a multiplayer game of parenting and civilization building
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Instead of adding food pips/overflow, overeating causes people to poop. This can then be used for compost.
Also works for making brown shorts.
What about planter boxes to allow farming/decoration to happen in buildings? Make a storage box, dump two baskets of dirt in it. Treat it like a normal ground tile for planting.
You could make it so overeating triggers the sick emote with sound. Maybe add a 10 second cooldown where they can't hold objects after overeating? That way people could still stockpile food, but they would let everyone know. The cooldown would give people a little bit of time to respond.
"why are you overeating?"
"getting ready to look for a new tarry spot"
tl;dr - Doubling the food bar makes the game easier for new players and harder for experienced players. That's a good thing.
On an individual level, food is a skill cliff. When you first start off, you starve all the time because you forget to eat. This makes it hard for new players to learn the game. Many people give up and stop playing the game because of this. How many times have people commented on this forum that you should learn to play by reading the wiki or onetech? This is because it's impossible for new players to do anything somewhat complicated while trying to find food. This is why we have so many berry munchers in villages. These players are trained that if they stray too far from the bushes, they will starve before they can find their way back.
Conversely, once you get over the skill cliff, food is almost a non issue. You learn how village layouts tend to work and can quickly find the kitchen to grab pies. You know to keep a pie in your backpack. A mutton pie is 60 pips of food you can carry in one item slot.
A full person carrying a mutton pie has 80 pips to go through before they'll starve. If you double the food bar it only goes up to 100 pips. This 25% increase will not make a meaningful impact on experienced players. On the other hand, new players haven't learned to carry food with them yet and they don't know how to use backpacks. For them, the difference is a 100% increase in time to do things. It makes leaving the berry bush and exploring the town a little bit safer.
Interestingly, doubling the food bar makes the game harder on a village level. When people see food supplies running low, they start to hoard food. Hoarding food lowers food supplies leading to a positive feedback loop. When food supplies get low enough people stop working and spend all of their time looking for food leading villages to famines.
What if genetic fitness affected the amount of hunger pips you had?
It does. The higher your genetic fitness, the more hunger pips you retain when you get old.
I really like this idea. For experienced players, starving isn't much of an issue so they won't see the change as making the game easier. However, this will make staying alive easier for new players. That will give new players more time to learn the game and hopefully get more people to stay.
What do you think about changing starvation so that before players die they get sick for a period of time and need someone to feed them? Maybe movement speed drops to 0 and some visual indication like yellow fever. When a player enters the village with yellow fever everyone drops what they are doing and rushes to save the person. The same would likely happen for starving players providing a visceral experience (one of the things that hooks people to this game). It can also act as a new-player notification for the whole village without breaking immersion. Additionally it will make teaching new players much easier since they won't suddenly drop dead halfway through the lesson.
I think the engine doesn't support computing a biome based on neighbors. That's why the engine didn't support putting grasslands next to swamps. He changed the map generation to use topographical maps (he talks about it here: https://onehouronelife.com/forums/viewt … p?id=7461)
Somewhere he's got a function that says "what biome is at (x,y)". To get the nice ordering he made this work using topographical maps where each location (x,y) has some altitude, then he has bands of altitudes that map to the biomes.
in pseudocode, whatBiomeAtLocation(x,y) is implemented as:
whatBiomeAtAltitude(whatAltitudeAtLocation(x,y)).
To get the biomes to shift over time he could change it to:
whatBiomeAtAltitude(whatAltitudeAtLocation(x,y) + arcTime).
As towns progress up the tech tree, things can get stale. The current approach to fix this is to limit water. This works well in the early stages where there is further technology downstream to alleviate the problem. Eventually, we get to the top of the tech tree. Villages go into maintenance mode. The towns stay the same. Exploration gets stale because we’ve already explored most of the map. If we make it long enough, tarry spots dry up.
Recently, Jason changed the map generation code to use a topological map for determining biomes. Each tile is assigned a height, and that height determines the biome of the tile. If all of the tiles were gradually raised as time went on, swamps would turn to grasslands, grassland to prairies, etc. Over time, the highest biomes (deserts, tundras, jungles) would take over the map.
If you’re reborn into the same town later in the arc, it might look completely different as the biome changed. Now there’s a bear cave in the middle of the berry patch. Towns will have to adapt to their new environments. Exploration gets interesting because there are new things to find. As the biomes shift fresh resources arise. The game gets challenging in the long run because the easy places to live (prairies, grasslands, and swamps) would shrink over the long run and inhospitable places (deserts, jungles, tundras) would grow.
Most of the necessary resources in the low height places can be domesticated; trees, crops, animals, etc. (clay is an exception). The resources in the high height places are not; tarry spots, iron veins, flat rocks, horses, etc. This allows the game to inject more of the non-renewable resources over time, and forces players to cultivate resources that used to just be a convenience. Buildings and roads become crucial to limit exposure to inhospitable climates.