but strongly encourage people to buy the game from Jason? etc.
[edit] Yeah, I'm all for survival. Survival has nothing to do with lag. I have a video literal compilation of all the times I had more than 50% food (read: tons) and after a literal 15+ seconds of lagging on a tree I didn't mean to touch, or bush, or anything, my food drops... and drops... and drops... and then I die.
I've played at least 5 hours now and 95% of that time was spent being a baby that died.
- Died from wolves glitching out of no where
- Died from starvation
- Died from starvation
- Died from starvation
- Died from starvation from lag induced glitching
- Died from starvation
- Died from starvation
- Died from starvation
- Died from starvation
- Died from starvation from lag induced glitching
- Died from starvation from lag induced glitching
- Died from starvation from lag induced glitching
- Died from starvation from lag induced glitching
- Died from starvation from lag induced glitching
- Died from starvation
- Died from starvation
- Died from starvation from lag induced glitching
- Died from starvation
- Died from starvation
- Died from starvation
- Died from starvation from lag induced glitching
The game's ecosystem is completely wrong. It cannot sustain life. It shouldn't take 15+ screens of walking to find a single piece of milkweed.
There's no way to find your mother, or her find you, if you simply walk off screen. There's a reason sound exists.
Any time anyone gets me to an age where I can become old enough to start? The entire city has run out of food and everyone panics and dies.
Over. And over. And over. And over.
I'm all for indie games. I'm all for experimental games. I'm all for Jason Rohrer games. I'm a big fan. But this... this is ridiculous.
There is simply not enough food to sustain a population. So babies constantly die, and then what happens? They get born to the SAME STARVING WOMAN over and over. Which drains even more supplies! The simplest glitch, or bad playing decision, brings the entire society down. It's too fragile!
And I literally cannot count (and I've got video) of how many times I'm standing next to a bush, and my person is repeatedly "half getting" from the bush, for 15+ seconds, and then I ...
DIE OF STARVATION.
And literally, that just happened, because the mother was trying to feed me, can't.
This is supposed to be a society simulation, but the insane amount of struggling has basically turned it into the single-mother ghetto simulator... but with less food and even worse, mass, uncontainable asexual reproduction. (I wonder if it'd be easier if a mother marked herself as "willing" to conceive?)
Mothers completely ignoring babies because they can't feed multiple, or, they're just so burnt out of doing nothing but feeding babies and dying that they want to actually craft something.
$20 is a huge price to pay for a "game" that basically doesn't simulate society, but absolutely tests your patience. I've literally had to refer to the game to friends, as "an onslaught" because of the frustration.
To be clear: I'm NOT saying. "This game sucks, you suck, go die in a fire." But for a brand new game, I keep finding myself wondering if I should open it up again and see if the next game will go as poorly as the last 80, or, I should just wait and hope the game gets better later. (And yes, I realize Jason is over-worked. I'm not saying "ADD FEATURES". I'm saying, the food levels are just mathematically unsustainable for gameplay.)
Best of luck in your endeavor, a sincere fan and developer.
Yeah, I don't see the game progressing at the moment because everything is too punishing. People either don't know, or don't care, and picket the last of everything.
If people couldn't have Minecraft servers without griefers intentionally destroying everything (necessitating passwords and permissions), then how is a game with mechanics as cruel as this, supposed to leave infancy?
>I'm just curious if the server gets laggy as it fills up.
Hell yes it is. I can't count how many times I've died yesterday after buying the game, to walk up to an object that it accidentally thought I clicked on, and repeatedly "half picked up/used" over and over and over for 30 seconds and then I'd go from full food, to 3 food near death. Any time it happened as a child, of course, I'd just be dead.
>:(
